flopsamjetsam
Re:81 Jokes for the ZX81
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @07:36PM (#50282465)
I remember seeing ads for the ZX80 in electronics magazines, and losing my mind as a little kid over them. Later on I did an electronics class as a teenager, and the tutor brought in his ZX80. It was amazing to see it in the flesh.
Later on, my friend's older brother had a Spectrum. All the local magazines had photos of the games, and it was incredible to play them and see them "for real". The rubber keyboard with pre-programmed BASIC keywords, later on a full-sized keyboard and some kind of expansion pack (with disk drives I think?). And his older brother showing me how crazy the memory layout for graphics was. Good times.
Re:AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in gradin...
on Sunday October 25, 2026 @03:02PM (#50234925)
I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.
Re:Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
on Sunday October 18, 2026 @09:12PM (#50147207)
https://codeberg.org/TechPaula/LT6502b
Specs:
* 65C02 running at 10MHz
* 46KByte of user RAM
* EhBASIC 22p2 with custom extensions
* eWOZMON
* Compact Flash for storage
* Built in battery (7400mAh currently)
* USB-PD Rechargable
* 10.1" Screen with 1024x600 and 256 colours
* WiFi Modem (based on this - https://github.com/dhansel/WifiModem)
* nanoSwinSID for sound (as well as beeps)
Re:A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @05:43PM (#49999191)
Brings back to mind the old IBM 3270 terminal status line (everything old is new again :). Actually think this is quite a good idea.
Re:The Legend of von Neumann [pdf]
on Friday October 02, 2026 @07:39PM (#49939920)
I'm reading this now, and can confirm it's very entertaining, and gave me more perspective on his life and achievements (coming from a CS background).
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging
on Friday October 02, 2026 @04:48PM (#49938439)
Re:Commit description as a thinking tool
on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:30PM (#49913954)
I sometimes use the AI prompt to do a similar thing: I'm struggling with a problem, or putting my ideas down in a coherent manner, so I write a prompt, and in doing so the idea crystallises for me. I've tried doing this just in a text editor, but there's something about having the next action be "submit this to X" that clicks my brain into higher gear.
I suppose it's very similar to drafting a letter or an email to someone.
Re:1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds
on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:30PM (#49900915)
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released
on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:24PM (#49900836)
My pet project in those days was writing a C++ X-Windows gui toolkit, and I took a lot of inspiration from Tk. Both design, and "how do I do this" from the source code were invaluable.
Didn't Cisco use Tcl in one of their IOSes? Found it: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/ios_tcl/co...
Re:Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @08:46PM (#49824732)
Do you find it a big improvement over the tools you used previously?
Re:Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years
on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @08:41PM (#49824685)
For CS students I agree. For non-CS students, who need programming as a way to use computers as a tool, I think they do need a solid understanding of what a computer does and what it's limitations are (and what it's capable of), but for their day jobs (once they graduate), they will most likely be getting AI to do everything for them. As long as they can reason about what's happening, to understand the results and to improve them, this seems likely to be the path in the future.
Re:Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years
on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @08:38PM (#49824667)
Some unis have: https://programsandcourses.anu.edu.au/2027/course/COMP1730
This is an introductory programming course, designed for non-CS students e.g. engineers and scientists.
> Learning outcomes
> 2. Explain key concepts in AI-assisted programming, including Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting, problem decomposition, and top-down design.
> 3. Apply the workflow of AI-assisted programming and prompt-engineering techniques to guide and improve code generated by AI assistants.
This course used to be non-AI (last year), and they rewrote recently to incorporate AI tools, as they realised the writing's on the wall for non-programmers.
It must be quite challenging to write curriculum when the underlying technology (AI) is changing so quickly.
Re:Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived
on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @06:47PM (#49809363)
So glad to see Filemaker is still alive! I had thought it had gone in one of Apple's software culls years ago.
Re:Science Is Open Software
on Saturday September 19, 2026 @04:14PM (#49769762)
Caveat: I am not a researcher (yet), I am moving from coding into science via a new degree, and along the way I am helping troubleshoot bioinformatics pipelines for scientists.
I see a lot of reliance on containers to make code always available, and I have the same misgivings as you do. It'll work a few years into the future, but what happens once packages aren't compatible with each other/the base container is upgraded/etc.
I've already seen this with older bioinformatics code, which is on old repositories that aren't running anymore, or are very unreliable (but weren't at the time that the code was written). And I'm talking about code that's "only" 15 years old; people will be going to these papers for implementation details long after that point.
