simmons

Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!

A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places like Whole Foods) and nobody else seems to be doing this.

Yes, the latest chips were very expensive back then, and out of reach for most people who would continue buying new computers with older chips. (As opposed to how most people today buy an iPhone or a Mac or whatever with the latest semiconductor technology.) I got my 25MHz 386 in 1991, over two years after the 486 was announced, and I had one of the fastest computers of anybody in school... for a short time.

I was excited earlier this year to discover that Micron (Crucial) was manufacturing 64GB DDR5 "laptop memory" modules, allowing me to pick up a couple in early September to build an ASUS NUC VM server with 128GB of RAM. It was a little hard to get even then, but I found a vendor selling it at a reasonable price.

It worked out so well that I decided to get some more. Needless to say, it went from unavailable to being available for double the price. Now, I guess it won't be available at all in the future. :(

When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.

I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person.

I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.

I would love to hear your other theories!

I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the released source, once an LLM model is trained on it, then someone else could quickly and easily have the LLM generate a new program that implements the novel solutions. Whether this is a problem or not may depend on the motivations of the developer, but this potential for IP laundering may very well begin influencing the licenses and methods of distribution that people choose.

(Of course, I suppose at some point AI will be able to analyze and learn from binary executables or obfuscated source...)

2002 Honda Accord. An immensely reliable car that is built to last, and is inexpensive to maintain.

Neat! I sometimes play around with the idea of reverse engineering and transcompiling a tiny game that I think was probably written in Turbo Pascal 4.0. Maybe 4.0 supported optimizations, but this program seems to have been compiled in a debug mode. (At least, it seems to have no optimization, and has the default {$S+} stack overflow checking at the start of every function.) The lack of optimization makes it (and perhaps other programs written in Turbo Pascal) a really attractive artifact to experiment with transcompiling. When I realized that only the first segment was the actual game, and the other three segments corresponded to standard units used for I/O (etc.), which could be harder to analyze, I realized I could just omit those segments and replace them with new functions suitable for the transcompilation target. Maybe some day I'll get around to finishing it.

Good luck!