A generation of programmers might disagree with you.
Multiplication instructions and hash tables (!) are easily worked around, as evidenced by decades of art and innovation programmed on that "terrible" CPU. There are still 6502 programmers today delivering games, art, demoscene, etc.
That CPU was a foundation of the home computer and console revolution: BBC, Commodore, Atari (consoles and computers), Apple, and Nintendo (NES).
It's just not the same class of devices. The tiniest IoT-focused subsets of .NET will still require more than 64KB of RAM and 192KB or so of mass storage. You could try and implement some minimum viable WASM subset (I think the issues that made WASM non-viable on microcontrollers and the like have been addressed by now) since the overall architecture is likely simpler, but even that is rather dubious and more like something that could be appropriate on slightly newer 16-bit machines.
I don't think that games, art and the demoscene can be used as evidence here. Implementing something like C# means you have a spec to implement. You have to be creative with the implementation without violating that spec.
All the three of games/art/demoscene on something like the C64 have a rough idea as the spec, but then you'll get creative about how much of that "spec" you can bend and violate to meet the technical limitations of the C64, while still being fun.
If it helps, you can find a treatment of this in Knuth's vol 4, I believe. Will have to see if I can actually solve it later.
Amusingly, this same basic problem was given to me by Google as an interview question. I was baffled, as I could name the problem, and knew of a reference book that covered it; but I wasn't able to just "on the fly" solve it. Felt like I was living a strawman of pointlessly difficult interview questions. (To be fully fair, I'm not sure I bombed this part. Been far too long for me to remember the other parts.)
I dodged a bullet. I bought into the original heavy stainless steel exoskeleton concept, which they never delivered on. So they had my deposit. Then it took me a year and a half (!!) to get my deposit back from time of request, a dozen documented follow-ups on phone, email, and in-person at the stealership.
Tesla’s excuse: While they were happy to take a Canadian’s money with fully refundable deposit terms, they had not contemplated actually ever refunding a Canadian. The deposit was made by credit card. The only option offered for refund was a deposit to an American bank account.
It seems like no aspect of the Cybertruck project was done well.
Then it took me a year and a half (!!) to get my deposit back from time of request
After we decided against an F-150 Lightning because it wouldn’t fit in the garage, one click of the “cancel reservation” button, and the money was back in our account within two weeks. When we were disappointed with the VW Buzz that the U. S. was getting, same deal: VW gave our money back in a few weeks.
Granted, your situation is arguably a little out-of-band if you squint really hard, but c’mon, Tesla.
Ha, I didn’t even mention that around the same time, to hedge my bets, I also had a deposit on an F-150 Lightning and had the same easy experience with a Ford refund as you did. Click.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if promises weren't kept or expectations not met. This is the same company that has a product called Full Self Driving that cannot fully self drive.
They originally claimed the stainless steel panels would replace the internal frame and thus be more efficient to produce. But they shipped with a traditional frame
The way they proposed doing it was folding steel sheets into the CT structure. My guess is they were never able to produce consistent enough folds. It takes pretty precise metal working to make that work.
The “exoskeleton” part? The stainless panels are poorly glued to an aluminum frame. The frame provides the structure, the panels are load, not bearing.
In 2019, Musk asked for deposits as he told the world "We created an exoskeleton ... the body and bed on a traditional body-on-frame design don’t do anything useful. They’re dead weight."
MotorTrend describes Tesla's failure well in their Nov 2023 teardown. Read the "Does the Tesla Cybertruck Have an "Exoskeleton?" section. Spoiler: It doesn't. The stainless panels are not load-bearing. The Cybertruck has a conventional unibody chassis.
While Apple has some admirable history in standing up to government information requests[1], am I alone in wondering now if Apple has started to voluntarily align itself with the current administration? For example, Apple is helping to build Donald Trump's new gold-plated ballroom.[2] (!)
"Major Upgrade" for the fast, disposable fashion crowd.
Major downgrade for maintainability and ability to repair.
This "upgraded" zipper will be impossible to replace if broken at home, by hand or with a machine, or even at a typical professional repair shop. YKK documents say a "dedicated AiryString® sewing machine" is required.[1]
Fabrics have gotten a lot thinner, and thus develop holes a lot more quickly.
I have t-shirts from 2010 which are faded but have 0 holes. Whereas t-shirts I bought half a year ago have holes in them.
Also, you mentioning the inability to repair stuff at home makes me sad. My mom, 72 year old, repaired my nephew's jacket the other day. Brand new zipper.
The machine in that PDF you shared makes me feel YKK is going in the direction of Apple. They supply the parts and the manufacturing device.
You do something they don't like? Sewing machine turns off.
"All AiryString® part sales and leasing of dedicated sewing machines are conducted between YKK and the customer. YKK will also coordinate the installation and startup of sewing machines at garment manufacturing factories. For more information on leasing dedicated sewing machines, please contact your YKK representative"
Yes, survivorship bias is real, but it's absolutely true that clothes are often made of more delicate fabrics today.
