okay just rebooted
it was so bad that it couldn't keep up with TTY
@iska They don't exist. These cosmic masons are just processes that you haven't kill -9'd yet.
@m0xee @iska This is exactly why I don't run btrfs.
@p@fsebugoutzone.org @m0xee@social.librem.one you reminded me to do a btrfs snapshot
@realman543 @iska @m0xee One of these days I either going to port fossil to non-FUSE Linux or I'm going to get the fuck out of Unix entirely.
@p@fsebugoutzone.org @realman543@annihilation.social @m0xee@social.librem.one every day I yearn for the latter :darkness:
@p@fsebugoutzone.org @m0xee@social.librem.one @realman543@annihilation.social 
is unix, just moreso. You know I'm not a fan of that
@iska @m0xee @realman543 It's not Unix, but even if you think it's basically Unix, when I say I'm dumping Unix, this means dumping Linux/BSD for Plan 9.
@iska
What did you expect, giant distributed microkernel-based LISP machine running exclusively on NUMA-enabled Itanium cores? 🫠
@m0xee @iska @realman543
> What did you expect, giant distributed microkernel-based LISP machine running exclusively on NUMA-enabled Itanium cores?
I may as well douse my computer in gasoline, unplug all the fans, and sacrifice my eyebrows so that I can huff the rare-earth minerals for enlightenment.
I'm more likely to boot to a Forth environment on a Z-80 than a microkernel LISP on an Itanic. One of those brings with it the promise of at some point performing I/O.
> What did you expect, giant distributed microkernel-based LISP machine running exclusively on NUMA-enabled Itanium cores?
I may as well douse my computer in gasoline, unplug all the fans, and sacrifice my eyebrows so that I can huff the rare-earth minerals for enlightenment.
I'm more likely to boot to a Forth environment on a Z-80 than a microkernel LISP on an Itanic. One of those brings with it the promise of at some point performing I/O.
@p
> Forth environment on a Z-80
That shit I came up with was somewhat hard to challenge, but you did! Respect! 😂
I'm just poking @iska for fun — pretty sure that it would be something more practical (but still unusable by the standards of a normal human being)
@realman543
@m0xee @iska @realman543
> somewhat hard to challenge,
Is it? I spend a lot of time thinking about living in a Forth environment on an old-timey chip.
> somewhat hard to challenge,
Is it? I spend a lot of time thinking about living in a Forth environment on an old-timey chip.
@p
Strange that you don't own a PowerMac G5 rig then — having Forth right in OpenFirmare sounds cool if you're into that thing. To be honest, to me it's in the same category LISP is in though — something fun, but impractical 😅
As for Z80: https://oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112620912045955111
To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.
@p
To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did. I don't know how my parents did that, but I had a 80386-based computer when not every Soviet research instutute had PCs like that. And it was US-made — not the CPU, the whole box — a few kidnes got sold somewhere along the way probably 😂
@realman543 @iska
@m0xee @realman543 @iska
> I don't know how my parents did that, but I had a 80386-based computer when not every Soviet research instutute had PCs like that. And it was US-made — not the CPU, the whole box
Ha, wow, that's kind of amazing. Do you remember any specifics about the machine? Like, make/model?
The first computer I really owned, the first one that was mine, that was a 386, but assembled piece by piece, kind of a garbage pile computer that I kept swapping parts into and out of. The computer I'm using right now is the "same" computer, though it's the Ship of Theseus.
behold_the_ship_of_theseus.png
> I don't know how my parents did that, but I had a 80386-based computer when not every Soviet research instutute had PCs like that. And it was US-made — not the CPU, the whole box
Ha, wow, that's kind of amazing. Do you remember any specifics about the machine? Like, make/model?
