pacman128
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1 day ago
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on: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?
pacman128
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6 months ago
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on: A gentle introduction to CP/M
Fun fact, George RR Martin still uses the MS-DOS version of Wordstar for his writing.
pacman128
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1 year ago
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on: Why making friends as an adult is harder
Look into the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. I'm a recently retired atheist and moved to a new city. My wife was brought up UU and they welcome all beliefs. We started attending services at a local fellowship a month ago and have been welcomed and are starting to make some friends there.
pacman128
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2 years ago
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on: A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916
This Philby story (father of the infamous double agent Kim Philby) is a key plot point in Tim Powers' book _Declare_. It's a mash up of a John le Carre spy novel with Lovecraft. One of Powers' best novels.
pacman128
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2 years ago
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on: The Netwide Assembler (NASM)
No, I'm not actively working on it. If I ever find the time, I might update it to 64-bit.
pacman128
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2 years ago
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on: The Netwide Assembler (NASM)
pacman128
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2 years ago
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on: The Netwide Assembler (NASM)
Nice to see NASM is still going strong. I used this for a class I taught back in the 90's. The class supported both Windows and Linux (but most students used Windows) and NASM supported both and was free.
I ended up creating my own free online textbook for the course. It's sorta out of date now since it was for 32-bit processors.
pacman128
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2 years ago
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on: Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Paul Carter here. Yes, as someone already replied. It's online. I would have liked to update it to 64-bit, but I jumped to industry and don't have the time to do a decent job of it. I didn't realize that Randall had a 64-bit version out. I'm sure it's very good. We both used to hang out on comp.lang.asm.x86 back in the 90's.
pacman128
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3 years ago
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on: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
_Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms_ by James O. Coplien
It showed me how to really use C++ effectively back in the 1990's. It was at the time in a class by itself. (Pun intended).
pacman128
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3 years ago
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on: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
rec.arts.sf.written was the one I was referring to.
pacman128
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3 years ago
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on: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
I just recently started looking back at one of the groups I frequently read years ago and found that there was a small community still using it. Even recognized a few of them. The trolls and spammers were gone.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: John Roach has died
Really sad to hear this. The TRS-80 Model I was the first computer I ever owned in high school. I spend many, many hours programming on it. Taught myself BASIC and Z-80 assembly language on it. Definitely was a major factor in my professional life.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
I taught college CS for 10 years before moving to industry. Cheating wasn't a huge problem, but I did run have some issues.
Gave a makeup exam to one student with an altered programming problem than the original exam. The student answered the original problem, not the one on the exam they was given. That made it very clearcut.
I also had a written requirement that students must be able to explain their homework programs to me. Had a few that couldn't explain what parts of "their" own program was doing.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Feynman on group decision-making at Los Alamos (1985)
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Long Now Years: Five-Digit Dates and Y10K-Compliance at Home (02013)
It's actually the prequel, 'A Deepness in the Sky', that has this. Both very good books.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: A submarine's weakness: its software?
I thought the same at first. I worked on the Air Force AWACS E3 (
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...) program as a contractor in the 2000's. It had dual IBM-360 computers and wireframe-like graphics for their radar displays at the time. This was the Block 30/35 version. It looks like from the link that they may have completely transitioned to the Block 40/45 version which replaced the 360's. They were talking about this move when I worked there 16 years ago.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How Do You Learn?
Completely agree. I usually start with a trivial step and then build from it. Keeping notes on paper, in a markdown doc or jupyter notebook as appropriate is also useful. I have notes that I still look back at to remind me of details of areas I haven't used in a while.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Is π the Same in Every Universe?
It's definitely a type of Platonism. The question isn't how hard it is, but if it's possible at all.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Is π the Same in Every Universe?
I'm not talking about physical measurements. How do you make a simulation that makes the sum of 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ... not equal to 1.0? It really comes down to whether math is universal. Maybe it's not, but I certainly don't see a trivial way to simulate this.
pacman128
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4 years ago
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on: Is π the Same in Every Universe?
We can't make a simulation that changes the result of infinite series. They were computing pi, not measuring it. This wasn't changing the curvature of space, it was changing math itself.