Some of it is fashion-motivated; a shaved leather jacket that has a feel almost like cloth lays very differently on a person than a bomber- or motorcycle-weight jacket.
The rest is because lighter threads are cheaper. And lighter-weight zippers are cheaper.
We won't know if this self-lauded new product is an improvement or not for a while.
The comment means "you throw away the shirts with holes, so obviously any shirt you have from 2010 has no holes". Unless every single new shirt the GP has has holes in it (which they don't), we can't draw any conclusions from this, except "some shirts from any year last a long time and some don't".
> I have t-shirts from 2010 which are faded but have 0 holes. Whereas t-shirts I bought half a year ago have holes in them.
One of the little things I find most satisfying about getting old is hearing the same proclamations about quality going to shit today that I heard when I was much younger, only now the supposedly-good baseline of the comparison happened well after the complaints I grew up hearing. I, too, want everyone to get the hell off my lawn.
If your mother has to drop-spindle the flax your father helped gather from the retting pond to make the thread to weave the garment... that tunic better damned-well last several years. In fact, garments were mentioned in estate records of the deceased because they were so valuable.
If you can shop online for a new T-shirt while riding the bus to work, and have it delivered to your door the next day... your children aren't going to hope to inherit it.
Sadly, I have garments from my grand-parents made 40 years ago which are much better than my parents garments made 20 years ago, themselves much better than what you can find nowadays at the same price points from the same brands.
Thankfully, with the internet, it's easier than ever to buy actually nice and well made pieces of cloth. They are not cheap however.
That seems consistent with a progressive slide towards lower quality. The products that were available when I was young where dramatically lower quality than those available to my parents but are dramatically higher quality than what is available now.
The fix is easy:
Don’t buy new clothes from fast fashion brands or stores.
If you only buy quality from small stores and independent designers you still get the same quality you got 15 years ago. Sure it’s 2-3 times the price but it’s worth it.
It feels easier to me: buy second hand, look for natural fibers, take care of your garments (wash according to tag, don’t use fabric softeners or dryer sheets).
Learning to mend isn’t too bad either, especially with fabrics that are sturdier.
I don’t know how to mend at all - but I have an excellent tailor in my neighbourhood who mends stuff like jeans and shirts for me for a reasonable price. Also I love his little shop so I’m happy to pay a bit extra to support that business!
That’s awesome! I love community solutions. I recently moved out to a more rural area so places like that aren’t as walkable as my old place in the city - we had a sustainable store with refillable soaps, detergent, etc; a good half dozen hair places, a local yarn and slewing shop that doubles as a place for people in the refugee community to learn techniques and get assistance; there’s also food co-ops, community garden, etc.
It’s all been really cool to see as it grows, and while I’m sad to have moved away, it also gives me an opportunity to find and form new communities.
I try to buy my clothes from shops that sell to the trades/safety gear (e.g. brands like "Hard Yakka", although I guess that brand probably doesn't exist outside of Australasia). Most of these shops do a good line of cargo pants/shorts.
But where does one get jeans that were made of the non-stretch denim that we use to get in the 1980s? That stuff was as thick as a tarpaulin (for those of us who are younger, tarpaulins used to be made of fabric, not plastic).
Stretch denim drives me insane. Not only is it much thinner and more fragile it's also just straight up a time bomb. Given enough time the elastic just deteriorates and you get super weird wrinkles all over. Not to mention that pants that fit just fine in the morning need a belt in the afternoon because the whole thing stretches out.
>Major downgrade for maintainability and ability to repair.
But it seems the exact opposite is true. These zippers should be easily removable, leaving the fabric mostly intact. After that you can put in a normal zipper.
But you can just cut it off entirely, with minimal losses to the fabric, which is preferable to pulling out the seams, which will leave damaged fabric behind.
It remains to be seen if it can be repaired by hand. A special sewing machine is required, as opposed to using a regular sewing machine. The document you linked is about garment production, not repair.
How things get repaired is not up to the original company in most cases. People are inventive when they need to be.
Almost anything that can be sewn together by a machine can be sewn together by hand too. That said, sewing doesn’t do much for most zipper failures anyway, which are usually broken teeth or sliders.
> This "upgraded" zipper will be impossible to replace if broken at home, by hand or with a machine
It looks like they just replaced the tape with cord. I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to hand stitch it in, though it might need some temporary stitches to hold it in place.
"- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)"
In 2025, this is true. At some point in the future, I predict this will be false. Maddening.
It's the We Must See You Online Or We Don't Owe You The Service You've Paid For Principle. Sure it starts with software (e.g. Adobe) and content (e.g. Spotify) but I can see it extending to home appliances and vehicles. Because they can.
Word to justify this principle will be used and the words will sound positive and good and consumers will nod their heads and shrug. "For Your Protection." "Safety." "Authentication." "Copyright Protection." i.e. assumed guilty offline until proven innocent online
Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
Learning things is good. I also find I care more about the outcome and timeline than many professionals do, because I have to deal with the end result. That's not to say professionals can't or won't do the job better, or that they don't have more applicable experience to do the job more efficiently, but evaluating professionals is often as much or more work as learning how to do the job myself and just doing it. On average, the end result is at least better than a poor professional, sometimes as good or better than an average professional.