The first computer I really owned, the first one that was mine, that was a 386, but assembled piece by piece, kind of a garbage pile computer that I kept swapping parts into and out of. The computer I'm using right now is the "same" computer, though it's the Ship of Theseus.
behold_the_ship_of_theseus.png
@p
I think I might be able to find some manuals it came with, but I have to dig pretty deep in my bookcase 🤔
The computer itself is long gone — I've also started upgrading mine with found and "donated" parts, at some point the PSU got fried and I couldn't afford a new one, so I donated the whole computer to my high school — I could use it there with their PSU. It wasn't a bad machine at the time, not the latest-greatest, but a 486 already with only the original case remaining — no one was against it as hardware in classrooms was even worse. But as the rest of the classroom were diskless machines booting from the network, this is where real fun began — mine had an HDD and could use removable media, eventually a friend of mine found an exploit for the NetWare they were using — no one was ever updating it: Internet wasn't yet a concern, machines were booting from the network and all files were written to and read from a network storage. We took complete control over the network!
I made a tiny TSR that was causing funny graphics glitches and that I could activate remotely, I've added it to a boot image the machines were using. People were genuinely panicking when that stuff started happening while they were doing their assignments and teachers were clueless too — it did look like the computers were malfunctioning. OMG, that was fun!!! 🤣
Our informatics teacher was the head teacher of school and she eventually started realising that we took over the network, but we were good in covering tracks and as it wasn't destructive — even compared to stealing balls from mice, we never got punished.
Now that I think about it, it was probably having access to technology earlier than my peers in my formative years, but not having things that were common is what got me into marginal CPU architectures 🤔 Same was with Macs — no one around me was using them, I don't think they were popular outside of publishing houses, but I was eager to embrace something non-Intel. Digital was on its deathbed already with SGI soon to follow, Sun was doing relatively well — you could find hardware from all of them at universities, but neither were even remotely affordable.
@realman543 @iska @m0xee
I think I might be able to find some manuals it came with, but I have to dig pretty deep in my bookcase 🤔
The computer itself is long gone — I've also started upgrading mine with found and "donated" parts, at some point the PSU got fried and I couldn't afford a new one, so I donated the whole computer to my high school — I could use it there with their PSU. It wasn't a bad machine at the time, not the latest-greatest, but a 486 already with only the original case remaining — no one was against it as hardware in classrooms was even worse. But as the rest of the classroom were diskless machines booting from the network, this is where real fun began — mine had an HDD and could use removable media, eventually a friend of mine found an exploit for the NetWare they were using — no one was ever updating it: Internet wasn't yet a concern, machines were booting from the network and all files were written to and read from a network storage. We took complete control over the network!
I made a tiny TSR that was causing funny graphics glitches and that I could activate remotely, I've added it to a boot image the machines were using. People were genuinely panicking when that stuff started happening while they were doing their assignments and teachers were clueless too — it did look like the computers were malfunctioning. OMG, that was fun!!! 🤣
Our informatics teacher was the head teacher of school and she eventually started realising that we took over the network, but we were good in covering tracks and as it wasn't destructive — even compared to stealing balls from mice, we never got punished.
Now that I think about it, it was probably having access to technology earlier than my peers in my formative years, but not having things that were common is what got me into marginal CPU architectures 🤔 Same was with Macs — no one around me was using them, I don't think they were popular outside of publishing houses, but I was eager to embrace something non-Intel. Digital was on its deathbed already with SGI soon to follow, Sun was doing relatively well — you could find hardware from all of them at universities, but neither were even remotely affordable.
@realman543 @iska @m0xee
@m0xEE @iska @m0xee @realman543 Ha, that's a shenanigan.
I was reading "Stealing the Network" and there was a clever prank, a bored admin would take over someone's tty remotely. What people would normally do is type some crazy message, but he would just watch their typing speed and when they were typing really quickly, he'd just occasionally hit backspace once, like they'd missed a key. Drove people crazy, they'd replace keyboards and move to different machines. (It is fictional, but some of the stories sound a little less fictional.)
> Digital was on its deathbed already with SGI soon to follow, Sun was doing relatively well — you could find hardware from all of them at universities, but neither were even remotely affordable.
Ah, I picked up a lunchbox SPARC for about $10. Had a Boeing asset tag scratched half-off, that ws a lucky thing about being here in LA: all the aerospace companies and JPL are here, and they all need a lot of computers. So if you stopped by a surplus store near their offices (or stopped by the dumpster behind their offices) you could usually get a full workstation for almost nothing, as long as you could deal with "State of the art...15 years ago." You probably remember, though, that a 15-year-old workstation was still usually better than a top-of-the-line desktop system. Eventually (~2002 or 03) got my hands on a 2-CPU UltraSPARC, 24" monitor, Type-5 keyboard and...no cables. So it took me months to track down a cable that would fit the Sun monitor. In the mean time, I had a little 90MHz Pentium sitting on the floor next to it, I booted a LOAF distro designed for serial terminals: it would boot directly into minicom. So I'd talk to the Sun machine like that.
