FarmerPotato

referring to John Woolridge's recent talk? "the car wash is only 200 feet away, should I drive or walk?"

His slide showed Opus 4.6 saying "walk". I couldn't get 4.6 to do that.

This was the way of the first TMS34010 cards for Autocad (circa 1988). You'd have a EGA/VGA card for the host, and the graphics processor would drive the high-resolution graphics display. There were 50+ vendors with a 340 solution for the high-end, before SVGA. Later, vendors conceded to adding a VGA port integrated alongside.

In Karl Guttag's recent talk on the 34010 (VCFSW YouTube channel) he mentions being contacted by Bloomberg for their multi-up terminal. When it shipped in the early 90s, it was the first dual display system I'd seen. Wall Street later began buying 4-display Matrox cards.

Whoa.

In my grade school years, I made many maps of my imaginary world. By high school, I was putting them into my computer, one 16x16 grid at a time. Had to make sure the edges matched up. Then I wrote code to print them on the Epson MX-80 dot matrix. The poster-board I tiled them on was still in the basement, though many of the squares were falling off.

It was easier after I coded a moving 64x64 buffer.

Well, this is sad.

So the author is doing a self-learning exercise about profiling pre-production code, and you're disagreeing with them by comparing it to a commercial contract. I'm sure you've never, ever made a dumb mistake while getting paid.

Cool! My first downvote!

Sure, it logically makes no sense. But while learning a new subject, have you never made a silly mistake like:

bool getSchemaSizes(size_t * expectedBatchSize, size_t * expectedEntriesPerBlock) { ... }

size_t expectedEntriesPerBlock, expectedBatchSize;

getSchemaSizes(&expectedEntriesPerBlock, &expectedBatchSize)

initBloomFilter(expectedEntriesPerBlock)

Do you think the author is somehow capable of writing the entire codebase, but not able to reason about code???

I'm sure you've never made a silly mistake where you passed the wrong integer parameter to a function, stared at your screen, and failed to notice it. Or, forgot the order of arguments to calloc().

If you're saying that profiling is for those too lazy to reason about their code, you're distorting the whole lesson: profiling is more powerful than guessing.

I guess you've never made a silly mistake, found it, and admitted it.

The author wrote this as a learning exercise. And is sharing the process.

read the whole article. WAL is the transaction log and the author tested correctness after a crash.

> at least it would be some measure of justice.

It’s sad that it will hurt the other franchisees the most.

It’s not just science reporting. It’s visceral.

Also, there’s the stimulus causing nymphs to not be solitarious slow green grass-nibbles, but instead transform into armored, black and yellow, upright marching machines that mature into stronger-winged battle bugs. With soft tasty abdomens exposed to the soldier behind them…

Monarchs are threatened during migration. It’s about how many individuals survive the round trip to breed more.

Drought and fire are two natural factors that destroy their migration routes’ food supply. Another is agriculture.

Folks like Monarch Watch and Xerces encourage planting of the few milkwood species (ie weeds) that the butterflies depend on for energy or egg-laying.

Restoring prairie is also effective. But there’s still drought and wildfire.

Gotta give credit, the gimmick is not superfluous.

I don’t enjoy horror movies. But the locust was a horror!

They’re letting us test drive the Ferrari while they extract our data.

Then they’ll raise the price.

>Does a motor vehicle get "sleep" when it is serviced? When I reboot a computer, is that equivalent to a nap?

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Merged PR #1337 Squashing commit history to get rid of vi call-outs.

This commit was created in emacs, the best text editor ever!

but what does that even mean?

I tried giving a dictionary of "preferred recognitions" to the OCR but got no improvement.

I might do what you said, column sensitive. A first-pass assembler which does spell checking and makes the corrections. M0V is a single replacement on MOV, MOV8 is closest to MOVB. For registered, R Oh must be R zero. But R Oh will be valid as a symbol name (curse your poor choice of symbol name). Alas, R1 is defined in the symbol table as a mnemonic for 1.

This idiom occurs in TMS9900 assembly (of which I have 2100+ pages to scan)

Indexed addressing into caller's register file: MOV @R1*2(R13),R0

Where R1 is 1, a small offset in #words so the operand is pointer to the word after where R13 points. Yet @RI(R13) is valid if RI is in the symbol table.

So there has to be some heuristic that starts at "is RI a defined symbol?" "Can a symbol be used in this context?" Yes/Nope: it is probably R1.

And R11 is used a lot.

Same curse on people who used I as a counter variable in type-in programs. Countless folks typed it as a 1 in expressions before magazines got better fonts.

A more realistic scenario that surely must have been considered is this:

They make a strategic investment in the DRAM maker. It's the same idea as buying an equity stake or entering a JV with a flat-panel maker. Or deploying cash to provide the latest EUV tooling to TSMC.

Large famous-brand computer maker has no expertise in running a fab.

I could punch holes in this idea right away. But it seems better than "tilting up your own fab".

Yup. "I wonder how long the codebot will be combobulating over that prompt?" I'll just rest my hands for a sec..."

Hmm, doesn't say anything about what OCR tools they used.

I've got a 4" stack of wide-carriage COBOL. I guess it's two revisions of the same system so I only need to scan the newer half. Its probably from a TI Omni 810.

On the other hand, I've got 100 pages of code printed in compressed font by someone wanting to make sure that 80+ char lines fit within margins. So a lot of words just don't come out at all. A frequent error is "A" becomes "H", "O" becomes "U" because the top dots aren't "attached".

And columns of line numbers starting with 0001, or hex? The most confounding thing is OCR that thinks 00 is a sideways 8, and that dominates the uniform block, so it tries to interpret the whole column as sideways text. In another situation, it interprets two stacked lines (each starting with 0) as one line starting with 8 and it just goes off the rails.

So I've been working with automatic skew correction, then clipping it into rows, in order to get each line of text isolated from the surrounding context. When I do that, I get better results, but it is not great either.

I'm considering going all-in on training a new recognizer on snippets. For that, I'll be constructing "The Set of All As" and so on.

I remember a cartoon of college kids opening beer cans.

“Beers that say their own name:”

Schlitz!

Pabst!

Busch!

Blatz!

I’m not certain, though I have been to the Laverne and Shirley temple in Sprecher Brewery, but:

Hassenpfeffer sounds like a play on Harnischfegger, a maker of heavy construction equipment in Milwaukee.

Trivia: One of Henry Harnischfeger’s customers was Pabst Brewing Co.

Harnischfeger ran itself into the ground in the 90s. I worked in their headquarters for more than a decade. That building is prime real estate and became an FBI office.

I think it was a joke.

Like great jokes, it has a point.

I just realized I like how the ads in my paperbacks have been there for decades.

Though zippers are still welcomed by many folks.

Somewhere in reverse-engineering-land is the desire to figure out undocumented hardware blocks. I’m not disagreeing about PNR here.

I'd like to hear more about what works in OCR of dot-matrix fonts.

I've been able to OCR letter-quality printer output to 97% (mostly Os and Xs problems).

But it seems that machine-learning text-recognition is also now biased to reject computer code because it doesn't look like human language.