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jlmcgrawon The Road to MS-DOS 2.0

It sounds like Microsoft _wanted_ to use '/' as the path separator but was forced by IBM to change it at the last minute:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac...

jlmcgrawon Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II

There is "Apple Machine Language for Beginners" by Richard Mansfield https://archive.org/details/Apple_Machine_Language_for_Begin...

I have fond memories from the late 1980s of trying to get the assembler contained within this book working, typing line after line of the MLX listing in. Unfortunately I never did finish it back then.

A week or so ago I got the urge to complete this project and I literally just finished getting the source in it to a point where it can be compiled online and then within an emulator: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/LADS_DOS33

jlmcgrawon John Carmack on mutable variables

For what it's worth, I was experimenting with this idea for Python (in an almost completely vibe-coded fashion) here: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/pure-function-decorators

Whether it's of any actual utility is debatable

jlmcgrawon RustGPT: A pure-Rust transformer LLM built from scratch

Some commentary from the author here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1nguv1a/i_built_an_ll...

jlmcgrawon Microsoft’s original source code

I wonder who the handwritten notes on page 98 are by?

Starts with "confirm plane reservation on Tue. Sept 2 or Wed. Sept 3" which is correct for 1975

jlmcgrawon The Washington Post kills off its "Democracy Dies In Darkness" slogan

“Democracy drowns in dollars” seems sadly more accurate

jlmcgrawon Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)

A style I picked up from a relative, who is a lawyer, is to make bullet points with minimal other fluff:

  Addressee,
   - Do this
   - Then that
   - Be sure to be aware of this

I found it impersonal at first, but it's very effective in calling out the things that need attention

jlmcgrawon Hiding messages in x86 binaries using semantic duals

:You’re thinking of A86:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A86_(software)

jlmcgrawon Passwords: Using 3 Random Words Is a Really Bad Idea (2017)

I wrote a perl script a while back to create random passphrases based on a random mnemonic word

It seems like a good idea to me but I’m not knowledgeable enough about cryptography to know if that’s really true and would be very interested to hear from anyone who does know

https://github.com/jlmcgraw/mnemonic_passphrase

jlmcgrawon Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

Since devices that automatically set their own time are so common now I’ve sometimes wondered why we don’t try moving the time forward/back by some smaller increment each day instead of a full hour twice a year.

jlmcgrawon How Long Is Long Enough? Minimum Password Lengths by the World's Top Sites

I did something very similar but had the thought that making the passphrase be based on an existing word would make a good balance between security and ease of remembering without a password manager.

Of course it isn’t as strong as a purely random passphrase but hopefully it would be strong enough and still better than choosing your own password

https://github.com/jlmcgraw/mnemonic_passphrase