kar1181

86box is really fun, and the m4+ macs are great at running it. I've been working on a custom OS designed specifically for the pentium 2 core/isa (trying to write an high performance *nix for 1997-1999 for quake 1/2). 86box runs very faithfully to the real silicon p2s (and voodoo 3) I have without the nuisance of having to copy code over to it in development.

Whatever I think of anthropic, that webpage is a truly nice piece of work.

Yeah, anthropic's models, even opus, are so slow I constantly find myself wishing for something a little bit dumber but a lot faster as most of the work is mechanical. If you have a clever controller agent driving some slightly dumber workhorses you get a lot more done and the quality drop is neglible.

Go - the language no one likes, but frankly everyone needs.

If you think of it as message oriented it makes so much more sense.

It's a toy, easy to break is what vintage software was. A very different era with users of a very different mindset.

Not just rewrite the interrupt handler either, can rewrite the timer itself :)

Part of the fun of real-mode is the absolute god like power you have. Downside is the 20bit segmented memory model.

Yeah, I think the ability to move at pace helps and especially when you get stuck at some sort of intractable bug, in realmode especially, claude/gpt is unbelievably good at identifying and proposing the fix.

THAT is part of the issue with it though, those length debugging sessions where you prod and poke and have to hold complex interactive segments in your head is what gives you that deep understanding of a piece of software. You do lose that when you throw the AI at it. This is part of my motivation for handwriting 'offline' all my code for these types of project. Have a doc to work from but otherwise wetware is doing the heavy lifting.

This isn't efficient use of time at all and professionally a dead end. But as a pasttime/hobby for an enthusiast it opens a door that would be closed (project like yours and indeed mine) while still having it grounded in our own work.

I mean this is cool, it's wholly / mostly AI gen, so it takes the wow away which I think is what foklks are reacting strongly to here.

Sadly this sort of thing is much easier now - thanks to the tooling. I speak from personal experience, I'd written some stub 32bit os' myself (by hand, pre-ai) and it is very fun. But you quickly run into walls that stop further development that aren't fun. I enjoyed poking at VGA registers, the 512 byte boot sector into real mode into protected mode dance. Setting up the global descriptor tables/page tables and the PIC/8042 controller.

But...then you get into protected mode you get a prompt up some very basic memory management and then TERMIOS...boring. Boring. Defining all the posix syscalls, boring. Building test harnesses ... boring.

Oh I need a DMA controller now because PIO is slow, FUN!!!

I've taken my toy os to basically Linux 2.0 level in a few weekends by throwing tokens at boring things and when I got to the end it was a little bit empty because although the kernel of the system was all me, and it very much was built on the skeleton I arranged I didn't understand bits now that while boring were important. And the magic ... was lost.

I'm working on a new version now where my rule is I hand type every line of code and I co-plan with the AI and write from my head. It's so slow going but the fun is in the problem solving and the design and by hand writing you keep enough of it in hand it feels yours and real.

Anyway this is a cool project, I hope the author enjoyed it and learned something, but this is the new normal now, powerful tooling means things that were novel are tokens away and so they lose some of the magic accordingly.

Robin used to go by 'bro' and he was insanely good deathmatcher, also an LPB (low ping bastard) as the Uni of NSW/RMIT folks had decent net links unlike the rest of us plebs.

Quake was special for me, the first time I felt truly immersed in a world. I'd played doom/wolf, obviously, but being able to look down, and move in a 3d space just felt real in a way nothing had until then.

Then the multiplayer - lived in the sticks had a 33.6k modem - ping times on a good day of 300ms. Even with all the limitations (and lack of any sort of predictive netcode) that was it, a very expensive (we paid by the minute for phone bills!), game!

Later teamfortress came out from the guys at RMIT in Melbourne who later went on to Valve (Robin Walker/John Cook from memory) and TF set the bar for so much to come.

I know a lot of folks recommend masters of doom for the atmosphere at ID during quake's difficult development, but actually Michael Abrash's graphics black book (free on github - https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) is an even better companion, still a wonderfully readable book today, but captures the mindset of the development that we can take much from still. Indeed Abrash's anecdote about sliderule jockey's in the day of pocket calculators rings very true today as we grapple with the impact of AI on our work.

How many of us can thank our careers to id for hooking us on computers and things like quakec and even quake2's game dll source and later full engine sources.

Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.

This is true. But Anthropic did us dirty most recently and so it’s their turn on the pitch fork. Sam will do us too. Just not yet.

Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity.

I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.

Agreed, though being OS is no panacea as we have seen from countless other projects, but it does mitigate some concern of investing in an editor and its ecosystem and getting rugpulled.

This is it, in terms of pure text editing zed is the best GUI land editor I've used.

Not quite there with emacs/vim but it's a much more accessible environment and more convenient for typical workloads.

Also love Zed, but sigh, it's VC funded. We all know how this is going to end. Best VIM mode ever implemented in a (non vim) app. I use it as my 2nd editor (most of the time in Jetbrains products).

I just hope I'm wrong about the medium term impact of the VC funding but rushing AI AI AI out seems to be a sign of that rather than fixing fundamental issues that remain such as the ugly font rendering.

I feel like the voyager spacecraft are a part of me, growing up in the 80s marvelling at all the images they sent back it was a magical time. The idea of voyager going dark feels like losing a part of myself.

It's proven to be a hardy spacecraft and has defied a lot of seemingly terminal problems before, fingers crossed she can overcome this one too.

God speed Voyager.

One of things I struggle with is on certain issues like Ukraine and Israel libertarian folks I normally (largely) agree with seem to hold inexplicable views which seem to border on religious rather than practical. It makes me then wonder about everything else how can the two topics seemingly have different grades of reason versus so much of everything else.

Clanpnp/ftb myself. Still remember some of the server IPs by muscle memory.

I was heavily involved with the australian team fortress (quake 1 version) community in the late 90s and 'bro' (Robin Walker) and John Cook were gods to us, regularly involved in the RMIT/Melbourne Lan scene and online even when back then mostly it was 28.8/33.6k modems with a few LPBS on East coast uni isdns.

The struggle for them to move on from qwtf to 'tf2' was probably for the best as a lot of the lessons they learned in the wilderness there helped when they were taken on by value and worked on HL2.

Also find it somewhat amusing was that TF2 was originally going to be a much more 'realistic' modern miltary shooter before the scope creep killed it.

Sounds like Apple / Xerox all over.

Intel ride or die here. My 2019 i9 mbp is trucking along still - and this time of year the heat helps keep the room hospitable.

Was looking towards M3 for a big leap, but apart from heat and power (I use my MBP plugged in 95% of the time) there still isn't that compelling a reason to deal with some of the issues (thunderbolt / multiple displays) for my use case.

At 4 grand (sterling!) for comparable spec to my intel mbp, I just can't bring myself to take a plunge.

We did move out of the US and funnily enough food (bread especially - we lived in the south) was part of the reason. However since our return to the UK the over processing of what were simple foods has occurred also. It seems to have dramatically accelerated post pandemic/brexit. We eventually moved somewhere where there’s a traditional baker walking distance away but if we have to go to a supermarket Sainsbury’s carry just two specialty brands soy free now the major brands hocks and warburtons and Sainsbury’s own branded bread all have soya flour.

I think in breads case it does improve the softness and protein content but it’s really unnecessary and mainly in there as it shaves cost.

Ultra processed is the end result of mckinsification of our food chain.

My son is allergic to soya - that was a catalyst for us looking into the supply chain of what we buy and eat and if there is one profound change above all is the fact soy is in -everything- and if not in the product itself then certain in the bulk of the food stuffs own food chain.

Can’t even buy bread now without it being bulked out with soya flour …

More pertinently than that, it's a quick win for a kids show, ads when young kids are involved increase friction so much it's not worth it.

Just waiting for spotify to do it too.

I recently read ultraprocessed people and while it's a bit hyperbolic it's still eye-opening about the state of the packaged food business.

My son is allergic to Soya, Nuts, Eggs, Dairy and since he started eating solids we've have to label check everything and in doing so as a family we've basically stopped eating packaged foods alltogether. Do you know just how hard it is to avoid Soy now, it and it's derivatives are in pretty much everything, and even if it's not a raw ingredient it's in the bulk of the 'supply chain'.

I think when we look back in 20 years the packaged foods business is going to look at lot like the tobacco one does today...

I was about to ask the same question - basically the Packt books I have read have been (almost) universally poor quality.

It's been a long while since I've bothered with them so hoping that's changed somewhat.

I started on RedHat and it has a special place in my heart - even now they still host the original distributions I cut my unix teeth on all the way back.

But sadly times change. Get it, they want to make money, but doesn't change the sadness these recent moves have caused.