jlarcombe

Used to write all meeting notes by hand to help me focus on the meeting and actually retain information. Fell out of the habit but must get back into it! Definitely helps especially if it's not a topic that's naturally gripping to me.

Very good. Full details of the development of Test Cards J and W here, which I read years ago and thoroughly enjoyed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100123102758/http:/www.barney-...

Also, Richard Russell's page here:

https://www.bbceng.info/Designs/designs_reminiscences/richar...

who did the technical work.

The thing is, vinyl (and tape) typically can't reproduce waveforms like that accurately, so it's difficult to compare. You can take a hyper-compressed master, cut it to vinyl or record it to tape, then play it back in to a computer, and it'll look different and less "brickwalled".

yes, they mostly use a digital delay, although some mastering houses still have a reel-to-reel equipped with an extra 'preview' head that gives the required lookahead for the lathe without any A/D conversion in the audio path.

Hah this is getting worse and worse

A depressing thought that all that work is just so you can "command AIs better"

before Affinity was a "loss leader" for Canva, it was a profitable suite of applications in its own right

Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.

Apart from the bit where he was hospitalised for "full manic psychosis", you mean?

If you think this is anything like working with a bright junior developer then i simply can't understand why.

Do you not find that depressing and sad? Do you never work with enthusiastic and talented junior developers at the start of their careers? Do you not enjoy interacting with them?

I enjoyed that too when I was a youngster but there are good reasons why it is impractical for day to day work.

FidoNet was great fun. Despite finding it difficult to remember any useful numbers in my life (credit card, NI etc) I can still remember my FidoNet addresses from when I was a youngster.

I'm not sure how I'd feel about an archive though, I'm sure I wrote a lot of childish nonsense on it! like a lot of things, perhaps best left as a happy memory...

it's fascinating / astonishing

How on earth does this count as "clean room" in any way, when many open-source Z80 emulators will without doubt have been part of its training data?

I am bound to say that turning to another large language model to seek some insight into the original output is unlikely to convince those of us for whom it is all completely meaningless and devoid of anything other than purely academic interest.

I struggle to see anything good or interesting about any of this. "Here's a conversation I had with a large language model and here's the completely uninteresting artwork that resulted."

Reading through the comments, perhaps I'm missing something. It continues to fascinate me that 80% of people are just bowled over by this stuff as if it's something genuinely profound, and 20% are just left completely cold.

Saw it in the British Library a few years ago. Hopefully the new owner is as generous with loaning it out to public museums as the current one.

Agree totally. Reminiscent of the Paul Erdös reaction to the proof of the Four Colour Problem.

It's been quite good reading these comments because a lot of them have put into words my own largely negative feelings about the AI ubiquitous hype, which I have found it hard to articulate. Your second paragraph, and someone else's comment about how they are attracted to computer science because they like fiddly detail and so are uninterested in a machine hiding all that, and a third comment about how so-called "busy work" is actually a good way of padding out difficult stuff and so a job of work becomes much less palatable when it is excised entirely.

The other thing I find deeply depressing is the degree to which people are thrilled (genuinely) by dreadful looking AI art and unbearable to read AI prose. Makes me think I've been kidding myself for years that people by and large have a degree of taste. Then again maybe it just means it's not to my taste..

Yes I remember your comment to that effect on the last thread that touched on this topic! From memory I think I was ten years after you and either I had different expectations or the course had changed radically because I had a much more positive experience.

the Oxford joint schools degree was called "Mathematics and Computation" for many, many years

Extremely enjoyable place to visit. Unique and intriguing atmosphere within.

yes it's hard to understand why people feel the need to do this and I worry it's just going to become ubiquitous and ruin everything

There are quite a few of these on the Victoria line, one next to my friend's house and it is really really noisy!

To this day I miss the way RISC OS handled focus, window/app activation, file loading and saving, menus, and the three-button mouse.

yes. it's absolutely horrible looking.

yes, surely a good approach, and as you say the performance is likely to be fine given the vast increase in raw speed since the old days...

Don't think Pi 5 can run 'supervisor code' (in old ARM language) in 32-bit mode, so RISC OS surely won't run. The bulk of it is written in assembler so reworking it to AArch64 would be an epic task. Probably take no longer to rewrite those bits in a higher-level language, for much of it.

the author explains his reasons in considerable detail in the article...

Not a single useful thing? A complete waste of time? Really not anything that you found intriguing or thought-provoking for its own sake? I did the same course nine years later and found it very stimulating, even if it wasn't always directly "applicable" so to speak. But perhaps the syllabus had changed a bit by then.