Mastodawn

https://federate.social/@mattblaze/114388932783329496

Hailey 5d ago

You know back in my day, we had static analysis tooling that would give you exactly this kind of feedback, except it was correct. Now we have shit which only looks at the vibes of the source text and does no semantic analysis whatsoever, so of course it's just fucking wrong

trog 5d ago

Hailey 5d ago

Sent a pull request to Audacity fixing a crash bug I'd been running into frequently. The cause was an out-of-bounds memmove. Classic C++ areas.

Anyway I got a fucking copilot review on my PR which left two comments, both completely wrong, one of which suggesting I reintroduce the out of bounds memory access. I'm furious!

trog May 28

SnoopJ May 28

Content-Type: text/shitpost

trog May 18

Thomas Tuegel May 15

Software devs are so bad at estimation that there is a whole methodology/movement based on refusing to estimate, but devs report the time they have saved by using LLMs, and I’m supposed to take that number seriously?

trog Apr 23

only if we combine the secrets of papal elections with the rigour and integrity of both the International Olympic Committee and the FIFA Council can we truly safeguard democracy

Matt Blaze (@mattblaze@federate.social)

I've had at least two journalists (from reputable places) ask me about hacking papal elections and/or how we can apply the security for electing popes to US elections. Just no.

federate.social

trog Mar 19

Daisy Leigh Brenecki Mar 18

With the power of AI, you too can take your startup from “fucking around” to “finding out” in as little as two days!

trog Mar 9

https://cketti.de/2025/02/26/goodbye-k9mail/

Let's talk about Microsoft Flight Simulator! The very first one. The OG.

This is what you see when you boot the game:

trog Mar 5

Dgar Mar 5

Preferential voting in Australia is actually really cool. It lets you list the candidates on your ballot in the order of your preference.

So you can, for example, have The Fusion Party as number 1, The Greens as number 2, Labor as second last, and LNP as last, with any other candidates in between.

You are in control of who your vote goes to. The candidates and parties have no say in it at all.

Don’t let the media tell you otherwise.

trog Mar 3

marlies

Feb 26

The vatican needed a latin word for tweet, because the pope tweets. Or tweeted, I suppose, given the whole dead or dying situation. Anyway, they call them breviloquia (s breviloquium) which is honestly a great word even tho it’s not very brief itself. Given its nature and etymology I think we should be able to use it platform-independently and apply it to toots, skeets and even Truths as well. Anyway thank you for reading this breviloquium.

trog Feb 27

cketti Feb 26

I'm saying goodbye to K-9 Mail. Today is my last day at MZLA 😢

Goodbye K-9 Mail

Looking back on 15 years of working on K-9 Mail.

cketti

Let's talk about Microsoft Flight Simulator! The very first one. The OG.

This is what you see when you boot the game:

The game uses VRAM as scratch space when initializing the game, so we get some pretty garbage on the screen. This has been reported as an emulator bug on more than one occasion.

Butwhy.jpg? Well, consider that this game supported the original IBM PC, which at the time was being sold in configurations with an anemic 64K of RAM.

Having an extra 16K of scratch space was a considerable bonus.

It's free real estate!

Another fun thing about the game, is that it only runs on an 8088 CPU.

The reason has to do with some obscure behavior surrounding divide-by-0 (or underflow) exceptions.

On the 8088, a division by 0 is a "type 0 interrupt" and the interrupt handler returns to the address of the next instruction.

On the 286+ CPUs, a divide by 0 is a CPU exception, and the exception handler returns the address of the faulting instruction.

You see, Flight Simulator divides by 0 on every frame, perhaps because the author hated their math teacher.

It doesn't matter because the code continues after Interrupt 0, and carries on.

On the 286, the exception returns back to the same DIV instruction, which faults again, looping forever.

Flight Simulator used to be one of the titles that companies would use to advertise full IBM PC compatibility. It's also a good emulator test.

Flight Simulator's black and white graphics hold a surprising twist. You see, similar to the Apple II, the CGA was really designed for composite color output.

We're used to its infamously ugly 4 color palette, but when connected to a TV or composite monitor, 16 rather pleasant colors were possible.

This is possible because the high resolution mode of the CGA happens to have a pixel width 1/4th of the NTSC color carrier.

By adjusting the patterns of dots, we can, in effect, shift the phase of the color interpreted by the display.

4 pixels = 2^4 = 16 colors.

Microsoft didn't really write Flight Simulator, of course.

Like most things they were initially famous for, they paid someone else for it.

Bruce Artwick originally developed Flight Simulator for the Apple II, and its 6502 CPU. Microsoft wanted something to show off the PC's capabilities, and cut a deal with him to port it to the 8088.

https://mmcirvin.dreamwidth.org/511330.html

@gloriouscow I was recently playing around with Artwick's company's backport to other platforms, Flight Simulator II (specifically the Atari 8-bit version):

Captcha Check

@mattmcirvin Very cool!

@gloriouscow The Atari ST version (which had a bunch of new features) was actually the one I played the most back in the day, but my ST emulator is not working well at the moment.

@gloriouscow the Atari ST and Amiga versions of FSII had a lot of new features that only got to MSFS for IBM compatibles in version 3 (the Learjet, the window based UI, the chase camera, a new San Francisco map). But I think they were developed on Microsoft's dime too, but it was for the one and only release of MSFS for Macintosh!