Zenodo seems like a good step in the right direction. It should be available as long as CERN is going, shouldn't it? And by that stage it should be "too big to fail".
Re:Science Is Open Software
on Friday September 18, 2026 @11:56PM (#49763179)
> Every result is instantly reproducible. When you read a paper claiming that a new drug reduces symptoms by 30%, you click a link and watch the exact analysis run in your browser. The data processing, statistical tests, and visualizations execute in seconds using the same environment the authors used—preserved perfectly through reproducible containers.
At least some journals have this as a stipulation e.g. https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/r...
Particularly the "data availability" and "Availability and peer review of computer code and algorithm".
However, in my limited experience, of trying to reproduce certain scRNA-seq processing pipelines, in practice it's never available as just a Github link. I can understand that some/many researcher's code is not in good shape, so I think it'll be quite a stretch to have this available.
I do think it's laudable though, to try and make it available. It would certainly have been very useful for me in the past.
Re:Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @06:37PM (#49543545)
My first computer was a Microbee, a Z80-based Australian computer made by Applied Technology. I loved that thing to death, and thank my Mum and Dad for buying it for me, and getting me started in a field that I loved.
My school had a VIC-20, later an Apple II, and an enterprising teacher brought in a Commodore PET.
Later on, my friends had ZX Spectrums, Amstrad CPCs (not sure of the model), and lots and lots of C64s. A few Tandy 1000s and Cocos. I was always envious of the great games that they had.
Re:AWS Acquires DuckDB
on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @04:21PM (#49455309)
LLM to write it, then all the managers just use LLM to summarise it :)
Re:Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
on Sunday August 09, 2026 @03:58PM (#49235178)
> Dan Bricklin's Demo
There's a name I haven't heard in a while. During our undergrad (90s), we used it to mock up UI designs for one of our early courses.
Re:Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @04:56PM (#49102980)
> I'm guessing Google can't make money on them.
The weights are free for non-commercial use. And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.
Edit: after reading the article, I realise it's about the disbanding of the team, so probably your original comment is correct.
Re:Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
on Sunday July 26, 2026 @01:56AM (#49055164)
Yes, it reminds me a lot of the ports between 8-bit computers in the 80s, and also console ports pre-Playstation.
Re:Should you use AI for a task? Here's a simple way to decide
on Saturday July 25, 2026 @07:47PM (#49053024)
An article by Bruce Schneier, on how he frames the question when evaluating his students.
Re:Count Binface
on Monday July 13, 2026 @03:24AM (#48889072)
That is excellent, and explains much!
Re:Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design
on Saturday July 11, 2026 @07:15PM (#48876740)
> CLIC was awful (thankfully it has been abandoned)
Could you expand a little on what made it a bad design? I'm not much up on RISC-V.
Re:Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design
on Saturday July 11, 2026 @07:12PM (#48876732)
I re-took Computer Architecture recently, and we used their earlier book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM edition", and it was also excellent.
Re:RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scr...
on Saturday July 11, 2026 @07:06PM (#48876702)
From the GitHub page:
> It is a Gameboy Advance from a parallel universe where RISC-V existed in 2001. A love letter to the handheld consoles from my childhood, and a 3AM drunk text to the technology that powered them.
Re:TOP500 at ISC'26: We Have a New Number 1 – By George Cozma
on Sunday June 28, 2026 @05:08PM (#48711664)
> We think it is highly likely that these LX2 chiplets are etched using SMIC 7 nanometer processes at the N+3 refinement, and we base that on the fact that the chip only runs at 1.55 GHz. That is nowhere near the 3 GHz that SMIC can push with that process, but it is probably lower to get the memory and core speeds more balanced. [1]
Based on the ARMv9.2.
[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/06/25/a-deep-dive-on-c...
Re:Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions
on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:35AM (#48669788)
I was a programmer, and moved over to biology recently. I was very "wtf is R" when I started, but slowly its strengths are coming through. I found the combination of the REPL plus the IDE, and the language syntax, somehow give me the ability to play around a lot more than I expected. Unlike others, I find tidyverse (especially ggplot2 and dplyr, which reminds me a lot of pandas) to be quite intuitive.
Re:Dirty Little Zine – a tool for making an 8 page printable Zine
on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @02:49AM (#48656114)
I love this, it's like a grown-up PrintShop.
Re:Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design
on Monday June 08, 2026 @04:37PM (#48451605)
That's fascinating, I remember my Dad telling me you would pay for something in guineas as a sort of tip, but I never knew it was for horses (this is in Australia).