ttgurney

Looks like quite a lot of marketing put into this open-source project. Heavyweight glossy website with trendy TLD, emojis everywhere. Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in particular? Seriously asking.

I'm trying to figure out what they are selling me, or what megacorp they are associated with, but I don't see it yet.

Based on the Zombocom reference and general lack of details, this must be a joke, but I don't get the joke. Is it meant to be a parody of something else?

And why not postal mail, for maximum novelty?

Aside, I wonder which CPU is emulated. A real 8086/8088 (for example) will behave differently than a modern x86 CPU that is running in real mode.

> They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice.

Serious question: are these languages actually controversial? Doesn't "controversy" usually mean people holding strong opinions and frequently disagreeing? I rarely hear anything at all about Pascal or Visual Basic. Maybe they were controversial in the 1990s? Now I'd call them merely unfashionable.

My first open-source contribution was a two-line patch for a bug I found in Eclipse while at work.

Eclipse is known as a Java IDE, but it also provides a widget toolkit and other libraries for developing desktop GUI apps. At the time I was working on a team that had a huge desktop app built on top of Eclipse.

The bug I found was pretty trivial; it was something related to incorrect sizing of one of the widgets in some corner case.

The process was a bit of a pain relative to the size of the change. I had to write a test case, sign a CLA (per Eclipse project rules), and of course one of my four different bosses had to review the change and sign off on it.

At the time I was a junior engineer still eager to prove myself, and I figured all of this effort would be worthwhile just so I could say I got a patch into a major open source project. Nowadays I wouldn't bother with so much process, and certainly wouldn't sign a CLA. Would rather work on my own projects. At most I might send a patch out to a mailing list.

I'm really grateful for Michael Forney's work on this project since I found it a good resource for getting a variety of popular packages to build statically.

I ended up starting my own statically-linked Linux distro, but with some creative differences like shell scripts (vs Lua scripts) and package management. I recently "finished" it (close enough anyway) to the point that I run it as my daily driver.

Not trying to plug my project (it's not public, not yet anyway) but if anyone wants to discuss this sort of thing (distro creation and static linking in particular) and compare notes via email, I'd be happy to.

Speaking from my experience so far as an "adult learner": yes, it's brutal. At least, tournament chess is. Online play is easy for me not to take so seriously. But when I get up on Saturday morning to go to a tournament and spend all day there, and I am writing down every move, and I'm face-to-face with my opponent, the whole thing is a lot emotionally weightier. I've found that I dislike losing and that I experience empathy for my opponents when they lose to me. My favorite games that I've played have been draws.

I spoke a bit with an older and much more experienced player I know about this. He said the only thing that worked for him was to completely stop caring about winning and losing, and to let go of seriousness about the game. His idea was that chess is supposed to be fun; fun is the whole point. Improving is nice, but why bother if the process is not enjoyable in itself? Been thinking a lot about this since then.

I got the DIY edition of this a few months ago and have been using it continuously since then. Nice piece of hardware and I'm glad I bought it. Only big thing missing for me is user-modifiable firmware. Combine this thing with the Coreboot and neutralized Intel ME of Purism's products, and I would have no reason to use anything else. Currently this has a typical proprietary EFI firmware and no legacy BIOS support, which I wouldn't expect most people to care about but I find it a bit annoying.

I've also had some issues with the CPU temperature consistently pushing into the 90s when running big multicore workloads. Not sure why. Rather than look into applying new thermal paste or whatever, I just turned off Intel turbo boost, this is of course a performance hit but it keeps the whole thing very cool and improves battery life.

Hey thanks for your perspective and a couple of mentions of software I'd not heard of (like tcpclient).

I agree that curl is pretty big and bloated. I would not call it a deficiency that Links et al. don't depend on it.

I mostly just was thinking that since I already have curl on my system, it'd be nice to have a browser that reuses that code. Especially since curl has upstream support for the much smaller BearSSL rather than depending on OpenSSL/LibreSSL.

Oh I'm sure the actual work to compile those packages is not much. It's more to do with keeping the number of packages on my system to a minimum.

Actually I would not be surprised if the JavaScript engine can be omitted with just a little bit of patching work... assuming there's not actually a build configuration that leaves it out. I've found that with some software projects and their dependencies, "required" does not always mean required.

I look forward to seeing your 1st release of this program!

> Anyways, if there's a moral to this story it's that writing a browser engine is surprisingly fun, so go for it :)

Good to know. I'd been fairly intimidated by the idea.

I'll 2nd the code quality. I dug into the Mines code a while back as I wanted to use its puzzle generation algorithm to throw together a text-based version of the game. This turned out to be very easy to do.