@gloriouscow (this being in one of the intermittent eras when Microsoft was leaning into Mac development)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_(1986_video_game)

Matt McIrvin Mar 9

@gloriouscow Hmm, the Wikipedia article on that Mac release gives a slightly more complicated story:

Those 16-bit versions with all the new features started with the Amiga Corporation, not yet acquired by Commodore, requesting an FSII port for the Amiga. Amiga got bought, Artwick suspended development; then Microsoft jumped in and commissioned it as Microsoft Flight Simulator for the Mac. Then subLogic finished the Amiga and Atari ST ports with the new features (they are essentially 100% identical to one another).

And there never was another version of MSFS for Mac, sadly.

Microsoft Flight Simulator (1986 video game) - Wikipedia

mjdxp Mar 5

@gloriouscow just like microsoft adventure and ms-dos, turns out companies just buying other people's work and making it their own isn't a new thing...

Kroc Camen Mar 5

@mjdxp @gloriouscow Oh Microsoft didn't pay for Adventure, they just outright stole it: https://www.filfre.net/2011/07/microsoft-adventure/

» Microsoft Adventure The Digital Antiquarian

mjdxp Mar 5

@Kroc @gloriouscow of course...

@Kroc @mjdxp @gloriouscow

48kRAM Mar 9

"Perhaps the closest to moral in this lot was the management of Tandy, who were so unimaginative and so out of touch with their competitors that they couldn’t really be bothered to actively try to wrong them."

LOLOLZZZZ

Daniel Barlow Mar 5

@gloriouscow my memory said they bought it from Sublogic, but checking wikipedia I see that Sublogic == Bruce Artwick anyway, so that tracks. Sublogic branding was on other platforms, I goess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Simulator_(1980_video_game)

Amputado Mar 9

@gloriouscow A little bit more complicated. What is MS Flight Simulator was indeed made for the IBM PC. Later Artwick published trough SubLogic ports to Apple ][, and other platforms, as Flight Simulator II. Artwick's first Flight Simulator was a more crude simulation (yet awesome!) released two years before, indeed for the ][.

Flight Simulator (1980 video game) - Wikipedia

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Mar 5

@gloriouscow what the

Literally Never Twice the Same Color. Intentionally.

@clacke

The IBM PC was designed around NSTC!

The system's main crystal, 14.3181818Mhz, is 4 times the NTSC color clock of 3.579545Mhz. Divide that crystal by 3 and you get the PC's weird 4.77Mhz CPU speed.

The CPU was rated for 5Mhz operation. They made it 5% slower so they could manufacture the CGA card without its own clock crystal.

Ingenious, or cheapskate?

Az Mar 5

@gloriouscow @shmouflon CGA mention! 🐐🎉 also that is such a dope hack

Jonas Köritz Mar 9

@gloriouscow interesting to see that he put the effort in, to model COM and NAV radios and a transponder. How much of that was actually working and useful in the original simulator?

rezmason Mar 5

@gloriouscow This is also why I holler out random words and secrets old friends entrusted me with whenever I wake up

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Mar 5

@rezmason To store them in your short-term audial memory?

@gloriouscow

rezmason Mar 5

@clacke @gloriouscow I'm not sure what I use them for, it's in my bootloader. I have a twelve year old ticket to migrate to OpenBIOS, but the last time I tried I couldn't run Flight Simulator.

Which ticket tracker, you ask? JetBrains of course 🥁

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Mar 5

@gloriouscow Classic method on the Commodore 64! The screen was always doing all kinds of garble during game init.

Broken Troland Mar 5

@gloriouscow 2024 Microsoft Flight Simulator recommends 64GB of RAM. Only a million-fold increase to simulate what’s supposed to be the same thing, in higher fidelity. And it still sometimes has graphical issues that look like the first screenshot.

Stacey Campbell Mar 5

@gloriouscow I brought up an X server on a TMS34020 based graphics card back in the early 90s and put my graphics engine program in VRAM once just to see what it looked like.

@stacey_campbell I love that sort of thing so I built this widget into MartyPC. You can interpret arbitrary memory regions as graphics or text mode...

I am still working on how to convert code into smells

Snow Mar 5

@gloriouscow Literally my brain when I wake up

Dr. Fortyseven 🥃 █▓▒░Mar 5

@gloriouscow You can't fly through that. :(

@fortyseven this is what cyborgs see when they press on their eyeballs with their thumbs

Dr. Fortyseven 🥃 █▓▒░Mar 5

@gloriouscow I just spat out my drink. YESSSS.

The Doctor Mar 5

@gloriouscow @fortyseven You're right.

mjdxp Mar 5

@gloriouscow at least it's not the commodore 64 giving you a seizure to let you know your game is loading

Jessigay Mar 5

@gloriouscow windows 1 did that too

Jonathan E Cowperthwait Mar 5

@gloriouscow it’s beautiful

Grizzly Mar 5

@gloriouscow Oh this was very interesting to read, thank you! 🙂

Michael Mrak Mar 5

@gloriouscow I remember 😃

cos Mar 5

@gloriouscow thanks for dull but interesting information. Naming / versioning in Flight Simulator series is really complex. I did most of my retro flying on Amiga Sublogic FS2, which was closer to MS FS3 on PC.

×××××Mar 5

@gloriouscow just like real flying

Fidalgo♾️Mar 5

@gloriouscow you sure that’s not SimEarth