accrual

There are some ISA USB cards with custom drivers to support them and present them as normal drives under MS-DOS. Never tried it myself, but they exist and seem to work!

Other commenter is correct, there are some late 486 boards with PCI support that would allow USB 1.0 or even 2.0 cards to be installed and used. Probably slow, but should work.

On the topic of modernizing a 486-class machine, there also exist a few with native PS/2 mouse support, and certain Matrox PCI cards have digital out, so it'd be possible to build a 486-class machine with USB 1.1, DVI/HDMI, and PS/2.

Since some Logitech wireless mice support PS/2, one could connect a 486 rig to a crisp digital LCD, use a wireless mouse, and plug in USB flash drives, sound, 10/100 network, NT 4.0, etc. -- all supported. Can make a fairly "modern" machine out of a pre-Pentium chip.

> where you have desktop AI apps on the left (Claude, Codex, Cursor) and macOS apps from Apple on the right (Finder, Photos, Mail). You can see how the AI apps all have much smaller, thinner icons than their native counterparts.

This would be such a simple, easy fix too. Increase the icon size, increase the stroke width slightly, raise from light grey to white or near-white (inverse for light mode). Then it would look like the system.

The author's email obfuscation holds up well against small local models too, just for kicks neither Qwen-9B, Gemma-12B, nor GPT-OSS-20B could read it, giving results like "poc.otulptcejorp@otulm".

It seems the agent was stymied by being bot blocked so often.

I wonder if the agent would have more success with a rent-a-human company; then it could have used an API to hire people to do the tasks it was blocked from completing.

I also noticed the web UI right away, very clean and functional.

I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.

I imagine there are similar risks for eating one's hat as well, though perhaps a bit safer since it's not in contact with the ground and contains fewer materials.

So if you're going to make a bet and eat something if you lose - take the hat.

> without ever directly mentioning anything

I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".

I thought the article was interesting from a visualization perspective, even if it's not perfectly solid on the actual mechanics in a model. It helps describe the scale of the connections.

> There’s no pre-formed thought “behind” the words that then gets translated into language. The words are the thinking.

The recent paper on "J-space" [0] contradicts this, models can "think" of things without emitting as text.

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.

I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.

HuggingFace and access to a fiber connection changed my concept of "large downloads". I can easily grab a 20GB model within a minute or two now, same for big Steam games. Meanwhile my childhood self was hyper aware of loading images and other assets that would bog down our home dialup connection.

> Sony's announcement follows Rockstar's announcement that Grand Theft Auto 6 will come with a download code in a box rather than a physical disc. It's a move that most notably stamps out second-hand reselling of a game.

This is the big point for me. If one buys a digital PlayStation game there's virtually no easy way to transfer it to another owner or sell it like one could do in past console generations. There will always be modding and ways to play game dumps, but it limits that level of "ownership" to those technically inclined to make it work.

Nice. I flip flop between Qwen 3.5 9B Q6_M and Gemma4 12B Q4_K_M on a 4080 Super. They run at about the same speed and I can have them review each other's plan or diffs. For smaller projects I find them very capable, and I can step up to a better quant for slightly more challenging work.

I've seen some recent examples of XP in the wild, they pop-up occasionally in old ATMs, bus route displays, small stores running a PoS, etc. Not a recommended configuration of course but still happens nevertheless.

For me I enjoy it as a fun/hobby OS. I can install all my favorite tools and games and boot it up whenever. It's also fun to see what modern work can still be done on old OSs. Recent versions of PuTTY work so I can in theory sit on my XP box and drive LLM agents with Winamp playing in the background, chat on MSN with Escargot, etc.

This is super cool! I admire those who make the effort to keep their software running on old unsupported OSs. There's a thriving community of new and existing XP users and I don't see it going away despite it being out of support for over a decade. It's one of the last great Windows versions and its long life ensured a huge software catalog is available for exploring, now including Principia.

Could you share more about the homelab project? Is it so you could message your local agent via Matrix and it can poke around the lab, check if services are up, restart VMs, that kind of thing? Would love to hear what you use it for, I'm thinking of building something similar for my lab.

