Notices by Charlie Balogh (chainq@mastodon.social)

@mntmn @andreasdotorg "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ... and by extension I guess "Any sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from wizardry."

@nixCraft None. We need a record of all of our mistakes, to prevent them happening again... Or at least happening again too often.

@mntmn It gets better, but never reaches the level of the older shows. S1 is the weakest, but both it and S2 has some good episodes. Sadly it feels like, Archer is written very inconsistently as a captain. Season 4 is my favorite, it contains a lot of 3-4 episode story arches, that are awesome. Season 3 is praised by a lot of people, and it's a single story arch, but it's not really my cup of tea.

@mntmn @SoniEx2 Does it work in BE mode? That's usually the big thing with JIT engines, if they make hardwired assumptions about endianness. Especially web stuff is guilty in thinking everything they need to care about is little endian. I think you run the ZZ9000 in LE mode, too, no?

@SoniEx2 @mntmn I'm not aware there's anything like that exists. If there's one written in somewhat portable C, that could probably be compiled. Or we need to write one in Pascal... 😉

"Look Ma! No hands!"

Free Pascal Compiler outputs a working WASM binary on AmigaOS, with no external tooling/dependencies. I doubt anyone has ever tried this before (maybe Marcus Sackrow, my partner in FPC-Amiga crimes did?), but it works, first try.

Experiment on request/idea by @mntmn.

#webassembly #pascal #amiga

@mntmn In theory, yes. I never tried it, but I could... And fix it if it doesn't work. 😅 But in theory (with some caveats), on any platform which can host a native compiler - and Amiga is one of them -, can be used to run any sort of cross-compiler builds too. It won't be fast, but should be usable.

It all depends what kind of external tooling it needs. But I think we mostly did our own tooling, because external tools were too dependent on "what LLVM does".

OK, lets check. Now I'm curious. 😅

@mntmn Free Pascal has a webassembly target, mostly with our own tooling, IIRC. And it runs 68k hosted (Amiga/Linux), if needed.

WASM works very differently to any "regular/real CPU" assembly. It's a stack machine, which is mostly good for compilers with SSA or some sort of a binary tree internal representation. It's not even recommended that you write it by hand...

Calling it "assembly" was the biggest marketing stunt ever, IMO, to gain the cool factor... But this is a story for another day.

@mntmn I knew it from the mid-90s as: "Windows is an ancient Native American word, it means "White Man Sits In Front of Computer Looking at a Hourglass" "

Meanwhile, other systems are improved to this level too... 😁

@mntmn I think the reason for this is that the Fediverse isn't a good marketing tool for traditional companies, unlike Instagram, or X, or Facebook even. There is no algorithm feed to hijack and get you go viral. There is no one to pay money to someone to shove your stuff down people's throats.

It needs a lot of consistent work and good values, to stand here on good terms with a community that is mostly consist of very conscious consumers. It's hard.

A Reform laptop serving as router for a Macintosh IIcx, 10Base2 power! Setup by @vkoskiv, the Reform is apparently his daily driver! Spotted at #68kinside, cc: @mntmn

#m68k #demoscene

@mntmn I wonder if any of these high-end non-Apple ARM chips will be available for "mortals" to buy and design hardware around, or this will just remain yet another walled garden.

@nixCraft I like how he was told to ... promptly leave.

@mntmn In about:preferences#home, under "Shortcuts", switch off "Sponsored shortcuts"? Just a guess... No idea how to make this default in Debian. 😅 Probably you can add it to some default setting to the default user...

@mntmn We need a whole operating system with TTD aesthetics. And why Google Maps doesn't look like this.

@amigalove @metin True, I'm younger (mid-40s) and Europe, especially the former East-Bloc where I'm from lagged behind a few years, and that adds up. My first Amiga was an A1200 indeed, but I think it's objectively a very pretty machine.

Wedge shaped home computers might be very similar, but tiny changes can make them stand out. The Falcon is the best looking by far from the wedge Atari ST lineup, and all they changed was the color of the case and the keycaps...

@amigalove @gklka @metin This. Good summary. And basically how the A2000 put together everything to basically "define" the big box Amiga going forward.

It standardized the Zorro II and CPU expansions, the video slot, yet especially the later US design that was based on the A500 chipset was a relatively simple design, that made it very reliable. It provided a blueprint and testing ground for a lot of expansions and machines that came after it.

@amigalove @metin I think the best looking Amiga is clearly the Amiga 1200. The 4000T can be also impressive, just because of its sheer size. But I admit, I'm more of a 90s design kind of person, when it comes to computers.

I'm also very fond of the A2000, especially because of it's unassuming workhorse look. But the engineering in it is beautiful. There are pretty machines with a lot of problems (A3K *cough*), and then there is the "ugly" A2000, that will just go and go and go...

@mntmn To me these AI pictures and videos have some grotesque, dream or nightmare-alike vibe. Which is fair. Both are generated by a neural net detached from reality trying to process data it accumulated. On a related note, do androids dream of electric sheep?

@mntmn @spaceraser @Truck I'm not sure Amiga's history explains why people still stick to it. Yes, the system is built in elegant ways, it is lightweight, flexible, feels very modern despite its age. It has a lot to teach to an engineer.

But - as with most retro platforms - the fact it still has an user base these days, is more a cultural and a social phenomenon with a big blob of added nostalgia, rather than a matter of technology or history, IMO.

(Yes, what I mean is "fly, you fool". 😅 )