eschaton

eschaton, 7 months ago to random

What are the secular, socialist organizations helping people in Palestine?

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Isn’t it a trip to think that everything we have online today, with the exception of real-time full-screen audio and video (streaming or otherwise), we could have had in 1998?

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

BART should not be purchasing and installing nearly a thousand new fare gates. BART should be dismantling all of its fare collection infrastructure so it can run as the public service it is.

eschaton, 10 months ago to random

“The “Promise” of “Easier” Programming,” wherein I talk about why 4GLs were temporarily successful, why that was temporary, and why “programming via LLMs” will have the same fate: https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=374

eschaton, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

I often find myself wishing the far right’s paranoid delusions about Soviet-supported Communist infiltration of American academia (referred to as “the Frankfurt school” in those circles) were true.

If our economics departments and business schools actually dealt seriously with issues like labor theory of value and the purpose of economies instead of tautological Ayn Rand bullshit, they wouldn’t have failed humanity as utterly as they have.

eschaton, 3 months ago to retrocomputing

I’ve been playing around with creating a new ROM from scratch for an existing 68K system and I’m excited to see MAME has a “gdbstub” debugger. I don’t have space in the ROM for debug symbols, and it’s a raw binary anyway (produced by a linker script). How do I tell gdb how to map the .o files with symbols to the ROM image so I get source level symbolic debugging? #mamedev #retrocomputing #gdb #embedded

eschaton, 2 months ago to random

Ugh, iTerm2 doesn't have sufficiently good VT200+ emulation to use with VMS full-screen applications, and Terminal only supports VT100. Is there another native macOS terminal emulator that has good support for, say, VT240 or VT340?

eschaton, 8 months ago to random

We need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly disclaim corporate personhood: No limited-liability entity shall be treated as a natural person, and shall only be able to exercise privileges enumerated under the law.

eschaton, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

Is anyone aware of a decent, WebKit-based browser for Linux/BSD/Windows? (I really do mean WebKit, not Google’s hostile “embrace & extend” fork.)

eschaton, 8 months ago to business

The C-suite is ripe to be supplanted by AI: Corporations run by bunch of technocrats educated at decent “flyover” state schools using AI decision support systems will make far better short- and long-term economic decisions than the super-expensive Ivy League Old Boys Club ever has, at far lower cost, with far more interchangeability. Eventually board members will recognize this; the celebrity C-suite is living on borrowed time. #business #artificialintelligence

eschaton, 8 months ago to random

I don’t understand why this government funding issue in the House is so complicated. Speaker McCarthy can do a deal with Democrats and some Republicans to bring the Senate’s bill to the floor unchanged, which will pass, in exchange for some Democrats supporting him if MAGA Republicans try to oust him. Where’s the problem with this?

eschaton, 3 months ago to random

@siracusa @atpfm QuickDraw 3D was contemporaneous with the Game Sprockets APIs but it wasn’t actually a game API. It was a retained-mode scene graph API like SGI Inventor, NeXT 3DKit, or SceneKit. It sat atop a low level immediate-mode API like OpenGL called RAVE that supported hardware acceleration, and that was what games targeted.

We got MechWarrior 2 working really well on RAVE, which was sad because that version was only available as a pack-in with some 3D accelerators (but worked on all).

eschaton, 3 months ago to ai

To the people who believe that ChatGPT is actually intelligent and not just fancy autocorrect:

How good is it at chess? Go? Scrabble? Checkers? Tic-tac-toe?

#ai #ChatGPT

eschaton, 1 year ago to random

@siracusa I was really disappointed to hear you say, shortly before 1hr40m in the latest released episode of ATP, that LLMs are “really good at understanding” which is an enormous category error. They don’t understand anything! What they’re good at is using statistics to predict what text could plausibly come next.

eschaton, 1 month ago to random

There were a bunch of different systems in DEC’s PDP line, many mutually-incompatible (e.g. the PDP-1, 6, and 10 were somewhat compatible, the PDP-8 and PDP-11 were each their own complete universe, and then there were the 5, 9, 12, and 15, etc.) but they were all very well-designed.

My friend @fvzappa has a listing up on eBay for a PDP-8/m, which is a complete PDP-8/m minicomputer: https://www.ebay.com/itm/116163448173 This is an excellent turnkey system for joining the 12-bit world!

eschaton, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Jason Scott is stirring up some drama on the eve of #VCFEast because he donated some stuff to #VCF but doesn’t actually understand how “donation” and “archiving” work. He’s also taking at face value that someone was “driven out” of the organization when they actually ragequit rather than work within proper governance.

VCFed is a decent organization, especially now, and the VCF events are great. This drama is a tempest in a teapot, and absolutely not a reason not to participate or attend.

eschaton, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

So I had a realization: The QuickTime movie format would make a good format for archival and preservation of streaming tape data. https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=409 #retrocomputing #simh

eschaton, 8 months ago to random

Isn’t it interesting that the same people who will insist until they’re red in the face that any form of central planning or shared resource management cannot possibly work for a society have absolutely nothing negative to say about how the largest and most powerful non-government organizations are extremely effective while being fully centrally planned?

It’s almost as if their justification for the former has nothing to do with the effectiveness of central planning.

eschaton, 3 months ago to embedded

Does anyone have a straightforward containerized toolchain that includes at least gcc, binutils, and gdb, targeting 68000 ELF? I’ll be running it under podman on my MacBook, for the embedded stuff I’m doing for fun, so I don’t have to do everything in an SSH session to Linux. #m68k #embedded #retrocomputing

eschaton, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

Are there any straightforward guides to setting up an SSH “jump server” for an old system? Let’s say I have a VAX VMS system I want to provide access to. People would ssh to cmhvax@mysite with a password I share, and each would produce a telnet connection to the VAX that they’d then have to log into with their real login and password. The past couple times I’ve looked into it, I got pretty lost in a forest of documentation… #retrocomputing #openvms

eschaton, 9 months ago to random

Don’t Create the Torment Nexus
https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=384

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

@vkoskiv Say, I just found MacNTP while looking for an NTP solution for my Mac IIx running System 6! Thanks! I haven’t been able to build it yet, have you considered committing DeRezzed versions of the projects too? (That should be able to round-trip a THINK C 5 project with objects removed.)

eschaton, 5 months ago to random

Are there any tools that’ll mount a “just raw blocks” disk image on System 7.5, whether read-only or otherwise? I can always convert such images to other formats, but I’d of course be happy to just have a tool as well.

eschaton, 2 months ago to random

If it surprises anyone that “the Marquess of Chumley” has stolen Chinese antiques in her home, you should really look into the contents of the UK’s museums.

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

“The United States is so big and geographically diverse that—“ shut up. China is sufficiently similar to the US in terms of size, geography, and population distribution that all the bullshit arguments about how what worked in Europe won’t work here are fully disproven as the auto-industry propaganda they always have been.