blippage (u/blippage)

blippage commented on Amiga Linux (1993) groups.google.com/g/comp.... · Posted by u/marcodiego

blippage · 2 months ago

I did see Debian on YT being booted up on an Amiga. It was, to say the least, a painful-looking experience. It seems sacrilege in a way. If you're going to use an Amiga you might as well use AmigaOS.

Amazingly, Aminet is still up-and-running with frequent uploads.

https://www.aminet.net/

I contributed a package to that once.

I also made an animation on the Amiga, "Sadistic Circus". A circus dog jumps through a hoop a few times, then gets set on fire. What a sick, sick little puppy I am. I submitted it to a PD disk collection one time.

The dog was an image I got off of a magazine disk, which I mucked around with to create my animation.

Pretty rubbish really, but whatever. Happy days.

Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be -- source contested

blippage commented on Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate github.com/ziglang/zig/pu... · Posted by u/Retro_Dev

blippage · 2 months ago

I tried Zig some time ago to use with microcontrollers. It has a generator for the pins, which was nice. But subsequent versions broke as Zig changed syntax. So I started going down the rabbit-hole (it needed a newer version of llvm, for example) until I eventually decided that the game wasn't worth the candle.

The fact that another breaking change has been introduced confirms my suspicion that Zig is not ready for primetime.

My conclusion is to just use C. For low-level programming it's very hard to improve on C. There is not likely to be any killer feature that some other contender will allow you to write the same code in a fifth of the lines nor make the code any more understandable.

Yes, C may have its quirky behaviour that people gnash their teeth over. But ultimately, it's not that bad.

If you want to use a better C, use C++. C++ is perfectly fine for using with microcontrollers, for example. Now get back to work!

blippage commented on Implementing a Forth ratfactor.com/forth/imple... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

blippage · 3 months ago

I've messed around with Forth before, and even created my own one. I could do cool things with it, and gotten a DSL-like language.

I used words like IMMEDIATE and POSTPONE to create words that create words. I quickly get lost doing that, though.

Forth is very very cool to play with. Pragmatically, virtually any other language is better.

blippage commented on As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook hamatti.org/posts/as-a-de... · Posted by u/ingve

mosselman · 3 months ago

Thanks for pointing this out. In the same vein there are so many posts about productivity systems where people put endless amount of time into crafting their gtd notebooks with tabs and lists, etc. All that time spent to be productive instead of actually being productive. Or people describing their ideal Obsidian work flows instead of actually noting anything useful down in it. People writing about how they built their own blogging engine because their particular way of blogging is so unique that they had to hand-roll something. All that time spent on building a blog rather than blogging. (I've been there too).

I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.

blippage · 3 months ago

As some wag on Reddit put it, "Digital Note Taking Systems: Cutting and pasting your life away, one note at a time."

blippage commented on Yes-rs: A fast, memory-safe rewrite of the classic Unix yes command github.com/jedisct1/yes-r... · Posted by u/ericdiao

blippage · 3 months ago

A few days ago I had the very foolish notion of trying to learn assembly for x64 Linux. It came out to 73 lines of code and weighs in at 288 bytes. It doesn't support the --help or --version arguments.

https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/cerbo/-/blob/master/x64-asm/0...

Some people seem to revel in assembly, but I now know why C exists.

blippage · 3 months ago

As an experiment I tried

yes | pv > /dev/null

and was getting about 5.4GiB/s

On the fasm code, I was getting a meagre 7.3MiB/s. Ouch! The non-assembly version is considerably faster. I wonder if it is because I make a syscall for every write I want to perform, whereas C uses buffering, or something.

blippage commented on Yes-rs: A fast, memory-safe rewrite of the classic Unix yes command github.com/jedisct1/yes-r... · Posted by u/ericdiao

alberth · 3 months ago

             Lines of Code
  yes (GNU)        50
  Yes-rs        1,302  (26x more)

The cost benefit analysis on this will be interesting given this is 26X more code to manage, and could also introduce a whole new toolchain to build base.

blippage · 3 months ago

A few days ago I had the very foolish notion of trying to learn assembly for x64 Linux. It came out to 73 lines of code and weighs in at 288 bytes. It doesn't support the --help or --version arguments.

https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/cerbo/-/blob/master/x64-asm/0...

