In around 2002, I got my hands on an old 386 which I was planning to use for teaching myself things. I was able to breathe life into it using MicroLinux. Two superformatted 1.44" floppy disks and the thing booted. Basic kernel, 16 colour X display, C compiler and Editor.
I don't know if there are any other options for older machines other than stripped down Linux distros.
There is something to be said for soldiering through a rough phase. It's not always the right thing to do but below a certain threshold, it's necessary to build some amount of resilience.
Collapsing at the slightest exposure to an uncomfortable situation and having to rely on an extensive support structure that includes a therapist, drugs and other things should not, in my opinion, be the default.
As for Holmes, I read, re-read and practically memorised most of the canon when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Mental health was never one of my take aways. I was fascinated by the intensity of the character and how his work meant so much to him. That the lack of it depressed him might have been something Doyle observed in his patients and decided to use as a foil but I don't think he was "exploring men's mental health" in the stories. He was merely trying to make a believable detective who explains his methods. My feeling is that this is overlaying a 2025 interpretation onto a Victorian tale.
I've seen this. Sometimes, they have curtains. I don't really understand what the point is though. It's definitely not price. I would imagine that it's costlier to add a window to a wall than just to brick it. I thought it was to allow one to watch the TV while taking a shower or a bath. It's the most reasonable thing I could come up with.
It's to encourage e.g. two coworkers to get separate rooms instead of one room with separate beds. The increase in revenue is more than the construction cost.
This is a lovely example of the value of being a programmer.
The leverage the simple (perhaps messy) scripts and code that these tools gave the author is simply incredible. So satisfying to read and a a really great achievement. Congratulations and thanks for the write up.
Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I did know about her till her death though I've played many of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
This is an interesting post. I've been spending time on a hobby project[1] that requires reading some old archives and game asset files. I didn't have to do any reverse engineering since it's already done by others and documented on on the moddingwiki. However, I did implement the algorithms myself to work with the assets.
It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down into and this post makes me appreciate the way in which this kind of forensic analysis is done.
This was an era before my time but the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy does a great job of painting an evocative picture of this era. It evokes a feeling of nostalgia (as in, we missed being in those times) but when you think properly, you see that you still have the same types of opportunities in a field where the frontiers are ever widening.
It's interesting how so many of the early tools were designed to create "communities" (mesg, talk etc.). The semi open nature of the platform really encouraged it too. It's nice to be able to cd into someone else's home directory and look at their files.
The passwords were only if you were connecting over the network. If you were using a directly attached terminal, you didn't need one.
RMS insisted that everyone use their UNAME as their password, but he wasn't widely listened to because the whole reason PWORD came into effect was because turists were getting increasingly destructive. People weren't happy when their mail got marked read (or worse, deleted) because some random from the network had logged in as them simply because they could and did not understand what their automatic login script was doing.
That was only true in very early systems. By the time of the PDP-10, HACTRN will nag you to log in if you run most commands and the gunner would kill off your job after a relatively short interval (the exact interval differed from machine to machine).
ITS had no file permissions, but even before PWORD was installed to keep randoms from the network away there were means of keeping the turists out when the system was to be reserved for Real Work. Other parts of the system that were considered sensitive were hidden behind undocumented commands or program-level passwords - For example, the innards of INQUIR, since the INQUIR database determined who was to be excluded and who was not.
There may have been no file permissions, but there was a definite hierarchy of users that was enforced by other (generally more subtle) means.
One point where, I think, the analogy fails is context.
If one wants to modify a code base, it's necessary to be able to, sort of, load the program into ones head and then work off a mental model. The "slowness" of traditional development and the tooling around it gave people enough time to do this and over time, get really good at a navigating and changing a code base.
With LLMs being able to generate huge amounts of code in a short time, this is missing. The LLM doesn't fully know what it generated and the nuances. The developer doesn't have the time to absorb all that so at the end of the day, you have something running which nobody (including the original AI author) really understands. That's risky.
Of course, there are ways to mitigate and handle this I don't know if the original analogy is missing this.
I'm really curious what kind of background and knowledge the creator of that video would have to develop instincts like that.
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