PopePompus

6 ms·

1.
by PopePompus 2mo ago
I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do to make that line of phones a mass-market success. U
2.
by PopePompus 2mo ago
Don't forget the N950! It was an aluminum body successor to the N900, with a glorious slide-out keyboard. Built like a tank. They were never released for sale to the public, perhaps because Nokia's leadership had already decided
3.
by PopePompus 3mo ago
I'm still alive, and college wasn't really sold primarily as a financial investment when I attended in the 1970s.
4.
by PopePompus 3mo ago
What happened if you used auto-decrement addressing with the PC? Did that hang the computer?
5.
by PopePompus 3mo ago
I've read this paper several times, over the years, and I've never understood why its considered such a landmark. I think it could be losslessly compressed to one paragraph of modest length.
6.
by PopePompus 3mo ago
I had an old astronomy app I wrote for pre-iPhone app store era Nokia phones (N900 etc.). I decided to get Claude code recreate it as an Android app. The old app produced several display pages for things like the positions of the planets.
7.
by PopePompus 5mo ago
How do you do the cleanup? Just /simplify or something you rolled yourself?
8.
by PopePompus 7mo ago
Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then
9.
by PopePompus 7mo ago
This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competi
10.
by PopePompus 8mo ago
On my unrooted Pixel, I get "Permission denied" errors if I ls /sys, /dev, /proc and / within Termux. And /usr and /var don't exist.
11.
by PopePompus 8mo ago
I don't think it's actually the VM crashing, it's the Android OS killing what it thinks is an idle app.
12.
by PopePompus 8mo ago
Because, wonderful as Termux is, it has a very nonstandard filesystem layout, so installation scripts for something like Anaconda will not run without extensive modifications. And Termux has no access to /proc, /dev etc., so lots
13.
by PopePompus 8mo ago
Also, if your Android phone is a Pixel, you can run the recently added Terminal app, which runs a plain vanilla Debian distribution within a VM. So you then have a pocketable Linux machine to develop code on. Not only does Python run on i
14.
by PopePompus 9mo ago
Mass surveillance by corporations, bad as it is, is less of a threat than mass surveillance by the government. Google can't put you in prison.
15.
by PopePompus 9mo ago
Yes, but all problems with tainted food are not as visually obvious as mold. After some bad surprises, I've decided to never eat anything I ordered from Amazon.
16.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voic
17.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
I'm sure grateful that you did that. I've been surprised by how little online discussion of this app I've seen. It's just extremely cool to be walking around with a real gnu/linux computer in my pocket, which cost
18.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
There is a third option (in addition to the native app and Termux) to get emacs running. The recently added (to at least Pixel phones) "Terminal" app runs a standard Debian distribution inside a VM. emacs can be installed there in
19.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
Iowa City is the bluest of Iowa cities. It's a university town.
20.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
It's actually not in the app store, and it may only be available on Pixel phones. You get the app not by downloading it from anywhere, you just enable "developer mode" in the system settings, and the app magically appears in
21.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
I use Android phones, and there are at least two ways to get iPython going on an Android phone. The first is Termux, which provides a gnu userspace atop the Android kernel. This app is pretty old, and well-tested. There is an active and hel
22.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
There was a time when I would have salivated over this. But now I can run iPython on my phone, and have numpy, sympi, scipy, astropy and countless other packages. Physical keyboards are great for calculators - much better than virtual keyb
23.
by PopePompus 10mo ago
Yes, DEC did use a non-IEEE floating point format at least through the VAX-11 era. I was fooled by the title too.
24.
by PopePompus 11mo ago
> If elon musk makes interstellar car that can reach the nearest star in 1 second and priced it at 1k, I guarantee within a year people will be bored of it and finding some angle to criticize it. Americans were glued to their seats watch
25.
by PopePompus 1y ago
One option would have been to place whatever high melting point metal tools they could spare into the hole, and freeze water around them to hold it in place. It also might have been possible to change the series of s-curves and other maneuv
26.
by PopePompus 1y ago
By default ChatGPT et al. will not produce the same output if identical input is fed to it multiple times. There is "stochastic sampling" which means that the most probable next token is not always selected. It will select from
27.
by PopePompus 1y ago
But it's not a telescope that's measuring the CO2.
28.
by PopePompus 1y ago
Hand-delivering mail intended for my neighbors, that was mistakenly placed in my mailbox, is how I met most of my neighbors. The sloppy USPS is an important part of my social life.
29.
by PopePompus 1y ago
This happens to me almost daily. I get photos of mail sent to the couple I bought my house from 4.5 years ago. Their mail never actually arrives in my mailbox, but it's still quite a privacy breech for the former owners (who were clear
30.
by PopePompus 1y ago
Congress has been happily shedding its powers for decades. They don't want to be held responsible if a war turns out badly, so they haven't declared a war since 1945, I believe.

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