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I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.

sehuggon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

That's hilarious. I've been following Mario since his work on libGDX and RoboVM.

His blog post on pi is here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

sehuggon The pleasures of poor product design

You can see some of these objects at Musée des Arts et Métiers: https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/les-objets-inconfortab...

sehuggon RISC-V Is Sloooow

It's not the wrong design; RISC-V is designed around extensions, and they left room in the instruction encoding for them. They don't have a 800-lb gorilla like Intel shoving the ISA down customers' throats (Canonical is the closet thing) so there is some debate on which combination of extensions are needed for desktop apps.

sehuggon Reverse engineering a DOS game with no source code using Codex 5.4

From the docs, I couldn't tell if it had disassembled very much of the EXE. Looks like it extracted most of the assets, the presence of open-source modding tools for this game in training data likely helped a bit.

sehuggon Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native

Realize, though, that just grabbing a frame buffer is not a thing anymore. To render graphics you need GLES support through something like ANGLE, vectors and fonts via Skia, Unicode, etc. A web browser has those things. Any static binary bundling those things is also gonna be pretty large.

And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)

sehuggon Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

That policy doesn't explicitly disallow writers from using LLMs as part of their process, nor does it mention reviewing submissions for content that could be LLM-generated.

I like some of the ideas in the article but there are some very "it wasn't just A, it was B" sentences in there. IEEE has a higher standard.

sehuggon DBASE on the Kaypro II

I note that Clarion is still being developed, version 12 was released last year. I remember fondly using its screen designer to create drop-shadowed dialogs.

sehuggon Building a TUI is easy now

Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.

sehuggon How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?

IIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.

sehuggon Reverse Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600

One of the authors, Dennis Debro, has done a bunch more of these: https://github.com/DNSDEBRO/Disassemblies

sehuggon County pays $600k to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security

They had written authorization from the state court and verbal confirmation from state court officials. They didn't know there would be a pissing match between the judicial branch and the sheriff.

sehuggon To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

The best tech writers I've known have been more like anthropologists, bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users. With this perspective they often give feedback that makes the product better.

sehuggon Favorite Tech Museums

The System Source museum in Hunt Valley, Maryland is also worth a mention. I attended a demonstration of a revived Bendix G-15 there.

sehuggon Health care data breach affects over 600k patients, Illinois agency says

Several maps created to assist the agency with decisions — like where to open new offices and allocate certain resources — were made public through incorrect privacy settings between 2021 and 2025 ... the mapping website was unable to identify who viewed the maps ... implemented a secure map policy that prohibits uploading customer data to public mapping websites.

So a state employee/contractor (doesn't say) uploaded unaggregated customer records to a mapping website hosted on the public internet?

sehuggon Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

iCloud sync is a nice feature too. I use the Mac app mostly for adding feeds and the iOS app for reading. Anytime I read an interesting web post, I pop its url into the app to see if it has a RSS feed.

sehuggon Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

2011. This in my memory is the year of the industry-wide vibe shift from open APIs to walled gardens/cesspools.

sehuggon If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app

More annoying is that it's really difficult for me to unlock the phone with the side button without activating Siri. Seems like there's often a lag when waking the phone that causes a long press to be detected even with a short press.

sehuggon Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut had something to say. We have it on tape

Bluebeard is a good one too; it ruminates on the nature of art and how/why meaning is assigned to it.

sehuggon Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

Try https://8bitworkshop.com/verilog to get started with dabbling

sehuggon You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser

GTA Vice City was released for iOS devices in 2012, and IIRC it ran pretty well. Not surprising that it runs well with WASM/WebGPU, given the massive increase in GPU performance. I'd imagine that the CPU-bound paths are well-optimized for 2002 Pentiums.

sehuggon Does my key fob have more computing power than the Lunar lander?

Another related question: Is there any production software system so inefficient that it would run faster if implemented in machine language on the AGC

sehuggon The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

I ran Node with --print-opt-code and had Opus look at Turbofan's output. It was able to add comments to the JIT'ed code and give suggestions on how to improve the JavaScript for better optimization.

sehuggon LLVM-MOS – Clang LLVM fork targeting the 6502

I've implemented Atari 2600 library support for both LLVM-MOS and CC65, but there are too many compromises to make it suitable for writing a game.

The lack of RAM is a major factor; stack usage must be kept to a minimum and you can forget any kind of heap. RAM can be extended with a special mapper, but due to the lack of a R/W pin on the cartridge, reads and writes use different address ranges, and C does not handle this without a hacky macro solution.

Not to mention the timing constraints with 2600 display kernels and page-crossing limitations, bank switching, inefficient pointer chasing, etc. etc. My intuition is you'd need a SMT solver to write a language that compiles for this system without needing inline assembly.

sehuggon Perkeep – Personal storage system for life

I've worked on and off on my own personal system which leaves the filesystem stuff to filesystems, and focuses on verifying backups/mirrors and recursing into archive formats. Also interested in warning of near-obsolete formats, like my collection of RealAudio files that are hard to decode these days.

sehuggon Things you can do with diodes

You can put a small ROM on your board with diodes, for example to store bitmaps, and for style points you can even arrange the diodes in the shape of your bitmaps: https://technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-...

sehuggon No Socials November

Does RSS count? I've appreciated having NetNewsWire and its iCloud sync. Having no urge/obligation to comment or retoot is a different experience.

sehuggon Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again

I used FreeBSD as my daily desktop for a while in the 2000s. IIRC, the package manager had to compile each package from source, but that wasn't a huge deal. Things just worked in a non-overly-clever fashion.

sehuggon URLs are state containers

My 8-bit IDE lets you share your ROM as a lzg/b64-encoded URL. Things get dicey when you go above 2000 characters or so.

sehuggon Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop

I use "aider --commit" sometimes when I can't think of a comment. I often have to edit it because it's too general or it overstates the impact (e.g. "improved the foo", are you sure you improved the foo?) but that's not limited to local models. I like gemma3:12b or qwen2.5-coder:14b, not much luck with reasoning models.