Monday, September 07
Daily News Stuff 7 September 2026
Fantasy Dimension Edition
Disclaimer: An enigma and a mystery in meso-American history.
Fantasy Dimension Edition
Top Story
- Your Roku TV now offers AI slop for free! (Engadget)
Never mind the quality, feel the width!
- Your LG TV is spying on you. (Notebook Check)
For once this is not even overstated.
Tech News
- Flock taught cops how to surveil "No Kings" protesters. (404 Media)
Just follow the trail of bloodied victims and looted bodegas?
- Microsoft has announced a stripped down version of Windows 11 for AI developers. (Tom's Hardware)
It requires only 64GB of RAM and 250GB per second of memory bandwidth.
- A look at the retro tech making a comeback. (Tech Crunch)
Now that AI has eaten all the real tech.
- Behold the website that never asked, "are we the assholes?" (The Verge)
Yes, The Verge. Yes you are. You are all the assholes.
- Today: Finished hammering Ada into alignment with Ruby (you won't believe this one weird trick), extended my home computer emulator with a tile and sprite editor, a wavetable editor, a music tracker, Forth, and local networking, and it's still under 64k, and built the application server of the suite.
Plus I bought an asset library of tiles and sprites for low-resolution adventure games - the tile size is 8x8 pixels, perfect for a retro look.
The tileset is 800MB. The computer I'm emulating doesn't have even 800kB.
Speaking of which, my initial design allowed for 128k of ROM. The Atari ST, which came a little over a year later, had 192k, and the Amiga had 256k - although neither one shipped with working ROMs; you needed a boot disk. So that seemed reasonable.
I've so far shoehorned in a Basic interpreter, a Basic compiler, a full screen editor, an assembler/disassembler, the above listed modules, and now Logo, and I'm just shy of 64k.
That second one needs a little explanation. That's not a sprite editor. That's a wavetable editor, custom-designing a sampled sound, that you can then feed into a 3MHz DSP while varying parameters to produce complex effects.
I did the math; it was genuinely possible in 1983 with some trickery; the Apple IIgs had it in 1986.
After shoving in a couple of forgotten display modes (512-colour half-res pixel switching and four-colour text) the ROM has hit 65,289 bytes. I think we can call it there.
Imagine BASIC 1.0, as it stands in the ROM: 104 keywords, 54 functions, 46 errors, 78 Forth words, 64 Logo words, 1,024 characters, 65,289 bytes of the 131,072 the ROM socket carries — which is five 32k×8 parts and a little logic, on a bus ten bits wide. Figures measured from the assembled image, not estimated, and every picture taken from the emulator at that build. Every colour on this page is a colour the machine can display.
- Well, crap. Ruby uses half-open intervals and Ada uses closed intervals.
No it doesn't!
The first big incompatibility in my compiler suite and it's not something I can resolve without breaking compatibility or programmers' minds.
No it doesn't!
Let me look up a reference on how other people resolved this p... It says that Ruby's default intervals are closed, exactly the same as Ada.
That's what I've been trying to tell you!
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: An enigma and a mystery in meso-American history.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:24 PM
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