• 2 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • ROMs back then got erased by UV light, EPROM. EEPROMs are a bit newer (though still ancient) and can be erased electronically, nowadays it’s a very sane idea to just throw flash storage at the problem. I think you can get modern replacement for pretty much any ancient form factor.

    The way those things are used are basically big logic tables: Instead of using a bunch of logic gates, you store the output that’s expected given a certain input. Completely ancient technique, the limiting factor is storage space and sensibility – storing all addition results of two 32 bit numbers uses a lot more transistors than a 32-bit adder, but if what you want to put in there isn’t a thing that can be implemented few standard TTL components throwing storage at the problem makes sense even if you never plan to reprogram it because burning a custom set of transistors onto silicon is expensive.


  • Some more technical info.

    It’s an legit 8-bit CPU implemented with TTL chips, what makes it a different beast than what they did back in the days is that its microcoding isn’t kneecapped. It would absolutely have been possible back in the days to build exactly such a thing, even from precisely those components. At least the TTL part, that is, I bet there’s wibbles around VGA etc. And because I already hear the detractors yes, 8-bit CPUs were microcoded: They decoded single external instructions into a stream of “load from memory, fetch from register so and so, switch on the ALU, put what’s in the ALU output somewhere”. They kept it as simple as possible and it wasn’t reprogrammable but that stuff there, that’s microcode.

    Implementing CPUs in TTL chips also isn’t a new idea, that’s how early minicomputers were made (later on they got some specialised chips). And those things also used ROMs for their microcode. So you could say that this is a minicomputer capable of pretending to be different 8-bit microcomputers.

    FPGAs are a completely different technology, those allow you to arrange logic in a (more or less) arbitrary topology. That is, looking at that board with all those TTL chips, it’d be the equivalent of being able to re-route all the board traces as you please.


  • Data after dst+n is unchanged.

    Sure but that means the part before that is garbage because you have a null terminated string without terminator.

    Or at least that’s how I see it. If your intention isn’t to start and end with a null-terminated string you should be using memcpy. Let us not talk about situations where CHAR_BIT != 8 that’s not POSIX anyway.

    Even better, just avoid doing string manipulation in C.



  • barsoap@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@programming.devA Guessing Game
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    23 days ago

    How on earth should a newcomer know that the letter “n” in that word stands for number without having to google it?

    By looking at the difference between strcpy and strncpy. Preferably, though, you should simply learn C before writing C.

    The gist of is is that strcpy takes a null-terminated string and copies it somewhere, while strncpy takes a zero-terminated string and copies it somewhere but will not write more than n bytes. strncpy literally has exactly one more parameter than strcpy, that being n, hence the name. If n is smaller than the string length (as in: distance to first null byte) then you’re bound to have garbage in your destination, and to check for that you have to dereference the pointer strncpy returns and check if it’s actually null. Yay C error handling.

    In retrospect null-terminated strings were a mistake, but so were many other things, at some point you just have to accept that there’s hysterical raisins everywhere.



  • The core is connected up quite intimately to the whole digestive system and when nerves reorganise there it can get funky indeed.

    That said, try hanging. Not necessarily pull-ups… though while you’re at it might as well do some negatives at least: jump up, let yourself down as slowly as possible until you get that rotation in the shoulder and then you are hanging properly. Then stay there, move your legs, explore the load shifts, such stuff. That’s going to tickle nerves that you might never have tickled before, but which need occasional tickling or your whole back gets confused because we happen to be monkeys and hanging from stuff is in our biomechanics, the nervous system expects those kinds of loads. Generally works miracles when it comes to back issues, and core issues are often just reflections of that.


  • I get hot and sweaty and feel like shit afterwards.

    Have you tried swimming? Hot and sweaty definitely won’t be a problem there.

    For the record though I also hate cardio. It’s fine at levels which I can sustain for hours on end, that is, not jogging pace, definitely not interval training, but hiking pace. If you want interval training without grinding your brain field sports might be an option, it’s different when you have teammates and a ball.




  • There is none, it’s all signal politics, shibboleth juggling. The same people also unironically use the term “BIPOC” in a German context without realising that it means Black and say Vietnamese Germans, includes organic potatoes, but excludes e.g. Turkish or Italian-Germans as they’re neither black, indigenous, or “of colour”.

    They simply heard that term online used by their ingroup and now parrot it to signal that they’re part of that ingroup.



  • Borscht as is known all throughout most of the ex-USSR and the world is Ukrainian. The red beet version, that is. The more general term roots in Poland where (even much earlier) it meant a soup with hogweed (hence the name), then sour soups in general.

    Kvass should be safe though, it’s a generally east-Slavic thing, basically low to negligible ABV sour beer from rye. And yes that’s exactly what Russians are drinking anyways, the cola craze after the fall of the USSR was short-lived.

    And just to add injury to injury: Pelmeni aren’t Russian, either. The name is Permic pointing straight to (near) Siberia, it’s thought that Mongols brought the general idea of dumplings from China there on their adventures which also explains the pepper. OTOH that means that the stuff you see in supermarkets, frozen bags of them to throw in boiling water, is 110% traditional (modulo the plastic).



  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlIt's up to you to break generational trauma
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    So if they’re not going to save the world, nothing they ever do amounts to anything. Worse, the whole thing worked (the Zoomer quit Tiktok and they feel better now) so that was obviously bad.

    And now, and please do mind that has nothing to do with age: Your argument is dumb and you should feel bad. In fact the first thing is Boomer talk, the shit they tried to get us with. Fuck that.




  • Me, here.

    Picking on younger generations is healthy and natural: They’re still figuring stuff out and it’s a good way to give some teachings while everyone has a chuckle. What’s not healthy and natural is leaving them with neuroses where silent expectations, judgements, unwillingness to see their side etc. are the usual weapons: Don’t carry a dagger behind your back, doubly so don’t be unconscious of it, instead, open-carry a super soaker.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlYeah, well...
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    8 months ago

    The human body can’t turn dietary fluoride into harder enamel, it has to stay on the teeth, topically, for a while to soak in. As such drinking water is a suboptimal way of going about applying it to teeth. Fluoride in toothpaste is highly effective. Dentists applying highly-concentrated fluoride stuff directly to your teeth even more. In people who actually get their teeth made resilient by such measures fluoridated drinking water has exactly zero impact as the teeth can’t get more resilient, in people who don’t, well, it’s something, a little step. There’s a reason Europe isn’t fluoridating drinking water: We don’t have huge segments of the population falling through the gaps of the health system.

    is cheap AF, and is completely trivial to distribute.

    And if you were Brasil or India that would make sense. The US, OTOH, does not have an excuse when it comes to stingy with more effective measures: You have the resources to do better.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlrazor blades
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    The cherry on top is that this whole ritual is to save someone the hassle of “having to deal with batteries”. The horror!

    You missed the “a quick and dirty [wet] shave is just as good as an electric one” part, didn’t you. In both cases I’m partly scratchy by noon and fully scratchy come evening. A good wet shave will be about as good in the evening as a quick or electric one is once I get to work.

    For most people, all it will become is a lesson in why they preferred the original path of convenience in the first place.

    If the convenient path gives you a result you’re happy with then take it. There’s a reason I put “personal satisfaction” as a step after “for your lover”.

    I don’t even shave that often. But when I do, I do it properly. I also don’t make Ragout Bolognese that often but when I do, I do it properly. If that offends you then I can’t help you, either.