Recently I had to do some changes to a 3d rendering my contractor provided so I learned Krita to do it. Dare I say the results were not bad. But as good as a professional designer? Of course not. Was it satisfying to be able to show him exactly what I wanted? Hell yeah.
Well, it would be nice to be able to use my Kindle 4 again... Thanks to KOReader, it's no longer a brick, but most of my ebooks are kept hostages at Amazon.
They still have to request every 5 pages separately so they could be caught for requesting pages faster than you could realistically tap through the book on an actual phone or tablet.
> "the console features a built-in 5-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 800×600, delivering sharp and bright vector graphics"
So ... NOT vector graphics. Rasterized bitmap versions of vector graphics.
EDIT: Sorry, I'm not saying this isn't cool. I know rasterizing a vector to a sharp bitmapped display can still allow effects to simulate continuously drawn vector artifacts e.g. thin lines, thicker at vertices, refresh, flicker, etc.
Nothing matches the pinpoint of light dancing around that Vectrex provides. I'm not sure it's feasible to sell something based on vector graphics like Vectrex did, but it would be way cooler!
Maybe a raster display could match it, but it would need more dynamic range and much better resolution, plus processing power to perpetrate a screen-wide simulation of the glowing phosphor.
This is the opposite of what I'd want. Give me an actual vector display, and double the screen size. This is just going to provide an experience like myriad chinese handheld emulators.
Yeah, not really the same. I had a really really complete Vectrex setup, every game (even the stupid ones :-)) AND their overlays, I'm pretty sure every accessory. Which I ended up selling to a guy doing a museum?[1] Anyway it was quite the game for me. I knew eventually it would stop working and then just be a memory but still.
The screen was what really made it, and I get that having a vector scope manufactured would be expensive (it isn't true that nobody makes CRTs any more, but it is true that they don't come cheaply). Its also the reason I never really went all the way and bought one of my all time favorite arcade games which was the cockpit version of 'Star Wars' with its color vector display. (even harder to store!)
In a related effort, I looked at replicating a CRT "look" for some older test equipment that came with CRTs using a high dpi IPS display. I probably could have succeeded if I had an FPGA for doing the phosphor simulation (I developed a lot of respect for Tektronix's DPO technology and their patent portfolio on same :-). Very much a diminishing returns kind of thing.
[1] If you're that guy and reading this say "hi" :-)
I wonder if an FPGA is still necessary. 4k/8k are running way over 60 fps these days. Presumably a gpu could do a decent job emulating the phosphor.
In related news, atari 2600 emulators are keeping 4-8 cores > 50% busy these days. How else do you get accurate ntsc “red blur”, and capacitor effects from blinking pixels?
I suppose it would depend on how you wanted to simulate it. In my case I was targeting taking the signal from an unmodified test instrument that thought it was talking to a CRT and using that to figure out what display it wanted. That would be equivalent to taking the X/Y/Intensity lines from the mainboard of a Vectrex and just doing what the vector scope would have done. I drilled down enough to find the non-linear, temperature dependent, curve of phosphor decay times on the CRT used in some HP gear. It was pretty wild. If you buy third party kits they don't even bother simulating phosphor. Instead they just take the signals, figure out the information content of the display, and put that on an LCD. (Monochrome generally)
We still get cathode ray oscilloscopes. Apparently the og has a grid screen. Wonder what it costs to get a CRT maker to get custom dimensions, phosphor colors, curvature etc?
AliExpress has these 4-inch "flat CRTs" that look like they scan the vertical axis onto a sort of parabolic screen. I've thought about playing with one, but decided I don't want to risk shocking myself for a tiny distorted image. Still have no idea for which application they're intended.
I suppose you could even point that at a screen with phosphors on it for a more CRT-like effect. (Maybe you'd need a different kind of phosphor since you'd be exciting it with visible light rather than with an electron beam, though.)
Do we? I was under the impression that CRTs were not being manufactured anywhere anymore. I could definitely be wrong, but I couldn't find anything with a quick search.
But they're only building them for specialty niche military and industrial applications (e.g., replacement parts for old fighter jet HUDs). You could ask them about building one for your SNES setup or old arcade machine, but it'll cost you call-for-pricing dollars (tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps?)
interesting! Somehow it doesn't seem those are at fidelity what sony was producing, since it doesn't need to be - requirements are different. Maybe we can have US army order a few for us SNES guys, since they're also SNES guys? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-purpose_Arcade_Combat_Si...
Reminds me of how the actual Marines modified Doom with realistic weapons, locations, and enemies to turn it into a simulator for drilling fireteam tactics:
Multiplication instructions and hash tables (!) are easily worked around, as evidenced by decades of art and innovation programmed on that "terrible" CPU. There are still 6502 programmers today delivering games, art, demoscene, etc.
That CPU was a foundation of the home computer and console revolution: BBC, Commodore, Atari (consoles and computers), Apple, and Nintendo (NES).