dcminter

He's likely a good bit older than me then - I was about 9 when we got ours. I think "fancy calculator" was probably one of the best ways to use them given their limitations.

Their success was largely down to their very low price point (clever cost-shaving engineering) at a time when there was a huge untapped public interest in computers.

The ZX81 didn't have so much software around for it - what there was mostly came on tape, or was typed in¹ on the ghastly membrane keyboard, and what there was was very limited in capability (the default RAM size was one kilobyte (yes, just 1024 bytes, though typically you'd buy a "ram pack" upgrade to 16k). Then it was very rapidly superseded by the more capable ZX Spectrum machine. So odds are your Dad didn't patch software on the ZX81 because it was usually already highly optimised to squeeze it into the tiny space available.

What was very common on those devices was using the "poke" command in BASIC to change a handful of values, but while it was possible to change code in this way it was much more common to be changing the value of variables - things corresponding to "number of lives left" and the like. Not all that different.

Fairly quickly, though, the games were entirely in machine code and used fancy loaders (still from tape mostly) so you didn't get access to BASIC. This created a market for devices that let you get at a monitor program - the "Multiface" series of addons². They had at least three generations of that device, but the company slightly weirdly evolved into a music production company³ after that, which is kind of cool.

Er, ok, I'll stop now while I still can...

Edit: PS - you should ask him about it. Tell him another former ZX81 owner says "Hi" and that my fingers still ache from that keyboard. Although I sneer a bit at its capabilities, it kicked off an interest in computing that's still paying the bills 40 something years later...

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¹ https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000265/Book/Not_Only_...

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiface

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_Robot

Ask it for advice on learning to play the banjo...

Edit: ...or was it the ukulele?

> I'm a Noctua fan!

:)

I'm a Linux guy who doesn't really like Macs but has intermittently been required to use them. On the whole I have a grudging respect for Apple (their hardware is peerless), but seeing one screen turn to "brushed steel" when the app on the other was put into full screen mode kind of blew my mind because "UI is worse than Windows" was not, at the time, a failure mode I believed the company was capable of.

I like opera and classical music generally. Musicals too, although only ones written up to about 1950. I was unreasonably embarrassed about this as a kid because it wasn't "cool".

The author says:

> I’d recommend you go to the show if you haven’t already, but that’s not really the point of this post.

So while I agree that it is good to contemplate why you like things, that wasn't the topic of the post at all.

The author quite explicitly say so.

Yes. You should try liking things too instead of being dismissive of those who do. Kind of the author's point.

My terminal (terminator) does (2) and the "easy" scrollback on tmux messes up the ability to scroll with the mouse, at least with default settings. I just tried it in zellij and that doesn't. Since I'm only using a multiplexor for (3) and zellij does that too, I'm already inclined to switch.

I know I'd get used to them, but the key combos used by tmux seem very odd choices, even to someone who used to code on a real glass tty!

If anyone's interested, there's a bit more about the intention behind this library here: https://paperstack.com/kafkaesque/

Perhaps you're looking for this?

https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.

My wife, being a genius, has a decoy keyboard. Pretty effective, it usually has a cat sitting on it.

Even if promotional (which I doubt even if other posts are), this ticks the 'is interesting and not shallow' box for me.

That's the third paragraph.

Their second paragraph addresses this.

The real challenge is to do it in a way that's intellectually stimulating. Mind you The Economist just had an article about the monkey called Punch so all things are possible...

> people who never actually used WASM ;)

Fair if you mean me - I've at most toyed with it, but the shim stuff was off-putting.

I'm a backender though, I don't pretend my opinion is of any consequence here.

> Personally I'm not a fan of this

You make it sound like the shim layer is actively desirable - why is that?

It misled me too - though I'm interested in the article anyway. I've emailed the mod team so hopefully the submission here will get a less context-dependent title soon.

Does anyone know if there's any reasonable timescale likely for this to happen? Last time I looked into the topic it seemed to be completely stalled, but I might well have been looking in the wrong places.

To a very casual observer (me) it seems like it ought to be simple, but I expect there are good reasons why it isn't.

Just before I installed an SSD was the last time I owned a computer that felt slow.

That's unusual. Maybe that's a US thing? In Europe anywhere I've had to interview people I've received at least a couple of hours of training and then usually sat in as the shadow on at least one interview.

Quality varies, but I think it's only the super small outfits where I've been expected to just wing it.

I hadn't read that page, but now I do I note that it says:

"The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity."

So I guess I'm not any clearer on this point.

edit: If I had to bet on it then I'd put money on the theory that "blob" became "BLOB" to sound more technical though...

One of us! :)

Currently in a brief macos phase before I can be issued my Linux laptop at work. It's so clunky. A major annoyance for me right now is the lack of MST multi-screen over USB which means my nice daisy-chained home setup is fine on my near-decade-old Dell but doesn't work at all on the fancy Macbook. They have the hardware to support it, they just don't.

Generally the hardware with Apple is amazing but I'll take the hit on that and things like battery life just to get an OS that feels like it's on my side.

I'd maybe consider Asahi for home use but I'd be wary of it for work. Perhaps in a few years.

In the database world a BLOB is a Binary Large OBject ... are you sure of your etymology?

Edit: and I'm not btw - for all I know BLOB in DB land might be backronym from blob in the common usage.

While these are all reasonable points, there is a distinction between criticising people for using ${lang} (bad) and criticising the language (neutral).

Some people get their egoes attached to their choices (for or against Rust).

Also there's a time and a place for all criticism. If the conversation is not fundamentally about language choice then it's very irritating to have it brought up.

> [Rust is] a good language [...] but also a huge pita to work with

This is practically the elevator pitch of the language :) and I speak as one who likes it a lot!

I don't think your comment deserves the downvotes (upvoted to compensate) but I do think that it's questionable if "Most errors are not type errors" is true.

Rust's culture of pushing things into type checking does eliminate a huge swathe of bugs and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the majority.

The hurdle of negotiating translation between filesystem strings and unicode strings strikes me as a good example of a place where most languages don't protect you from bugs and a strongly typed one does. The downside, of course, is that you have to handle these cases (even if it's to explicitly say "I don't care").

I still create dumbass bugs in Rust, but they are usually simple logical errors that are pretty obvious when debugging.

Yeah, I keep hearing about this toxic community from people who won't blink twice to use decade-out-of-date critiques of Java :)

I asked for the purpose. You guessed at the purpose. those are different.