“Password cannot contain username”

“Password must contain digits”

“Password cannot contain reversed misspellings of predynastic Egyptian pharaohs”

And now…

“Password cannot contain JavaScript”

One thing about the pre-Internet times I don’t hear much about is how much more centralised our media were and how, as a result, people or ideas on the fringe of society didn’t get much attention. That includes for instance how the strange ideas about vaccines or ethnic groups now spread much easier than they did before the Internet, but also how trans* people and other marginalised groups find it much easier to find and support each other and be a united front against oppression.

In summary, I don’t thing that what has been termed “the great awokening”, nor the organised opposition against it, could have taken place before the Internet. At least not at this scale.

The tweet wasn’t easily available on nitter (it wasn’t being highlighted).

It just so happened to be the canonical source for this piece of information. And it wasn’t being run by an antisemite at the time the linked tweet was being written.

Exactly. The good kind of failure.

Hyperloop was always a project to sabotage high-speed rail. Good thing it failed.

I have an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and really like the fact that I can just plug in an HDMI cable without resorting to dongles. I don’t notice the extra weight. If you already know that you’re going to connect multiple monitors I’d say go for the M1 Pro.

Easy way to save on power.

A non-recursive recursive descent parser isn’t any easier to reason about.

I had been thinking about doing something akin to the X16 but more modern, but realised that the main challenge with launching a product like this lies not in doing the design, but in coordinating all the people that are involved in producing the hardware, software and documentation (and hype, don’t forget hype). And you’ve gotta hand it to David Murray (the 8-bit guy): he’s knows how to do this, and has demonstrated this before with Planet X3.

It’s weird in the sense that software development has moved in other directions. A tagged-architecture stack machine like the Burroughs Large System is weird as well, even though it’s been highly successful and very influential on later designs (eg. Forth, SmallTalk).

If we’d still be using bank switching and overlays I’d say learning to code assembly on a 6502 is a great introduction to modern computers, but we’re not so it’s not.

Exactly. Something in the spirit of an Amiga 500 (I never had one, so this is not nostalgia speaking) is much more suitable to beginning programmers. Something with a flat address space, an easily memorisable instruction set and rich collection of hardware (blitter, DMA controller, sound generator) to play with. And something that has modern interfaces (HDMI & USB) so the not-so-well-equipped hacker-in-training can also jump in right away.

The Commander X16 isn’t it.

There’s plenty of choices. If you want that retro vibe go for a 68k, if you want something neat but obscure (and are willing to use an FPGA) choose the pdp-11, if you want to go with the flow then use risc-v.

But please pick something that’s not actively fighting modern (that is, not 1970’s) programming techniques.

People would learn bad habits.

For example, due to parameter passing often being done via the zero page, recursion is unnecessarily hard on the 6502, whereas one could argue that recursion is one of the major skills to master for any programmer.

The 6502 was weird back in the day as well, just weird in an ubiquitous way. It’s registers are too small, it’s stack is too small, it’s address space is too small. Argument passing often had to be done using the zero page, and since none of its registers can hold a respectable portion of its address space it requires hacks to implement such obscurities as C-style pointers. No current ABI can trace its origin to the 6502 (not even ARM).

Sure, back in the day the alternatives at the price point were worse, but that doesn’t make the 6502 good.

If you want a good CPU design with a 16-bit address space, take a look at the PDP-11.

Though I really like the concept of building a new device which incorporates the inherent ease of programmability of the computers of yore, I think the 6502 is just too weird and limited for doing so. For example, in order to cram a halfway decent amount of memory into the thing they had to resort to bank switching. At the least they should’ve gone with a 65816 (apparently they tried but they initially had some problems with the '816 address bus multiplexing).

Don’t worry, with media independence being an area of concern for the EU, and with the Digital Services Act in the process of being enacted, we’ll no doubt soon Brussels-effect your biggest media providers into compliance. The rest will follow soon thereafter.

Not YouTube: too controversial. But I wouldn’t put it past him to start his own federated service.

I don’t need to smoke anything, I simply live in the EU where this is commonplace.

This is a bad look for Apple: it shows that there’s basically no editorial independence at Apple TV, something that has been a well-established feature at for-profit newspapers and television channels for decades. This clearly demonstrates that Apple TV cannot be trusted when it comes to serious news.