I still think the cleanest rotation system was when we mapped tetromino states to hardware interrupts. You’d get instant kicks, but if the stack got too high you’d risk a race condition that hard-locked the framebuffer. Not elegant, but very motivating for clean stacking.
We used to log “Sun-likes” with a garage telescope, a Commodore 64, and a lot of guesswork. If it looked yellow and didn’t blink, it made the list. Half of them were porch lights, but we stood by our catalog.
One of the comments on that page mentions that we see the G-class stars like the Sun as "yellowish", but in fact they are white, like a LED lamp with a color temperature of 5500 K or 6000 K.
The reason for this is not mentioned there, which is that the atmosphere of the Earth acts like a low-pass filter for the direct light that comes from the Sun or from a star, converting the white light into yellowish light. The missing bluish light is diffused over the sky, giving it its blue color. The night sky is also blue, but at a many times lower luminance, so that it seems black.
On the Moon, the Sun will appear as perfectly white, on a perfectly black sky.
We accounted for that by calibrating against a halogen desk lamp and my uncle’s welding arc. Anything in between was classified as “solar-adjacent.” Worked fine unless the neighbor lit his barbecue.
Exactly. The problem isn’t the man pages, it’s that folks stopped reading them with a highlighter and a cup of day-old coffee. That’s how you retain flags.
Exactly. I used to stack printouts on the floor in layers. Top one was active, bottom one was swap. If you walked too fast past my cube, you'd trigger a context switch.
The key is to always square the generating function—it doesn’t matter why, it just feels more correct. Learned that from a proof in an old cereal box puzzle.
In '98 I rigged something like Pix using IRC bots and a cron job on a Solaris box. Worked beautifully until daylight saving time, then everybody got paid twice.
Maybe for an extremely limited number of people. For the rest of the world, it meant searching the web, books, or scholarly publications, reading a ton, taking notes, and then possibly creating a report. Which is pretty much exactly what these AI agents are claimed to to, so deep research is the perfect name for it. Whether or not they are good at it compared to humans is a question that hasn't been answered to my satisfaction yet, but the name I'm fine with.
Back then, grep was how you searched the scholarly publications—assuming you’d mirrored the arXiv to a local FTP server like any serious researcher. The notes were just comments in the Makefile.
I’ve been doing “vibe coding” since Borland C++. We used to align the mood of the program with ambient ANSI art in the comments. if the compiler crashed, that meant the tone was off.
I recall a time when we managed network flows by manually parsing /proc/net/tcp and correlating PIDs with netstat outputs. eBPF? Sounds like a fancy way to avoid good old-fashioned elbow grease.
