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jhallenworld

4,959 karma · joined October 31, 2013

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jhallenworld··on US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%
Suppose you want shelter. It used to be that you could buy a house for a reasonable price and move in. But now that's unaffordable, so instead your have to pay rent. In CPI thinking these are equivalent forms of shelter, but I bet if you asked most Americans, they would not agree with you.
jhallenworld··on US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%
No it's cooked. For high tech items, they assume that improved technology means you are getting more for your money even if the price goes up, so they discount it. It's true that you get more for your money, but it ignores threshold effects, like you just can't buy an equivalent phone for $10 even if todays phone's are 200x better.

Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the question "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished, and without utilities?" It assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent.

jhallenworld··on xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
>There are no dark GPUs

This might not be true. Someone was comparing Nvidia's production rate with known data center capacity, and they do not match. Their conclusion was that people (possibly even Nvidia) were hoarding GPUs- in the very short term this might be a good strategy, but GPUs go EOL fast. There are other stories about paused datacenter builds that match with this.

TSMC is definitely fully allocated, based on current 40 wk lead times for FPGAs..

jhallenworld··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
Also: Musk's shares have 10x voting power, he can not be overruled by anybody (he will retain ~80% of the votes).

Also: SpaceX debt is $20 billion.

jhallenworld··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
See also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

jhallenworld··on The dead economy theory
Yeah, it's how you pay dividends at capital gains rate instead of income rate. But also, Apple is kind of stagnant.. if they had something better to do with the money they wouldn't be doing the buybacks.
jhallenworld··on Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)
Not only that, the operating itself was configured by a process known as "sysgen". You relink the entire operating system with options set the way you wanted. It was generally a miserable slow process.

At least on PDP-11 that's how it went for something like RSX-11. I believe same is true for early IBM mainframe operating systems like DOS 360- I think all programs had to be relinked because one option you had was to move things around in memory, and ancillary programs had to know the memory map.

Even later: I wrote a device driver for Xenix: you got a link kit for the OS, you relinked it with your custom driver object file included.

On CP/M you patched the running image (perhaps with DDT), then use the CP/M SYSGEN command to install it on a disk.

jhallenworld··on Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY

CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it. iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.

Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.

jhallenworld··on Ti-84 Evo
My favorite cheap Casio is fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition, $17

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...

Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.

If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...

The older ones that still have basic:

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...

BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki

jhallenworld··on JOE 4.8
(JOE 4.7 was also recently released)
jhallenworld··on Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux
VxDs and Watcom C... now those are names I haven't heard in a long time.

Do any screen editors work in the command prompt windows? Try with "export TERM=ansi".

jhallenworld··on How Motorola’s 2N2222 and 2N3904 transistors became the default NPNs
A somewhat little know part is a "pre-biased transistor": this is a bipolar transistors with built-in resistors, and will often work as a drop-in replacement for a logic-level MOSFET (like 2n7000), but is an order of magnitude cheaper.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/diotec-semiconduc...

jhallenworld··on Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...

jhallenworld··on Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)
Now do a dynamic scheduling out of order engine with renaming, 20 pipes, speculative execution and hundreds of instructions in flight. I guess you could make a multi-person game for this.
jhallenworld··on PicoZ80 – Drop-In Z80 Replacement
I want to make something like this as a classic CPU ICE, with trace memory, disassembly, etc. (note that you need a crystal oscillator circuit for many CPUs- 6802, 8085, etc.)

It would be useful for debugging classic computers like Altair 8800, etc. What you do is get a boot trace (record the first 100,000 instructions) of a working machine and diff it with the one from your broken machine. This finds the problem in like 5 seconds.

jhallenworld··on IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
How well do commodity systems protect your financial transactions from cosmic ray-induced bit errors?
jhallenworld··on Afroman found not liable in defamation case
I thought it was big time defamation risk for Afroman to call him a pedofile.. but maybe the cop is afraid of discovery in this case..
jhallenworld··on Use GPT-5.4/CODEX to reverse engineer ancient machine code
I gave it the .S19 file containing the EDOS resident 6800 FORTRAN compiler machine code and asked it to reverse engineer it. It wrote a disassembler in Python along the way.
jhallenworld··on AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
>The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.

I thought it was being burned alive in the resulting firestorm because the intense light starts fires over a large area: way beyond the blast zone. This risk could be reduced if we painted everything white- a double win since it would also help reduce the city heat island effect.

jhallenworld··on AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
Colossus/Guardian was the first AI to realize that the humans could be easily coerced by using their own nukes against them.

From the Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) film.

jhallenworld··on Show HN: Formally verified FPGA watchdog for AM broadcast in unmanned tunnels
>NCO: 12 Numerically Controlled Oscillators generate carrier frequencies (505–1605 kHz)

This seems like a crude way to do it.. why not provide all 110 carrier frequencies by using a polyphase channelizer? The bandwidth of the entire AM broadcast band is pretty low..

jhallenworld··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
Adding EXORdisk-I support to my MC6800 simulator so that it can boot EDOS and EDOS-II disks.

EDOS was a direct 6800 port of FDOS. FDOS was the first DOS available for microcontrollers, using iCOM's FD360 8-inch floppy drives.

https://github.com/jhallen/exorsim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY

jhallenworld··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
Does it make a conforming preprocessor?
jhallenworld··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful.

So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.

jhallenworld··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
The receiver is like the asset tag on computer servers- it's the one thing that is definitely not replaceable since it has the serial number used for entitlement.
jhallenworld··on Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
If the end product ends up marginally cheaper, the company will be able to sell more of it, and this will lead to more profit. And sure, when you ignore the cost of the pollution, this certainly benefits the consumer, by allowing them to afford more energy and energy-based products (i.e., just about everything).

But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).

jhallenworld··on Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
Lead helped fuel company profits because it was cheaper than the other anti-knock additives, like ethanol.
jhallenworld··on Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple and Fast
I have been using Walter Bright's libc code from Zortech-C for microcontrollers, where I care about code size more than anything else:

https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs/blob/main/src/nkprintf_f... https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs/blob/main/src/nkstrtod.c https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs/blob/main/src/nkdectab.c

nkprintf_fp.c+nkdectab.c: 2494 bytes

schubfach.cc: 10K bytes.. the code is small, but there is a giant table of numbers. Also this is just dtoa, not a full printf formatter.

OTOH, the old code is not round-trip accurate.

Russ Cox should make a C version of his code..

jhallenworld··on Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops
Agree, use Linux, use LUKS.

PGP WDE was a preferred corporate solution, but now you have to trust Broadcom.

jhallenworld··on TPM on embedded systems: Pitfalls and caveats to watch out for
I mean a separate chip.
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