Inspired by an offhand comment Alice (@foone@digipres.club) made earlier today: the CGA iceberg
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curtmack
@curtmack@floss.social
mastodon 4.7.3He/him. I program programs and I game games. You may know me from that side project I never finished. I like Lisp.
Creator of the GNU Unifont skunk emoji.
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37 Posts
Joined August 23, 2023
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curtmack.02
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@typeswitch@gamedev.lgbt up there with the Twilight Zone episode about the man who finds a fortune telling machine at a diner that gives generic but seemingly always true answers, and he becomes obsessed and starts asking the machine everything
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@aparrish@friend.camp In fact, these two statements are complementary. "No one ever got fired for using AWS" is, in fact, a major contributor to why so many companies use AWS. The same is absolutely true of AI tools.
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@megatronicthronbanks There's a special circuit on IBM CGA cards so they render low-intensity yellow as brown. Some clones lacked this circuit, so they would display a darker yellow instead. Also, since RGBI was a digital signal, RGBI monitors needed their own brown circuit.
What it's like to be a programmer in Nebraska:
Manager/QA/any non-technical person: "Haha, hey, have you seen this XKCD comic about-"
Me: "Yes. Yes, I've seen it."
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@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io Reminds me of a certain US company whose commercials made the phrase "up to 15% or more" into a meme.
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@soatok also, it's all mutual. The people doing cool stuff you would never think of doing, in turn, would never think of doing most of the cool stuff you do.
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@foone@digipres.club @cyrus@wetdry.world I used to be surprised by things like this, but then I learned about the Remington Model 700.
See, the Remington Model 700 was perfectly fine at firing when the trigger was pulled. But it could also fire when the trigger wasn't pulled, causing injury and death. Remington sold this rifle for more than 40 years, despite knowing of the flaw and knowing a way to fix it... because the fix would have made each rifle 5.5 cents more expensive to produce.
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@lina@vt.social that's the worst part IMO. We get Claude through work and, all environmental and ethical issues aside, I just hate using it. Curating mounds of garbage output from the Screw It Up Faster Machine sucks. But it looks *great* in artificial evaluations with a concrete, machine-verifiable goal. And too many managers don't understand that real world programming isn't just passing a succession of concrete, machine-verifiable goals.
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@sliminality@types.pl I believe it came up in undergrad formal logic, as an example of how inverting a closed set gives an open set. Not 100% sure if it was there or another class.
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@malwaretech reminds me of a short video that was shared with me:
Electrician (holding camera): "Who did you say wired your house again?"
Customer (in another room) "My cousin"
Electrician: "Okay, and when did his house burn down?"
Customer: "Oh, about two years ago... Wait, how did you know his house burned down?"
(As this happens, the electrician is showing that there's 120 volts between the customer's oven and metal countertop, capable of supplying enough current to light a lightbulb.)
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@frameworkcomputer finally, the Framework luggable! What I've been waiting for this whole time!
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@acarsdrama@live.acarsdrama.com always remember the pilot priority list
Aviate (maintain control of the aircraft)
Navigate (determine where you're going)
Debate (philosophical conundrums, pasta-related or otherwise)
Communicate (tell ATC your philosophical breakthroughs)
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@Xibanya@mastodon.xyz Loosely related to one of my favorite jokes:
Jean-Paul Sartre walked into a diner. After taking his seat, a waitress walked up and asked if he'd like anything to drink. Jean-Paul thought and said, "Coffee, please, no cream."
The waitress gave an apologetic look and said, "Very sorry, sir, but we're out of cream. Would you like it with no milk instead?"
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@gloriouscow
Cool!
My earliest computer memories are of VGA and Wolfenstein 3D, so all my knowledge of "real" CGA comes from the Internet. The closest I ever got was playing around with ZZT as a teenager and learning why there were 16 text colors but only 8 background colors (because ZZT forces blink mode).
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@richardstephens@hachyderm.io Also the close cousin of looking behind the couch, "we bought an expired URL"
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@freya@social.highenergymagic.net @foone@digipres.club I mean let's be real. Autoencoders? Look at those curves!
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@Njord There's probably more nuance to be had in terms of *exactly* when AI is more likely than not to break down (e.g. the more complex your code, the more likely it is to write unit tests that don't work), but I don't care *that* much about understanding the Unethical Grift Machine.
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Pretend it is still 2017 and the best we have is a thing that makes weird dreams of dogs.
okay but now that's the only thing I can think about.
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@techokami fun fact: the well-known Super Mario World arbitrary code execution speedrun involves JSRing to $014A13. This address is not mapped by any part of the system, so behavior at this point is governed by bus capacitance and the pattern of data reads as the 65C816 processor fetches instruction bytes.
By sheer coincidence, this results a coherent sequence of instructions that eventually executes the payload instructions, programmed into the X positions of a handful of koopa shells.
"Ana is really close in the breadcrumb dimension"
If RFK Jr. ever has an altercation with a deceased cattle, someone should comment, "I knew he was head of the CDC, but I didn't realize that stood for Cult of the Dead Cow"
On July 17, 1981, two overhead walkways in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, MO collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring 216. There were a number of engineering failures in the construction of the building, but the proximate cause of the walkway collapse was a later change to the design of the walkways. The change seemed innocuous, and the engineer of record didn't see the problem, but it proved disastrous.
This is a post about C compilers and undefined behavior.
I knew Doctors Without Borders was going to say something about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza during Summer Games Done Quick, but *holy shit* they did not fuck around. Glad the GDQ organizers were willing to stand behind it.
I understand that there are editorial conventions for this, and I would like my opinion on the matter to be known, to wit:
1. Those editorial conventions are wrong, and
2. If I read this in an article, I will assume that the writer pronounces it "a mhll language."
Be careful when clicking on brightly-colored links - they are often poisonous!
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@gloriouscow I knew there was *a* brown circuit in the monitor, but wouldn't the card have its own brown circuit for composite out? Or does composite out just use dark yellow?
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@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be @amy@mastodon.fibercut.org
Now imagine you have a C codebase that was developed in Japan. All of the files use Shift-JIS, which your editor doesn't support, so all of the comments are mojibake. You would like to read the comments, so you use iconv to convert them all into UTF-8. This works, except *none of the code compiles anymore*, because the process turned all of the backslashes into yen signs (U+00A5).
Then you give up and never open that project directory again.