ahefner (u/ahefner) - Readit News

ahefner commented on Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch theverge.com/news/845400/... · Posted by u/tortilla

raw_anon_1111 · 3 days ago

Buy an AppleTV.

Google devices are out because they are developed by a advertising company.

The Roku CEO outright said they sell Roku devices below costs to advertise to you.

ahefner · 3 days ago

Apple is already sending spam notifications for stupid bullshit like that F1 movie.

ahefner commented on Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price finance.yahoo.com/news/or... · Posted by u/pera

jeffbee · 9 days ago

It's a statement of my experience in the performance achieved in practice by real developers who lack dedicated language support teams. And even the ones who enjoy dedicated language support teams. I could point to gRPC. gRPC-Java is slapping gRPC-C++ sideways. Why is that? Because when a codebase is increasingly complex, the C-style lifetime management becomes too difficult for developers to ponder, and they revert to relying on the slower features of the language platform, like reference counting smart pointers.

I think hybrid implementations, where a project enjoys the beneficial aspects of the language runtime at large, but delegates small, critical functions to other languages, makes sense. That keeps the C, C++, or Rust stuff contained to boundaries that are ponderable and doesn't let those language platforms dictate the overall architecture of the program.

ahefner · 9 days ago

If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.

You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.

ahefner commented on End of an Era erasmatazz.com/personal/s... · Posted by u/marcusestes

AndrewDucker · 6 months ago

This feels quite sad.

Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems to have not just made games.

He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for what he was making.

Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a shame.

ahefner · 6 months ago

He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.

Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.

ahefner commented on Show HN: My self-written hobby OS is finally running on my vintage IBM ThinkPad github.com/joexbayer/Retr... · Posted by u/joexbayer

joexbayer · 8 months ago

Appreciate your response! Will have a look at 16by16 fonts.

ahefner · 8 months ago

The 8x16 font from the Atari ST's hi-res mode is pretty slick if you like something bold and a little futuristic. https://github.com/ntwk/atarist-font (or rip it directly from the ROM)

ahefner commented on The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility markbessey.blog/2025/04/1... · Posted by u/rbanffy

kragen · 8 months ago

I used the p-System on a Heathkit H-89.

I think the overall approach of future-proofing your software by compiling it to a simple, portable virtual machine is valid. Since the p-System, in addition to the JVM and Zork Z-machine mentioned in this post, we've seen Smalltalk-80, PostScript, Open Firmware aka OpenBoot, Glulx, the ASS/400, the Open Software Foundation's ANDF (the architecture-neutral distribution format), Google's NaCl and pNaCl, Microsoft's CIL, JS as a compilation target, WebAssembly, uxn, and the revival of old video game consoles in emulation as a stable software target.

A problem with this approach is that most of these portable platform layers are still far too unstable for reliable archival; even video game emulators face a constant struggle to maintain compatibility as they are updated to keep up with whatever platform they're running on. Platforms like the JVM, which make more concessions to efficiency than MAME, have even more difficulty, so the JVM's slogan of "write once, run anywhere" was widely mocked as "write once, debug everywhere". But it's a good aspiration. I'd like to see it realized in a practical way.

My memory of the p-System is that it was almost unusably slow, a problem made worse by its filesystem being so simple it didn't support fragmentation, so sometimes you had to defragment your floppy disk in order to write new files onto it. It's true that its UI was screen-oriented, as wduquette said, and it was driven by a Lotus-1-2-3-like menu system, which enhanced its usability quite a lot.

Being a pure bytecode interpreter was a serious handicap, especially on the sub-1-MIPS machines we were running it on. EUMEL managed to make a go of it. I never got a chance to use EUMEL on an actual Z80, but I hear it was usably fast; I suspect the EUMEL virtual-machine instruction set (which included string operations) and operating environment went a long way towards compensating for the slowness of bytecode interpretation, much as Numpy does on CPython today.

I suspect you could have done a better job with a bytecode more like Dalvik, designed for efficient JIT compilation by leaving less work for the JIT compiler. But Deutsch and Schiffman didn't publish the first JIT-compilation paper until a few years after the p-System was released. (Schiffman told me a self-deprecating joke about this which I guess I can't really repeat.)

Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay published a paper on designing a very simple virtual machine for such digital preservation 10 years ago: https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf

I think these ideas point the way to achieving the kind of future-proofness that the p-System was shooting for.

ahefner · 8 months ago

Not ideal, but MS-DOS seems to me like the most practical universal software platform. DOSBOX isn't going anywhere.

ahefner commented on Why Every Programming Language Sucks at Error Handling blog.aiono.dev/posts/why-... · Posted by u/kugurerdem

ahefner · 9 months ago

There's still a few Common Lisp features the mainstream would benefit from ripping off. Relevant here is the condition system. Conditions and restarts are still foreign enough that it's hard to explain to people why the "debugger" was a fundamental part of the lisp machine UI, and how much sense that made, and harder still to fathom how you'd adapt that to Unix, where it would morph into some kind of weird IPC tied into the command shell.

It's not just about being able to stop your program and hot-patch code to recover from errors - this should be trivial in any dynamic language. Rather, it's about being able to composably control how to recover from exception conditions (or, really, any branching behavior) both interactively and programmatically in a unified framework.

ahefner commented on An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot downtowndougbrown.com/202... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

mras0 · a year ago

Rev5 "full" 060 (not EC/LC). Quick capture of crappy methodology: https://imgur.com/a/XwQ1Tnp (PCR with revision number is in d0)

ahefner · a year ago

Today by, way of your screenshot, I discover Asm-Pro. Just got into Amiga recently (by way of receiving one from my uncle's closet..) and have been meaning to backfill my shameful lack of 68k asm knowledge. Thanks!

ahefner commented on iTerm2 critical security release iterm2.com/downloads/stab... · Posted by u/tjwds

saagarjha · a year ago

No, it's just that you're exceptionally rude.

ahefner · a year ago

Probably true, but it still stings that this dubious piece of software (speaking as a former iTerm2 user still holding a grudge) had been spraying my passwords and random terminal activity all over the internet in the form of unencrypted DNS requests for who knows how long, deliberately, due to mindless opt-out featuritis on the part of the developer. In my mind this is one of the clearest violations of privacy and information security I've been directly subjected to, because the developer had some gee-whiz-neato idea of highlighting URLs in a terminal and making them clickable.

It pains me to think people are still exposing themselves to this class of risk because of whatever iTerm2's latest and greatest idea is.

ahefner commented on Conscious unbossing robertwalters.co.uk/insig... · Posted by u/gpi

asielen · a year ago

In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers.

Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers.

Senior management never faces any accountability but can make big massive changes to an org without consideration for implementation.

ahefner · a year ago

Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck) to defer this cycle for even a year or two.

Depends what you mean by senior management, of course. I'm thinking mostly the "VP / SVP of Engineering" type role, and to a lesser degree, one hop down, the "Senior Director" folks, who seemed to be subject to the same phenomenon but on a slightly slower cycle.