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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • You’re absolutely right, you could take any binary that runs under an OS and set up a bootloader to execute it directly without an OS.

    The problem is that all programs, even ones in C, rely invisibly and enormously on the OS abstracting away hardware for them. The python interpreter doesn’t know the first thing about how to parse the raw bytes on a hard drive to find the location of the bytes that belong to a given file path. Files and filesystems are ‘fake’ when you get down to it, and the OS creates that fiction so each program doesn’t have to be customized per PC setup.

    So, ironically, to be able to truly kernel hack in python like you want would require writing tons of C to replace all OS hooks (like fopen to interact with a file, e.g.) with code that knows how to directly manipulate your hardware (speaking PCIe/NVMe to get to the disk, speaking GPT to find the partition on the disk, speaking ext4 to find the file in the partition, e.g.).

    OSes are complex as hell for a reason, and by retrofitting python to run on bare metal like that would require recreating that complexity in the interpreter.







  • Yeah, being a niche product without the economies of scale elsewhere in gaming makes the price really awkward. My hope is that will improve over time if the install base keeps growing.

    I use mine just about every day, I’ve been fully obsessed with a game on multiple occasions, and I’m excited every time there are new things in the catalog. Easily worth full game-console price for the joy I’ve gotten out of it. But, that doesn’t really help anybody else, I know.

    It really is a lot less of a gimmick than it might seem. The final game of the first season is a shockingly polished gameboy-zelda-style adventure that I’ve played start-to-finish more than once.



  • C is a little older than namespacing and object orientation. C++ wasn’t even a glimmer in Bjarne’s eye when these conventions were laid down.

    And yes, having to google it is part of the design. Originally C programmers would have had to read actual manuals about this stuff. Once you learn the names you don’t really forget so it works well enough even now for ubiquitous standard library functions.

    And yet, C was an ergonomic revelation to programmers of the time. Now it’s the arcane grandpa that most youngsters don’t put up with.








  • Is it really that mind-boggling? ST has always seemed to me to read whichever way you are already predisposed to. How does everybody dying make it an anti-war movie? I would be shocked if the kind of person who believes in the good of a war machine were surprised that lots of people die in war.

    Maybe my memory is a bit hazy, but the bugs actually annihilate a city, right? What is the human response supposed to be? The extreme nature of the government and military only come across as insane if you’ve already been educated about fascism. Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures, which muddies the antifascist message in my opinion.

    It’s a great movie, but anyone who thinks it’s going to change anyone’s mind from their preconceptions is fooling themselves.

    What am I missing?



  • It is great tech, but there are serious downsides too.

    • storage and handling: Hydrogen is a tiny atom, so it leaks like nobody’s business. Even liquid hydrogen is terribly low-density which makes pretty much a hard limit on storage density, unlike battery tech which can at least hypothetically dramatically improve. Pressure vessels suck. They have to be crazy sturdy and roughly spherical which places major design limitations on vehicles that use them.
    • distribution: EVs can limp by on sparse fast charging stations and home charging while better infrastructure builds out. Electrical supply is already ubiquitous. Who’s going to want a hydrogen vehicle (which you can absolutely already buy, nobody’s stopping you in the US at least) with so few fueling options? The upfront investment to bootstrap a market with hydrogen stations to the point of even competing with crappy EV charging is enormous.
    • no onboard energy recovery: Regenerative braking is an incredible benefit on its own.
    • industry synergy: EV manufacture benefits from tons of other industries investing in battery tech. The tide lifts all boats.

    There are solutions as with any tech, but the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs. The least worst option tends to win.