Sometimes I visualize a setup like this [0], based on 2D art by Simon Stålenhag. Someone has their home robot sitting on a desk connected to their old PC with thick cabling, dumping endless lines of each subsystem's <think> logs to diagnosis why it did something weird earlier in the day. Systems pushing 750+ tokens per second per subsystem might even be considered on the slow side for realtime tasks by then.

[0] https://www.therookies.co/entries/39513

Same, I was reading discussion just yesterday that these were expected to go in place with the September releases.

I saw it immediately as well. Some tells for me are:

- Off-white or sepia toned backgrounds, similar subdued color palette for icons, grey ALL CAPS subheadings

- Serifed headings

- Various "Item: Quantity" lists (Puzzle types: 10, Puzzles solved: 1,951, etc.)

- Middle dot character for separator

One common tell it is lacking is the placement of colored dots or circles in the corners of panels or other UI elements, sometimes animated/pulsing.

To be clear it's not bad, it's a clean and friendly style. It just has that certain look, like a visual "it's not X it's Y".

I loved the K-Lite Codec Pack and CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) back in the XP days, especially while exploring MKVs and anime, but I virtually never run into a media file that VLC or MPC-HC can't play by default these days. Just drop it in and it plays.

I haven't played the newer expansions, but the classic client (v1.12.1 in my case) from ~2006 is a nice piece of software. I've run it on old Pentium 3 clients and modern hardware under Win 11 and Wine and it just works everywhere I fire it up. It handles scaling well (I can play it 4K OLED or 1024x768 CRT), it behaves during alt-tab, and every button/tab/shortcut feels thought out.

The Siri icon was the largest departure from Tahoe I noticed. Maybe a part of the broader Siri changes announced.

I hope early home robotics will be like a game console launch - a community rush to break through any initial barriers to homebrew. Specific early firmwares will be desirable and a whole community will form around creating exploits and running user software. As old robot units fall out of service and are sold in bulk, the community will pick them up and keep them running.

Not GP but I enjoyed reading through some details of EDN here, I hadn't studied it before: https://edn-format.dev/

I remember using TweakUI to enable "always show underline for shortcut key" because that genuinely felt like it should be a default for better usability.

It's not gaussian splatting, but Outcast (1999) has an interesting voxel-like rendering for the world surface. It has a pretty distinct feeling when walking around in the early areas, and a somewhat clunky but usable UI.

> The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texture-mapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term "voxel engine", when applied to video games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the Voxel Space engine). On the engine technology page of the game's website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the "Voxels engine". The engine is purely software based; it does not rely on hardware-acceleration via a 3D graphics card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)

Splendid model, it reminds me of Gemma3 27B which was my favorite local model last year. Gemma always had a bit more warmth/empathy compared to Qwen and Mistral in my experience and I found it more useful for personal questions.

My system has a 4080 Super (16GB) installed and using llama.cpp (b9333-35c9b1f39) I got these results on a test prompt:

* Qwen3.5-9B-Q6_K.gguf - Prompt: 1492.0 t/s | Generation: 81.0 t/s

* gemma-4-12b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf - Prompt: 1329.2 t/s | Generation: 72.3 t/s

* gemma-4-12b-it-Q8_0.gguf - Prompt: 504.4 t/s | Generation: 25.2 t/s

> They’re finding that the chemistry of life is not exclusive to life, he added. “It’s the chemistry of geology.”

This has me excited for missions to Europa and Enceladus. Vast quantities of tidal energy flexing unseen ocean floors for millennia is bound to produce some interesting chemistry, if not life.

I'm in a similar boat, I previously saved a bunch of AIM chats from my school days but only tiny fragments made it to present day. From those fragments I gather I wouldn't want to re-read much of it. :D

I had one briefly but I think it's important to think through the logistics of using it. Even the small ones are somewhat heavy and cumbersome. I ended up returning mine because it was too much of a pain to set something up and tear it down just to get steps in. Maybe different if one has a dedicated place for it.