I was reading "Stealing the Network" and there was a clever prank, a bored admin would take over someone's tty remotely. What people would normally do is type some crazy message, but he would just watch their typing speed and when they were typing really quickly, he'd just occasionally hit backspace once, like they'd missed a key. Drove people crazy, they'd replace keyboards and move to different machines. (It is fictional, but some of the stories sound a little less fictional.)
> Digital was on its deathbed already with SGI soon to follow, Sun was doing relatively well — you could find hardware from all of them at universities, but neither were even remotely affordable.
Ah, I picked up a lunchbox SPARC for about $10. Had a Boeing asset tag scratched half-off, that ws a lucky thing about being here in LA: all the aerospace companies and JPL are here, and they all need a lot of computers. So if you stopped by a surplus store near their offices (or stopped by the dumpster behind their offices) you could usually get a full workstation for almost nothing, as long as you could deal with "State of the art...15 years ago." You probably remember, though, that a 15-year-old workstation was still usually better than a top-of-the-line desktop system. Eventually (~2002 or 03) got my hands on a 2-CPU UltraSPARC, 24" monitor, Type-5 keyboard and...no cables. So it took me months to track down a cable that would fit the Sun monitor. In the mean time, I had a little 90MHz Pentium sitting on the floor next to it, I booted a LOAF distro designed for serial terminals: it would boot directly into minicom. So I'd talk to the Sun machine like that.
@m0xee @realman543 @iska
> Strange that you don't own a PowerMac G5 rig then — having Forth right in OpenFirmare sounds cool if you're into that thing.
:apple_inc::blank::sun:
:virginbody::sf2vs::chadbody:
> the same category LISP is in though — something fun, but impractical
I have used both languages for actual work.
> https://oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112620912045955111
I paste that into the search box and cannot see the post here. The administrator's avatar is a picrew furry with red streaks in its hair. I click on the link and there are people that I will never talk to having a conversation about chips. They not only would not willingly have a conversation with me, but if they heard that you were having a conversation with me, they would not talk to you. I look at what they are saying and how they are saying it and I cannot relate to them. Every message I try to read in the thread has a "content warning" and I have to click "Show More". One of them has the opinion that a fun chip should "die"; I've heard what these people have to say about me. I click a couple of the other ones. They're listing their opinions, and I don't really have a personal relationship with them so I don't wonder what they think, and they use a grating cadence that reminds me of work emails written by a middle manager that wants to sound fun, or a corporate Twitter account. People that hate me and want to prevent me from reading their posts do not like a thing that I think is fun, and they require a lot of clicking on "Show More", so the thread can't even be skimmed, and their writing isn't even entertaining.
It was a depressing link to click on; even the sadposters around here seem upbeat by comparison: the sadposters are young and they are figuring things out and sometimes that makes you feel aimless and depressed on top of the usual nonsense that comes with being alive that they are not yet accustomed to. These people, though, are bitter, and are hating on chips that cannot affect them any more, they have spent most of the words in their bio on what sort of people they hate and the other half on rules that you must follow to interact with them. They have walled themselves off from the "bad" people and they think this is some sort of punishment rather than a mercy.
> To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.
I do have some loose Z80s, Zilog's logo and everything, but I didn't have a Z80-based computer per se; I have spent a lot of time with the Game Boy, though. The Game Boy and the Game Gear and the NES (6502) and the ubiquitous TI-83 and a very large proportion of the arcade games. The Z80 also appeared in the Texas Instruments graphing calculators that basically every kid in the country used. It was as ubiquitous then as the ARM is now.
The Z80, 6502, 8080, and the custom chips in the game consoles, those overlap significantly, just a handful of instructions different, almost all binary-compatible, so it's a piece of computing history, one of these pieces of technology that were so widespread that they have come to represent an era, like the DEC VT100 or MS-DOS on an 8086.
