Max-q

MS Access was a very solid product when it came out. dBase had no chance.

$200 is two man hours. So if you save two hours a month, you are breaking even.

I would say using performance of Perplexity as a benchmark for the quality of o1-pro is a stretch?

The mistakes they make are very similar to mistakes we humans do. Just like you can confuse a human with irrelevant information, you can distract the LLM. We are not good at big tables of integers, just as them.

An LLM isn't a calculator. But we probably can teach it how to use one.

I think I read the article s bit differently. The headline is a bit click-bate, but in the article they never state that the format has to die in general, but that this distribution has killed it of, with explanations on why that is.

"bright yellow on white" and "dark blue on black": I thought the system was designed so that you should use a bright colors on a dark color or opposite, not two colors in the same group?

I wonder if this will increase creators payout with 30-50%.

This was a very interesting read. I have read a bit about the 4004 before so I knew it was strange. But the level of obscurity is mind-blowing. Now I just got the urge to see how well I would be able to make a CPU with the same transistor count. It's not that much fewer than a 6502. 8 bit would make it so much easier to program.

Thanks for documenting your work so well!

I can't understand how the game-while-loading hot granted. This "invention" was already invented and used long before, for example the "invade-a-load" fastloader on C64.

"more than one middle name" :)

We have a couple of challenges today. Hobbyists often go over 20MHz, because they put WiFi, BT or USB on their boards, giving EMC issues. Also, the speed of the modern ICs tend to be very high. If you have a 9600 Hz UART signal, that is not a 9600 Hz signal if it's a square wave with a modern IC with very short rise time on the pins. So a good old, slow serial line can with modern MCU emit noise up in the hundreds of MHz range.

So your PCB layout tips are important, even on slow circuits these days.

You probably know about this already, buy in case you missed it: The Arts of Electronics is a wonderful book on electronics, starting from zero, ending up at bachelor level EE.

I was introduced to the second edition (silver) when I attended college in the late 90s, and have later upgraded to the third edition (gold). It also has a companion book with more exercises and lab experiments.

For everyone that wants to learn EE, it is highly recommend. Just beware: there are fake copies for sale on Amazon, so be sure you get a genuine copy.

Maybe real time image processing from a camera. 2GB would probably be more than enough, and less power draw is nice when running continuously.

Converting a picture from color to black and white is a fairly simple task. Getting back the original in color is not easy. This is if course due to data lost in the process.

Minification works in the same way. A lot of information needed for understanding the code is lost. Getting back that information can be a very demanding task.

Very interesting project! I read the project description and status, and I would maybe call it a pre alpha, not beta at this stage?

Anyway, good luck to the creator. I hope you find people interested in contributing :-)

I would be willing to bet quite much on cancellation.

The opportunity to go to space is worth so much that I think they would get qualified people to do it for free, maybe even pay to have the job. So I don't think there is a need to pay more than a regular "good salary".

I would gladly have done it for $100k.

A normal car or motorcycle

The Russians used a simple, standard ballpoint pen, so the story is not true

I came here with that exact quote copied, but expected to find it posted already

It's easy to forget that the 80s took us from Apple II, TRS-80, PET, via C64, Amiga, Atari ST and Macintosh to SuperVGA and 486 when we entered the 90s.

Wow, is that true? And the documentation is thousands of pages! I can't understand how Intel keep these processors consistent during development. It must be a really, really hard job.

It was a nice period in history when proper RISC was working well, when we could get stuff to run faster, but getting more transistors was expensive. Now we can't get it to run faster but we can get billions of transistors, making stuff more complicated being the way to more performance.

I wonder if we ever again will get a time where simplification is a valid option...

You are completely right. I think many people still think of Microsoft as Windows and Office.

What Nadella did will be in the business school books!

Ballmer is a good used car salesman. He sold what they had, but new products suffered under his leadership. Just like Apple stopped inventing after Jobs.

Nadella built new product categories for the company.

I think two more years with Ballmer would have made the the prophecy valid.

68%, February 2024

This is so interesting! Quite often, I'm thinking about how a modern design would perform with tubes. Back in the 40s and 50s, digital computers were new. Much of the design was inherited from tabulating machines. When I study the early IBM machines, they seem very complex. When we learned more during the 60s, and ended up with microprocessors in the 70s, the design had been optimized a lot. So I have been wondering how a "modern" design would perform on tubes.

This guy actually did it. What a fun project it must have been. Super interesting read.

One detail in the introduction that made me a bit puzzled: "The Valve.Computer is an 8 bit computer, with the usual 12 bit address and data buses". In an 8 bit CPU, we had "the usual 16 bit address bus and the 8 bit address bus".

The valves need to be warmed up can still be the source of the names "cold boot" and "warm boot", even if we today have given them different meaning.

The trio Amiga, ST and Macintosh all had music software, DTP and graphics, but I think they ruled one craft each:

The ST became the king of MIDI.

The Amiga was the queen of gfx and video.

Machintosh created and ruled the DTP revolution.

Still, they had so much in common. If the three companies had made one OS and all standardized on the Amiga chipset, they could have won over the IBM PC.

Of course, back then, they didn't know how the PC would crush them all, at that time the three thought they were each others biggest competitors.

This happens a lot on the Norwegian Wikipedia. It has a super-deleter, deleting hundreds of articles a month, especially on Norwegian artists, musicians and companies. Many of them have Wikipedia entries in other languages, but for that person, the bar is high. This pattern really scares people off.

If you go to art school, what you do is study and analyze what artists have done before you. We humans learn much in the same way as an AI. We study what has been made by others.

I think accusing AI generated work to theft, is a based on the wrong assumptions.

It's not just art. What do you do in computer science courses? Or math, language, physics, or any other subject? You study what has already been made. What you produce based on that knowledge is not considered theft.

Have you ever seen an AI image that, if a human made it, would be considered a theft?