Some people seem to revel in assembly, but I now know why C exists.

blippage commented on German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal politico.eu/article/germa... · Posted by u/Tomte

jxjnskkzxxhx · 3 months ago

If powerful people were afraid they would be a lot less unhinged.

blippage · 3 months ago

As Bill Burr said, if we were to eat just one billionaire, then all the rest would tow the line.

blippage commented on German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal politico.eu/article/germa... · Posted by u/Tomte

blippage · 3 months ago

Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability. It is actually a "good" thing as a legal principle because it's the the employer who has all the dough and is most able to compensate for a wrong.

The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the game.

My view is that more people need to go to jail. Corporations would behave less like sociopathic institutions if this were done.

blippage commented on The Future of Flatpak lwn.net/Articles/1020571/... · Posted by u/dxs

blippage · 3 months ago

I'm currently using Slackware current. I use an approach of compiling from source or using AppImage. Things like Flatpak and Snaps are an opaque black box to me.

I have AppImages for things like Zoom, KeePass and LibreOffice. I don't need to keep updating them. They do what I want them to do. I have them on a separate partition. If I reinstall my system they're all ready to go out of the gate.

It's ridiculously simple.

I did try out Fedora awhile ago, but decided it wasn't for me. Why is everything a Flatpak? Just use the repo mechanism.

blippage commented on Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life johnnydecimal.com... · Posted by u/debone

Beestie · 6 months ago

Its a beautiful system but where my head explodes (and has been exploding for 4 decades) is over the following scenario.

So in Johnny's system, I assign 21 to automobiles. My VW van gets 21.1, my Citron is 21.2, etc. and the insurance for each car gets a .8 so 21.1.8, 21.2.8, etc.

And I assign 13 to Money. Insurance belongs under money so 13.5 is insurance and life insurance gets 13.5.1, E&O insurance gets 13.5.2, etc.

I also need a top folder for Medical for doc visits, vaxes, ER visits, Surgeries, the kids' allergies and stuff.

So where all this is going is two months later, where is the health insurance policy? Is it under medical or under money? Is the car insurance under Automobiles or Insurance under Money?

Back to my head exploding - this is my issue - I can never remember which branch of the tree to find a specific leaf? Does my annual car tax belong with the Money or with the Auto branch? If I want to see the tax for all the cars at the same time, I put it under Money - Taxes - Auto but when I need to know the last time I paid the tax on the VW, I will assume its filed under Auto-VW-Car Tax.

This is why I can never find anything. All due respect to Johnny but I'm too retarded to use it properly.

blippage · 6 months ago

I have set up a Zettelkasten, which alternates between letters and numbers.21a5 is for my Alcatel 3085 mobile. So it's a similar idea, I think.

Classification is a vexing problem I've tried to grapple with.

The Dewey Decimal system is a really good example of people trying to get a handle on it. It's not easy. "Arduino Cookbook" is in the Electronics section (621.3810285536 to be precise, although the decimal system doesn't usually get that crazy in its specificity), whilst "Getting Started with Arduino" is in 005.133, more that half a library apart.

As one commentator put it, a book is rarely about one thing. People have criticized the Dewey system, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare their bright shiny new wheel to be the solution.

Except, of course , they skip over the same fundamental problem that Dewey had: books don't really fit into a taxonomy.

One solution which may work for small personal systems is to not bother to use a hierarchy. Put car insurance in one folder, then file all folders alphabetically.

Getting more sophisticated, if you have a hierarchical system, consider indexing. I found an old address book that I had lying around. Add entries into that. Sure, entries won't be in strict alphabetical order, but hopefully you won't have a system so big that you can't find anything.

Indexing is "the" solution, because you don't have to try to figure out where in the taxonomy something is. You just look it up. Indexing also allows you to construct different "views" of a subject, thereby allowing you bypass taxonomic choices.

Being a computer geek, you could keep an index file on computer. You can then simply grep it.