The internet isn’t the same as it was when we were growing up, unfortunately. I miss the days of cruising DynamicHTML while playing on GameSpy but… yeah. It became an absolute clusterfuck and I’m not surprised they now want to enforce age restrictions.
Maybe TBL is right and we need a new internet? I don’t have the answer here, but this one is too commercialized and these companies are very hawkish.
It’s a tough sell considering for many in the West the only idol of worship is money. And the Catholic Church has already rotted itself from the inside when it allowed the mentally unwell homosexuals to continuously abuse children and get away with it.
This person is confused. Trump was a well known pussy grabber for decades. Epstein was anything but a secret, it seems, given how many politicians and celebrities and moguls he rubbed elbows with. Jerry stopping by the island for a lemonade and a spot of lunch with his high school aged girls? Yeah.
It comes down to this: you can have visibility into things and yet those in power won’t care whatsoever what you may think. That has always been the case, it is the case now, and will continue to be in the future.
This is a defeatist attitude. Don't know what bubble you're in but these official revelations are driving real change in mine. It's kind of subtle at this point but it's the kind of change that cannot be undone.
Unfortunately speed often matters when it comes to outcomes. Eg if you get a cancer diagnosis like Jobs, you probably shouldn’t waste a year drinking juices and doing acupuncture.
I imagine PIE chunks that you can kludge into other programs to Frankenstein implementations? Kind of like how mad max cars are made of bits and pieces bolted together
Also I’m not sure if this is well known but Gemini has a nice quiz/test mode that you can use for learning. Ask it to quiz you on a subject and you can increase/decrease difficulty and keep going. I pair it up with textbooks as a learning tool; not in school or anything just for my own enjoyment.
I remember after I read the 1st edition, bought MINIX ($150 !!), and then was very annoyed to find that the compiler source was not included. Luckily it was '89 or '90 and GCC sources were available.
The sursprise comes when you try to compile the minimal book version and find out that it is not as lean as presented in the book but actually depends on hundereds of assembler files (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Minix3/tree/Minix3_Book_TCC).
I’m a tad confused so maybe I’m not understanding the horror show.
Tanenbaum explicitly mentions multiple times that the book is a subset of the code because it would be too long to print with the library. So he covers mostly the main areas.
But the source code, in its entirety, is mounted under /usr/src. And it has all the assembly files in ACK files, mostly in lib I believe. You can compile it with a make command and it works as expected.
The author makes it seem like there’s some terrible thing. Am I missing some gory directory? Yes the ACK syntax would need to be ported over to something more modern like NASM or FASM if someone wants to move the whole kitchen sink, new linker scripts made as a result of exported symbols etc. It is painful but alas, so is the archaic K&R C.
I don’t know if that’s necessary though? It sounds like a waste of time to begin with.
I mean this book is ancient, and nobody really uses 32-bit protected mode. I’m mostly doing it out of curiosity even though I already stood up a small 64-bit long mode thinger.
The author writes in the book explicitly "This is a modified version of config.h for compiling a small Minix system with only the options described in the text". This leaves no doubt that the book indeed describes a working microkernel of less than 15kSLOC which can be built and run (even if the "small Minix" lacks a few features). I blieved the author (like generations of other scholars) until I tried to actually build and run it myself.
> Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem.
I assume you mean because the assembler was manually migrated in later Minix versions, not because there is a tool which can do so automatically. Or did I miss this?
> and a lot of interesting stuff was left out
Can you please make examples what you mean specifically?
Yes, there is a tool called asmconv, that converts.
One example is the new compiler driver that can use ACK and GCC from a single compiler driver and that can automatically convert assembler and figure out which archiver to use to create libraries.
Another example is library support for filenames longer than 14 characters that was completely transparent. MINIX3 just broken all backward compatibility by increasing the size of directory entries to a new fixed size.
I'm sure there is more stuff, these are just a few I remember.
In the coming months I suspect it’s highly likely that HN will fall. By which I mean, a good chunk of commentary (not just submissions, but upvotes too) will be decided and driven by LLM bots, and human interaction will be mixed until it’s strangled out.
Reddit is going through this now in some previously “okay” communities.
My hypothesis is rooted in the fact that we’ve had a bot go ballistic for someone not accepting their PR. When someone downvotes or flags a bot’s post on HN, all hell will break loose.
I think we are about to see much stronger weight given to accounts created prior to a certain date. This won’t be the only criteria certainly, but it will be one of them, as people struggle to separate signal from noise.
It's already happening. For years now, but it's obviously accelerated. Look at how certain posts and announcements somehow get tens if not hundreds of upvotes in the span of a few minutes, with random comments full of praise which read as AI slop. Every Anthropic press release shoots up to the top instantly. And the mods are mostly interested in banning accounts who speak out against it. It's likely this will get me shadow banned but I don't care. Like you, I doubt HN will be around much longer.
Maybe TBL is right and we need a new internet? I don’t have the answer here, but this one is too commercialized and these companies are very hawkish.
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