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.

@p @iska
One day you still have to do it — only to realise that your file system remained broken for at least three months and is now beyond being repairable 😱

@iska @m0xee I'd rather have a thing that doesn't break than a thing that has some unidentifiable benefits but breaks all the time.
@p @iska @m0xee BTRFS was *supposed* to be Linux's answer to ZFS. As far as I am aware it still has not succeeded in this goal.
@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.
@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? 🫠

@realman543 @p

@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.

@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.

@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: oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112
To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.

@realman543 @iska

@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.

@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
@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

@p
Oh, for this stuff — sure! I'm currently reading a book, that touches systems programming in examples, and it gets explained how CHIP-8 works, how instructions are decoded, how arithmetics works, how calls work, the author goes on to explain how memory management works, what endian-ness is (for those who don't know it).
Weird shit is — it's a Rust book and all examples feel… AWKWARD to say the least, everything is wrapped in unsafe {}, system calls are used directly, etc 🤪
@realman543 @iska

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@p
I mean it's great in a way that it shows what's happening under the hood instead of "just use this crate", how smart pointers and reference counters save your ass, but why they might make things noticeably slower, but it feels weird, when every example shows how the language is against you doing things like that.
Knuth didn't come up with MIX to explain algorithms for nothing after all 😆
@realman543 @iska

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