And anyway, not just that, but the instruction set is basically all you need for Forth. If you sit down and do a Forth, you can really feel it, this clunky chip opens all the way up.
> Strange that you don't own a PowerMac G5 rig then — having Forth right in OpenFirmare sounds cool if you're into that thing.
:apple_inc::blank::sun:
:virginbody::sf2vs::chadbody:
> the same category LISP is in though — something fun, but impractical
I have used both languages for actual work.
> https://oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112620912045955111
I paste that into the search box and cannot see the post here. The administrator's avatar is a picrew furry with red streaks in its hair. I click on the link and there are people that I will never talk to having a conversation about chips. They not only would not willingly have a conversation with me, but if they heard that you were having a conversation with me, they would not talk to you. I look at what they are saying and how they are saying it and I cannot relate to them. Every message I try to read in the thread has a "content warning" and I have to click "Show More". One of them has the opinion that a fun chip should "die"; I've heard what these people have to say about me. I click a couple of the other ones. They're listing their opinions, and I don't really have a personal relationship with them so I don't wonder what they think, and they use a grating cadence that reminds me of work emails written by a middle manager that wants to sound fun, or a corporate Twitter account. People that hate me and want to prevent me from reading their posts do not like a thing that I think is fun, and they require a lot of clicking on "Show More", so the thread can't even be skimmed, and their writing isn't even entertaining.
It was a depressing link to click on; even the sadposters around here seem upbeat by comparison: the sadposters are young and they are figuring things out and sometimes that makes you feel aimless and depressed on top of the usual nonsense that comes with being alive that they are not yet accustomed to. These people, though, are bitter, and are hating on chips that cannot affect them any more, they have spent most of the words in their bio on what sort of people they hate and the other half on rules that you must follow to interact with them. They have walled themselves off from the "bad" people and they think this is some sort of punishment rather than a mercy.
> To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.
I do have some loose Z80s, Zilog's logo and everything, but I didn't have a Z80-based computer per se; I have spent a lot of time with the Game Boy, though. The Game Boy and the Game Gear and the NES (6502) and the ubiquitous TI-83 and a very large proportion of the arcade games. The Z80 also appeared in the Texas Instruments graphing calculators that basically every kid in the country used. It was as ubiquitous then as the ARM is now.
The Z80, 6502, 8080, and the custom chips in the game consoles, those overlap significantly, just a handful of instructions different, almost all binary-compatible, so it's a piece of computing history, one of these pieces of technology that were so widespread that they have come to represent an era, like the DEC VT100 or MS-DOS on an 8086.
And anyway, not just that, but the instruction set is basically all you need for Forth. If you sit down and do a Forth, you can really feel it, this clunky chip opens all the way up.
@p @realman543 @iska
It must be the instance, nothing sad about that thread in particular, it's a provocative post about Z80, but being a self-proclaimed hot take — it's supposed to be.
Or that account for the matter, I've never seen anything political there, it's purely technology-oriented. But anyway, here it is.
@m0xee @realman543 @iska
> It must be the instance, nothing sad about that thread in particular,
The things I described are depressing, they were from that thread. Those people are depressing. The two people in the screenshot you posted depress me. The first post in the screenshot, that is the post that depressed me, I quoted it. The rest of the thread depressed me. I'm not doing a bit or a shitpost, those people depressed me. Please do not take it personally, as I do not think you could have anticipated that those people would seem depressing, but those people depress the shit out of me, so I'd rather stop discussing them. Thank you, friend.
> I've never seen anything political there,
Check the bio.
> It must be the instance, nothing sad about that thread in particular,
The things I described are depressing, they were from that thread. Those people are depressing. The two people in the screenshot you posted depress me. The first post in the screenshot, that is the post that depressed me, I quoted it. The rest of the thread depressed me. I'm not doing a bit or a shitpost, those people depressed me. Please do not take it personally, as I do not think you could have anticipated that those people would seem depressing, but those people depress the shit out of me, so I'd rather stop discussing them. Thank you, friend.
> I've never seen anything political there,
Check the bio.
@p
> I have used both languages for actual work.
Sure, both are viable, but despite not being new it's not like they are becoming household names… ever at this point, they are now "meme" languages, sure choice when you need a marginal language in a joke — that's what I mean by placing them in the same category, despite them being different.
