heironimus (u/heironimus)

heironimus commented on For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf] s3data.computerhistory.or... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

usefulcat · 4 months ago

It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school.

Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive word processor.

But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.

heironimus · 4 months ago

You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.

heironimus commented on For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf] s3data.computerhistory.or... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

syntex · 4 months ago

I bought my C64 very late - around 1991/1992. It was in Poland where I bought a used one from my friend. Back then, Eastern Europe was a decade behind the Western side of Europe. Two years later, I purchased a used disk drive. So, for two years, I could only run cartridges like Boulder Dash (I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games"). But from that boredom, I started programming in BASIC, always dreaming about creating the perfect text based game ;p

heironimus · 4 months ago

Similar to me, but years earlier in the US. The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive. My friends who had one just played games. I had to learn to program instead.

heironimus commented on Reusable rockets are here, so why is NASA paying more to launch stuff to space? arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/rbanffy

heironimus · 4 months ago

This implies that Space X is overcharging compared to launches from 25 years ago, but is cheaper relative to ULA launches from 10 years ago.

But how does, for example, "1998: Deep Space 1 — Delta II rocket — $86 million" compare to "2025: SPHEREx astronomy mission — Falcon 9 rocket — $99 million"? Are they similar payloads? Are the reliability requirements the same? Could there be a reason the Falcon 9 launch costs more instead of less, as we would expect?

The article does mention interesting reasons why some cost more than others such as scheduling, hazardous payload, weight, non-combined payloads, etc., but without addressing each launch individually there is no way to address the headline, "Why is NASA paying more?"

Incidentally, from the data, I don't see any case of them paying significantly more. It's actually about the same, so even that is misleading.

Dead Comment

heironimus commented on Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster astronomy.com/science/ast... · Posted by u/geox

Demlmlm · 7 months ago

It's tracked as debris and not an asteroid.

It was deleted because it's already tracked

heironimus · 7 months ago

So the takeaway I get is that these two databases should be cross linked so this doesn’t happen again. Maybe there’s a community of software developers who could help.

heironimus commented on Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s chuckwnelson.com/blog/goo... · Posted by u/chuckwnelson

heironimus · 8 months ago

I was using ChatGPT to compare Docker and Podman and getting reasonable comparisons. I also asked it about c code searching tools and getting a reasonable list with what I think were reasonable comparisons.

It hit me that in a few years, this may not be available as Docker and other tool suppliers start paying for advertising. We’ll see.

heironimus commented on A neurology ICU nurse on AI in hospitals codastory.com/stayonthest... · Posted by u/redrove

heironimus · 10 months ago

This is the same technology story told thousands of times a day with nearly every technology. Medical seems to be especially bad at this.

Take a very promising technology that could be very useful. Jump on it early without even trying to get buy in and without fully understanding the people that will use it. Then push a poor version of it.

Now the nurses hate the tech, not the poor implementation of it. The techies then bypass the nurses because they are difficult, even though they could be their best resource for improvement.

heironimus commented on Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone ssoready.com/blog/enginee... · Posted by u/noleary

heironimus · 10 months ago

Me: This does not look interesting at all, but its really popular, so I'll quickly skim it. Me, 5 mins later: I can't stop reading this!

heironimus commented on Fraud, so much fraud science.org/content/blog-... · Posted by u/nabla9

throwawaymaths · a year ago

> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science"

Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it.

No, easier to gaslight the idiots

heironimus · a year ago

Exactly. “This is bad because dumb people won’t believe us.”

Not “This is bad because it undermines science, is lying, and unethical, regardless of what people think.”

heironimus commented on Inside a Ferroelectric RAM Chip righto.com/2024/09/ramtro... · Posted by u/chmaynard

heironimus · a year ago

These saved me from a redesign 25 years ago. I had an 8051 with 256 bytes of RAM and a serial EEPROM with limited writes. Replacing the EEPROM with a serial FRAM allowed me to increase the effective RAM. I had to do some tweaking and figuring because it was so much slower. Also, FRAMs had limited writes AND reads, but on the order of billions instead of millions. Billions of reads are a lot, but you still had to be careful.

u/heironimus

KarmaCake day198January 18, 2012View Original