@eschaton@mastodon.social
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

eschaton

@eschaton@mastodon.social

Work on tools for people to do work. Play with old computers in my spare time. Only ever speaking for myself.

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eschaton, to random
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

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,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

Hell, the UK has stolen whole countries and refuses to give them back in their entirety, like Ireland and Scotland.

thias, to retrocomputing
@thias@mastodon.social avatar

The Mac SE/30 had a 256 Kb ROM, that was expandable to 2MB. And Now is wonder if someone, somewhere is trying to create a 2MB ROM, with a boot file-system system like the Mac Classic had…

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@thias In fact it’s not only been made, it’s been made with flash so it can be reprogrammed and customized! https://www.bigmessowires.com/mac-rom-inator-ii/

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What is it with fascists and speed? Always with the speed! Always being "anti-drug" then using up ALL the drugs.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird We can certainly tell what drugs they weren’t using—like mushrooms or ayahuasca.

jwz, to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

TIL that SXSW still exists

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@jwz I only realized last week, when a comedian I enjoy said on a podcast she was headed to Austin “but for South By, not The Mothership.”

jsq, to random
@jsq@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

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    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @jsq All of the /usr/bin stubs (including xcrun) will follow DEVELOPER_DIR if it’s specified in the environment to an Xcode’s embedded Developer directory. So you can export it from a shell to use tools from a specific Xcode installation in that shell.

    eschaton, to retrocomputing
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    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,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @kaibae @hanshuebner @eschaton Not unreasonable at all, and very probably the way to go. Thanks!

    schwa, to random
    @schwa@mastodon.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @schwa Gods, they will not stop trying, will they?

    drahardja, (edited ) to ai
    @drahardja@sfba.social avatar

    How the mighty have fallen.

    I remember c|net as a standard-bearer of tech journalism back in the 1990s. Theirs was one of the few bookmarks I opened regularly to read about tech news.

    Red Ventures has destroyed its reputation, along with all their other properties’ like ZDNet (the other fantastic tech news site). RV’s decisive pivot to AI is likely fatal; they will accelerate the descent of all their outlets into a content swill mill fit only for your blocklist.

    is an accelerator.

    “Wikipedia No Longer Considers CNET a "Generally Reliable" Source After AI Scandal”

    https://futurism.com/wikipedia-cnet-unreliable-ai

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @uliwitness @drahardja I haven’t paid attention to them since they hired well-known piece of shit Declan McCullagh.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @uliwitness @drahardja It’s interesting that it’s now hard to find information about Declan from when he was CMU Student Body President, whether the allegations about domestic violence or embezzling student activity funds.

    eschaton, to retrocomputing
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    Has anyone created a Digital Command Language (DCL) parser/highlighter for BBEdit?

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @acf Oh, on VMS itself I’ll use LSE. But on my Mac, I’ll use BBEdit. :)

    TomShafShafer, to random
    @TomShafShafer@toot.community avatar

    Trump committed crimes before, during and after his one-and-only term of service. No one - not even the President of the United States - is above the law. The Supreme Court is assisting Trump in making a mockery of the rule of law by granting a writ of certiorari for such an insane notion as permanent presidential immunity.

    Page 2: A President has to be free to determine what is right for our Country without undue pressure. If there is no Immunity, the Presidency, as we know it, will “no longer exist.” Many actions for the benefit of our Country will not be taken. This is in no way what the Founders had in mind. Legal Experts and Scholars have stated that the President must have Full Presidential Immunity. A President must be free to make proper decisions. His mind must be clear, and he must not be guided by the fear of retribution!

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @TomShafShafer If he wins then the Biden Administration should just order him removed from all ballots. After all, if the President cannot be prosecuted for any crimes then the sitting President can commit crimes with impunity.

    boredzo, to random
    @boredzo@mastodon.social avatar

    @irenes Relevant to past discussions of storing data as bit-patterns on paper: https://archive.org/details/MacUser8604April1986/page/n41/mode/2up?view=theater

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @boredzo @irenes One of the Apple II magazines that punished a lot of listings went all-in on this and had all the software also on the pages that talked about it. I can’t remember if it was InCider or A+, I suspect it was InCider. I thought about maybe asking for it when my family only had an Apple IIc, rather than a second disk drive. (Then the Apple IIgs came out, then I started looking at the Atari ST and Amiga, then I looked into the Mac again…)

    pixel, to random
    @pixel@social.pixels.pizza avatar

    So that was fun.

    Sounded like a freight train was driving through my garage.

    It was my water heater, which had decided to leak from every possible spot.

    New water heater being installed tomorrow.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @GeekAndDad @pixel We got so incredibly lucky that ours just stopped producing hot water. “Hmm, shower’s not warming up. Let’s look at the water heater. Front’s fine, the back is— OH MY GOD!” An entire chunk of the top back had rusted out and was just missing. Meanwhile the sacrificial anode appeared fine…

    BlackAzizAnansi, to random
    @BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

    Jack Posobiec at CPAC: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

    A video of Jack Posobiec at CPAC.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @BlackAzizAnansi The literal definition of “seditious conspiracy.”

    eschaton, to embedded
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    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.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @me_ What do you mean when you say “gdb-multiarch should work” — adding it to the container image myself, or using it via e.g. MacPorts? (Because that doesn’t build on Apple Silicon yet…)

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @rhempel @me_ VMs will be involved anyway since I prefer to work on macOS, but podman takes care of that for me. gdb should definitely still support m68k, after all gcc and binutils do… :)

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    Turns out this is all I really needed:

    FROM ubuntu:23.10
    RUN apt-get -y update \
    && apt-get -y install \
    binutils-m68k-linux-gnu \
    gcc-m68k-linux-gnu \
    gdb-multiarch \
    && apt-get -y clean

    eschaton, to ai
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    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?

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @Lobrien @dgoldsmith We ultimately know that connectionist architecture can excel at this sort of thing because brains exist, not just systems like AlphaGo.

    I refer to LLMs as “fancy autocomplete” because architecturally that’s what they are. They are not a knowledge representation system, they’re statistical regurgitation machines. Even humans require a lot of training before we start understanding cause and effect, relationships between knowledge, etc.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @Lobrien @dgoldsmith I’d say that depends how accurately they actually represent that knowledge and how amenable they are to actual introspection. People engage in reasoning because they’re taught to, and expect because of the “conversational” nature of LLM tools that this is also what an LLM is doing, but it’s doing nothing of the sort. (Otherwise the training would look a lot like an educational curriculum that covers early childhood through graduate school…)

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @Lobrien @dgoldsmith Something like Cyc on the other hand is performing the kind of reasoning that the layperson might expect, but without (necessarily) the conversational interface.

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