Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 50

The Hayes Code - Ernie Smith "Tedium": https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/15987549/early-modem-technology-history

(Classical computing, not classical entertainment)

@felix We thought Go was a sign of intelligence since there's no way a computer could even remotely use the brute-force tricks as it used for Chess.

Now it's evident that the computer did no theory forming for how to play Go, & got beat due to that fact.

I've just updated Haphaestus's website, to highlight what has been done as opposed to what will be done: https://haphaestus.org/

Also I've switched fonts for a bit of branding! Hope you like it?

P.S. If anyone can recommend tools for generating @font-face declarations for a pile of font-files, please do! I'm struggling to find these fonts packaged nicely for the web.

I should add, if you think you really know HTML, I wrote a thing:
https://web.dev/learn/html/

Turns out there might be a lot more to HTML than you might have thought. I learned (and shared) a ton of nuggets along the way, and diligently updated MDN in the process.

#10XEngineer 😜

From there, external interrupts go to some logic that prioritizes the interrupts, decides when the system can handle them (usually at the end of an instruction), and signals the microcode to execute the appropriate interrupt code.

The external interrupt pins each have a circuit to clean up the interrupt signal and synchronize it to the 8086's clock. An input protection diode, inverters, and a two-stage latch. "Superbuffers" built from two transistors provide more current than regular NMOS buffers.

For a software interrupt, this INTR microcode pushes the flags and gets the interrupt handler address from the vector table. Two adds multiply the interrupt number by 4 to get the table address. The FARCALL2 and NEARCALL routines do a subroutine call to the handler.

The 8086 chip supports 256 different interrupts. Each one has an entry in a "vector table" pointing to the code that handles that interrupt. The microcode gets the right address from the vector table and does a subroutine call to that handler routine.

The interrupt circuitry is implemented both in microcode and hardware. Microcode is a layer between machine instructions and the hardware, executing low-level 21-bit micro-instructions. These perform moves, combined with several types of actions: ALU, memory, jumps, etc.

The iconic Intel 8086 processor (1978) set the path for modern computers. Like most CPUs, it supports interrupts, a mechanism to interrupt the regular flow of processing. I've been reverse-engineering it from the silicon die, and I can explain how its interrupt circuitry works.

I’m amused. My speech synthesizer, Mac Voiceover Alex, pronounces “rubble” as “ruble”. I’m going to see if I can correct that by putting an entry in the pronunciation dictionary. #ScreenReader

What's really going on here is the creation of a form that is meant to do one thing: Keep the video playing as long as possible because it's monetized.

It's the monetization of the person who has to keep an audience from leaving while they wait 1 hour for the main act to arrive except the main act never arrives.

Nuke it from orbit.

I've just drafted CatTrap code for computing grid & grid-cell widths! Should be able to finish it tomorrow & test the following day...

CSS layout isn't that bad (despite suspicions of other devs I chat with), & I don't blame what complexity it does have on CSS. Certainly it's under-documented, so a blog post will be warranted.

Should have a basic CatTrap wrapped in a couple days!

@g @jollyrogue @RL_Dane @cobra @alcinnz
And that's not why it's the end goal—once you have exposure, you still have to harness it with for-profit endeavours. But if you don't have exposure, for-profit projects are going to be useless in most cases.

@roytang Strong candidate of a blogpost to link to in my next blogpost serving the silent majority...

@edsu you now have permission to respond with "STFU" to any insolent jabberwocky insisting that you have to follow what the NodeJS/NPM community's deems to be best practices.

JS and its history of use for programming in the large (let's call it "industrial" use) is so much bigger (and better) than whatever kooky nonsense the NPMers have convinced themselves is essential/irreducible complexity.

@edsu I was very pleased when a few years ago I looked at the implementation of the WebKit Inspector (which is on GitHub nowadays) and saw it was basically the same thing: <https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/WebInspectorUI/blob/4e0b016d7ece3a68a7a1c67764dcc9bf8cd8d6b6/UserInterface/Main.html>

@edsu no-build JS setups. So hot right now.

Mozilla figured out how to put JS to serious use before `npm install`* was ever a thing. Of the hundreds of thousands of lines of JS powering Firefox (at least up until I called it quits on my hope that Mozilla would stay out of the gutter ~10 years ago)—mostly just a bunch of script elements and pre-ES6 JSM `import` statements. Very little "build" work in sight.

* or NodeJS or even Firefox, for that matter

@webbureaucrat Very much how I feel, I find GHC (similar language, Haskell) catches most of my problems!

Maybe I'd get through my errors faster if I integrated Hoogle into my code editor...

🔖 Testing JavaScript without a (third-party) framework – alexwlchan https://alexwlchan.net/2023/testing-javascript-without-a-framework/ -