@realman543 @iska
@m0xee @realman543 @iska
> they are now "meme" languages,
Well, you say this, but I wrote an ad-hoc assembler in a Forth a couple of years ago because it was faster to fire up a Forth and look at a chart and emit the instructions I needed than to track down an assembler that would handle the weird shit I was doing and also run on my machine and then get it to compile. 30 minutes: program's done, blob's produced, anyone else would still be stumbling through search results and reading the README in someone's Github repo to see if it even targets the right chip. It's wonderfully expressive, the code comes out compact and readable, and if you're doing a "real" Forth on a small system, you can save a lot of memory: 40 or 50 bytes of opcodes turns into three two-byte addresses.
All the way on the opposite side from bitbanging on tiny machines, I have embedded stack-based languages in applications to use as DSLs for scripting. One of these was just internally facing, but it cut the length of most of the endpoints to two lines, one to extract/escape the user-supplied parameters and one to invoke the little runtime with the generated program and get the results out.
It's not even rocket-surgery stuff, it's easy stuff to do if you've done it once, but if you think it's a meme, you won't try it the first time and it's a tool you'll never have.
Same goes for Lisp; I've used it less often but it's a nice language. (Lisp-1s like Scheme, anyway; I don't like the separate function namespace stuff CL does.) I wouldn't wanna use Lisp as an entire environment if I could use Forth, but it'd be serviceable.
...Not on Itanium.
these_things_are_real_i_do_not_make_them_up.png
> they are now "meme" languages,
Well, you say this, but I wrote an ad-hoc assembler in a Forth a couple of years ago because it was faster to fire up a Forth and look at a chart and emit the instructions I needed than to track down an assembler that would handle the weird shit I was doing and also run on my machine and then get it to compile. 30 minutes: program's done, blob's produced, anyone else would still be stumbling through search results and reading the README in someone's Github repo to see if it even targets the right chip. It's wonderfully expressive, the code comes out compact and readable, and if you're doing a "real" Forth on a small system, you can save a lot of memory: 40 or 50 bytes of opcodes turns into three two-byte addresses.
All the way on the opposite side from bitbanging on tiny machines, I have embedded stack-based languages in applications to use as DSLs for scripting. One of these was just internally facing, but it cut the length of most of the endpoints to two lines, one to extract/escape the user-supplied parameters and one to invoke the little runtime with the generated program and get the results out.
It's not even rocket-surgery stuff, it's easy stuff to do if you've done it once, but if you think it's a meme, you won't try it the first time and it's a tool you'll never have.
Same goes for Lisp; I've used it less often but it's a nice language. (Lisp-1s like Scheme, anyway; I don't like the separate function namespace stuff CL does.) I wouldn't wanna use Lisp as an entire environment if I could use Forth, but it'd be serviceable.
...Not on Itanium.
these_things_are_real_i_do_not_make_them_up.png
@m0xee @iska @realman543 Actually, now that I'm looking at that code again, some of this is kinda cool. Like, there's $call, so you'd push an address onto the stack and call $call and that would emit a call to the appropriate address. But then there's this bit for forward calls and it's kinda clever, it works the same way you would do it in Forth, it leaves a little gap in the memory and then leaves an address on the stack, pointing to the place where the mark is supposed to go, and when you know what address it's calling, you write it to the address on the stack. This is fun shit.
that-s_kinda_clever_i_do_not_remember_doing_it.png
that-s_kinda_clever_i_do_not_remember_doing_it.png
@m0xee @p @realman543 @iska
look at floorplans seriously they are wonderful. colorForth & esperForth are important even if they're underrated.
"meme languages" are /g/ cope.
look at floorplans seriously they are wonderful. colorForth & esperForth are important even if they're underrated.
"meme languages" are /g/ cope.
@0
Aren't both Forth and LISP /g/'s darlings? At least I think this is where half the SICP memes come from 🤔
And when I say "meme-something" it doesn't inherently mean that it's bad — it's just that people use it more often in conversation than in practice. (Have anyone using "Freudian slip" ever read a page of Freud?)
In a lot of cases it means that it's something impractical — but again, not necessarily.
