jsrcout

As a budding young computer geek and mildly OCD person I always hated the non-square pixels. As far as I recall, square pixels just didn't exist at the time. Maybe at Xerox PARC or somewhere.

They never quite looked right, and making pixel graphics was a bit of a hassle since your perfect design on graph paper didn't look the same on screen, etc, etc, etc. I mean it wasn't life-threatening, just a tiny source of never-ending annoyances.

My Macintosh 512e (one of the early "toaster Macs") had square pixels and it was so great to finally have them.

And not only that, our sensors can return spurious data, or even purposely constructed fake data, created with good or evil intent.

I've had this in mind at times in recent years due to $DAYJOB. We use simulation heavily to provide fake CPUs, hardware devices, what have you, with the goal of keeping our target software happy by convincing it that it's running in its native environment instead of on a developer laptop.

Just keep in mind that it's important not to go _too_ far down the rabbit hole, one can spend way too much time in "what if we're all just brains in jars?"-land.

Wow, tried this in a VM and absolutely love it. Besides the nostalgia factor, there's just a concreteness and visibility to the UI elements that feels like it's been lacking in Linux desktop environments for a long time. Thinking about putting it on my home PC for a while. Might even throw caution to the wind and install it at work :-)

Late to the party but OMG this is possibly the greatest tech news discussion page of all time. Not just hilarious and impressive, but so many fantastic ideas / weirdly believable news items from the future! As an old fart software developer I've been slowly dipping my toe into the AI pool, I may have to just dive in!

Finally, a use case for AI that we can all get behind :-)

Yep. The Curse of Knowledge is a real thing.

Reading (someone else's) code is a whole lot harder than writing it. Which is unfortunate because I do an awful lot of it at work.

But will the smell be in 3D?

I know someone whose sense of taste was ruined by a small stroke. He said basically everything tastes like old gym socks now. That would suck so bad.

Now, either (except, of course, to himself).

Getting a "not available in your state" page, does anyone have an archive? I've only recently tried out fil-c and hope to use it in some work projects.

Firefox profiles have worked really well for me for years. I only have two complaints. (a) I like to configure my tools, and setting prefs via user.js has just never really worked - anything there is ignored. Probably it's just because of my particular setup, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could [edit:] share common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make it a feature, and it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.

Absolutely.

From my own experience, Think Pascal was fantastic for the time. MPW was serious and high-powered stuff for pro development on a late 80s/early 90s microcomputer; used it professionally for 2 or 3 years and loved it. Never tried the other ones you mentioned.

As you say, it's incredible how slick and sophisticated those systems were, given the hardware of the day. I mean sure current IDEs may be preferable but we're also using 4 Ghz systems these days instead of 40 Mhz or whatever.

Same here, scroll bars are literally the one missing feature keeping me from making Ghostty my daily driver. But the release notes roadmap mentions they will add them for 1.3. Waiting with anticipation.

I've always set controls like an airplane stick - "pull back" to look up, "push forward" to look down. And could never get the hang of the opposite mapping. It literally never occurred to me that it was like aiming your physical eyes up and down. Sigh.

I'm pretty similar. It's my hope that programmers as such will remain in demand long enough for the majority of people currently doing it for a living to finish out their careers. Though I may be too optimistic about that. And I expect that people just coming into the field will have a much tougher time of it.

I really feel for the newer folks coming in. Writing software is pretty much all I've ever wanted to do, and I've been fortunate enough to make a decent career of it. But our jobs, like every other one, will be automated away sooner or later, and the astounding pace of progress in AI and robotics indicates rather "sooner".

The real question is what happens when there is just no more need for humans to work jobs. What are they going to do? Because tech trillionaires sure aren't going to provide a universal basic income for everyone out of the goodness of their hearts.

> it should be easy to reassemble the components in a different way

An underappreciated value. I call this composability and it is one of my primary software development goals.

  > 3. The FDAI's signals are more complicated than I described above. Among
  > other things, the IMU's gimbal angles use a different coordinate system from
  > the FDAI, so an electromechanical unit called GASTA (Gimbal Angle Sequence
  > Transformation Assembly) used resolvers and motors to convert the
  > coordinates.

I'm so glad I work in software.

I love this so much.

Depends on who wrote it. My own Perl code, and plenty I've seen, is extremely clean and readable; sadly, a lot isn't. I'm sure clean and readable C++ exists, but the stuff I have to work with - big codebases with tons of history - is not. "Terrifying" would be more apt in most cases.

I work with a lot of embedded and embedded-adjacent software, and even I think several of these rules are too much. Having said that, Holzmann's rules are from 2006, and embedded / space qualified hardware has improved quite a bit since then. These days planetary probes run C++, and JWST even uses JavaScript to run command scripts. Things are changing.

I aliased ls to ls -A ages ago. While of course this doesn't solve any specific problems, it keeps one much more aware of what all's floating around in your home directory dotfiles.

Same thing in my small WV hometown. Gorgeous building, too.

"In the Apple II ROMs, I even stuck in my own floating point routine. It wasn't incorporated into the BASIC, but I just didn't want the world thinking I couldn't write floating point routines." -- Steve Wozniak [0]

[0] https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/07/03/steve-wozniak-v-step...

I'm not clear on which Apple II ROMs (INTEGER BASIC or Applesoft ROM, or both) he's referring to.

I worked at place in the late 90s where that was true, at least for anything Internet related. We were doing (oh so primitive by today's standards...) Web development and it happened so many times. I'd call downstairs and they'd swear DNS was fine, and then 20 minutes to half an hour later, it would all be mysteriously working again. But only if we called down heh heh.

On an unrelated note, one of the folks down there explained the DNS setup once and it was like something out of a Stephen King novel. They'd even been told by a recognized industry expert (whose name I sadly can't remember any more) that what they needed to do was impossible, but they still did it. Somehow.

They really were great folks, they just had that one quirk but after a while I could just chuckle about it.

In my experience people use it to mean "old crap that we can't get rid of (yet)".

Composability is a sadly underrated concept, at least for code with a longer expected lifespan. A lot of good things fall out from keeping one eye on it while designing / developing / maintaining.

> We had three architects who spent their time finding near future problems and making sure they didn't happen.

I want this.