@realman543 @iska @m0xee
> you could use ZFS
What the fuck did you just call me?
> achieve basically the same functionality.
Not remotely.
> you could use ZFS
What the fuck did you just call me?
> achieve basically the same functionality.
Not remotely.
@p @iska @m0xee ZFS is good. 
Well I admittedly don't know much about the fossil file system it's manpage says it has active/archive/snapshot. And feeds data via TCP. If you use 9p with some hacky workarounds in a C (or perhaps shell) script it sounds like you could get basically that functionality.
ZFS could act as active and snapshot, and if you make a new or nested volume you could archive as well. Though TBH I wouldn't recommend archiving on the same disk, but that's me.
Well I admittedly don't know much about the fossil file system it's manpage says it has active/archive/snapshot. And feeds data via TCP. If you use 9p with some hacky workarounds in a C (or perhaps shell) script it sounds like you could get basically that functionality.
ZFS could act as active and snapshot, and if you make a new or nested volume you could archive as well. Though TBH I wouldn't recommend archiving on the same disk, but that's me.
@realman543 @iska @m0xee
> ZFS is good. :columbo_smug:
I have seen it. It is a complete shit design. Even if they fixed the Linux bugs, there's no way to fix the rest without a complete redesign. It is probably better if we don't spend all day on arguing ZFS again, see my previous remarks about ZFS; I can (and have) spent days on this before. I do not like ZFS.
> Well I admittedly don't know much about the fossil file system it's manpage says it has active/archive/snapshot.
"Has a few similar features" does not mean it's similar; I have a rifle, you're handing me a blunderbuss. fossil doesn't try to be its own RAID array, for example. Snapshots are achieved by means of a Merkle tree rather than duplicate copies, so you can clone an entire fossil FS by giving it the same root score as the one you want to duplicate, and this takes less than a second, which is why I lost less than a day of work when I hosed my filesystem: I used flfmt with the last known-good root score, and the entire system was back. I type `history $filename` and I get every change made to that file, and I can type this as any user: I don't need to be `root`.
this-is-nothing-like-zfs.png
> ZFS is good. :columbo_smug:
I have seen it. It is a complete shit design. Even if they fixed the Linux bugs, there's no way to fix the rest without a complete redesign. It is probably better if we don't spend all day on arguing ZFS again, see my previous remarks about ZFS; I can (and have) spent days on this before. I do not like ZFS.
> Well I admittedly don't know much about the fossil file system it's manpage says it has active/archive/snapshot.
"Has a few similar features" does not mean it's similar; I have a rifle, you're handing me a blunderbuss. fossil doesn't try to be its own RAID array, for example. Snapshots are achieved by means of a Merkle tree rather than duplicate copies, so you can clone an entire fossil FS by giving it the same root score as the one you want to duplicate, and this takes less than a second, which is why I lost less than a day of work when I hosed my filesystem: I used flfmt with the last known-good root score, and the entire system was back. I type `history $filename` and I get every change made to that file, and I can type this as any user: I don't need to be `root`.
this-is-nothing-like-zfs.png
@p @realman543 @iska @m0xee >I'm going to get the fuck out of Unix entirely.
Come home white man.
logon.wav
Come home white man.
logon.wav
@mint @iska @m0xee @realman543 I don't know what OS makes that noise but Plan 9 makes no noise when it boots.
@mint @iska @m0xee @realman543 It does, and it is released
as
an 
ISO 
image 
with 
a
compiler 
like 
a 
white 
man
does.
as an ISO image with a compiler like a white man does.
@mint
AFAIK, it does some audio! I've even seen a documented way to pipe videos through bunch of stuff to watch them.
@realman543 @iska @p
@realman543 @longyap @iska @mint @m0xee Acceptable operating systems: Plan 9, ANTS, 9front, 9legacy, Inferno, DIY Forth environment, CollapseOS, DuskOS, boot sector demos, MS-DOS 5.0 (but only to run for exactly as long as needed to bootstrap your DIY Forth environment), or a ROM-based OS that came with a 1980s-ass computer. The list is complete. NT4 is not on it. Smalltalk? AmigaOS? Meego? No, no, no. ReactOS? Minix3? Minix*2*? You fucking kidding me?
