Me too, on the VIC-20.

It just had to turn it upside down!

I think something like the Commodore PET might qualify. Back in the day, I saw it used for everything from cash registers to accountants’ workstations, but rarely for anything else.

I think that the original IBM PC was conceived and marketed as a business machine and only grew beyond that because of Microsoft’s deep commitment to it as a platform and IBM’s uncharacteristicly open specifications and design.

If not for that combination, the PC might never have left the office and most of us would have stuck with the companies who were actually breaking new ground, Apple and Commodore.

That doesn’t surprise me. I have Haiku running in a VM, but haven’t looked at it in 2 years, despite the fact I used BeOS as a daily driver back in the day.

Well, if you want “compile something unstable yourself,” here is their official documentation for ARM64.

And here is someone’s progress report on porting to RISC-V. They seem to have started in 2021, so maybe they were successful.

Whenever I price something, I look at the whole package. If I like what a company is doing, I don’t mind paying extra to support them. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. With System76, I feel like I won.

They were the only company I found that was offering Canadians any laptop with Linux pre-installed. (I think Lenovo or Toshiba had something, but they weren’t available in Canada.) Having fought mightily with various distros on a wide range of hardware for years, it was critically important that my new daily driver not suck up my time just getting it running and keeping it that way.

Nearly 5 years later, the laptop is still going strong. On top of that, my hopes for their distro have far exceeded any reasonable expectations. I was prepared for the likelihood that I would ultimately need to switch to another distro, but their ongoing development and contributions to the Linux ecosystem have kept me on board and excited for the future.

In the end, I wasn’t buying a laptop. I was buying a system, and I’ve been extremely happy with the outcome.

That said, I suspect my next laptop will be a Framework. Again, it has less to do with the detailed specifics of hardware than in supporting a company in their attempt to do things the way I think they should be done.

Is that all? I bought my current laptop from System 76 3 or 4 years ago based on my perception that both hardware and Pop were mature enough to be the only computer in the house.

There have been some glitches along the way with the OS, but nothing to get excited about. Notably, I’ve never had to burn things to the ground and start over. :)

There are some ongoing annoyances with the track pad. I don’t know where exactly the problem lies but I do occasionally get cranky :).

I’m currently using the paid version to host my occasional writing and am very happy with it. It’s not perfect, but what is?

One thing I like about it is that it’s not just a blogging platform, but it’s own little slice of the web. The home page is a list of blog entries from all the blogs sorted by some combination of “toasts” (likes) and age. (And the trending algorithm is both simple and publicly viewable.) I don’t explicitly subscribe to anyone else’s blog, but enjoy just browsing “trending” and “recent”.

To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

Are you sure that rounding was broken? Many systems use “Gaussian” or “banker’s” rounding to reduce accumulation of rounding errors. Instead of always rounding to the next larger absolute value at .5, they round to the nearest even number. Although it introduces a bias toward even numbers in the result set, it reduces accumulation of error when .5 is as likely as as any other fraction and odd/even are equally likely in the source.

I was taught “banker’s” rounding in school (graduated 1974) and have had to implement it a few times to reduce error accumulation.

If you are looking for a rabbit hole, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article, including an example of how the wrong choice of rounding algorithm led to massive problems at the Vancouver Stock Exchange (Canada).

Thank you for sharing this! I’ve been looking for people who offer something other than hope, platitudes, and gentle transitions. Not because I’m suspicious of the “hopeful” position, or not only that, but to be fully informed on the issue of how to mobilize for concrete action.

I haven’t read much of the relevant psychology, but my reading of history convinces me that humans don’t act without an emergency. I see the challenge as being to help people understand that there is a real emergency, not a rhetorical one.

That, of course, is complicated by the fact that, in this case, the emergency isn’t really visible until the time to act has passed. That means some consequences are now unavoidable, which is something that human nature has difficulty grappling with. As a result, it’s very difficult to convince anyone, even those who are now living with some of those consequences, that the emergency can be anything other than rhetorical.

Could it be that Stacer and file manager are somehow reporting usable space instead of “absolute” space.

I recall from the early days that there was overhead in the process, so that useable space was always less than formatted space. Perhaps that is still the case.

I’ve got people around me who say we in Canada don’t need to do anything about CO2 emissions because, they claim, our forests absorb more than we emit. My response has always been “wait until they start burning.”

I first became interested in social and economic theories in high school (early 1970s). The books available to me were mostly pretty old, but I was also very interested in comparing what was said in those writings with what I could happening around me.

I read Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and their detractors. Two things I took away from that reading are that the economy must serve the mass population, not the other way around, and that, at least within a capitalist system, the population does not contain businesses, but business people and those people are just a small fraction of the population. My conclusion was (and remains) that governments must regulate business to prevent them from gaining power and must structure taxes and public services in ways that ensure that society as a whole benefits from productivity gains, not just business people. I recently came across this article that is an excellent starting point for cherry picking the good stuff from both theoretical frameworks.

I then read from the Chicago School of economics and the people in various fields who advocated and argued against it. From that I learned that there are those who would elevate business from being a kind of useful servant of the economy and therefore of society to the objective of the economy and therefore of society. (Something that I’ve recently heard referred to as “neo-feudalism”.)

I read who I’ll call the “social justice warriors”. So civil rights leaders, feminists, prison and justice system reformers, unionists, education reformers, etc. The biggest thing I took away from that reading was that certain kinds of discrimination (say, Affirmative Action) can be temporarily justified as methods of reparation and correction of historical wrongs and the ongoing generational fallout, but that the primary goal should be the creation of a society in which privilege is not an accident of birth, health, or circumstance.

I read quite widely on ecology, but quite heavily on the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources. It’s less obvious than most people think. There are obvious nonrenewable resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and metals, but a forest is not renewable if not harvested in sustainable ways. Going further, that forest is part of an ecological system and ecological systems are not renewable if overly disrupted, so sustainable harvest is not just about planting replacement trees, but preserving ecologies, and not just for display and recreation, but for regeneration. The places we dump our waste are also resources and their renewability is based on the nature and volume of waste.

Some more recent reading includes things like Shock Doctrine, which examines one aspect of how disasters can be leveraged by those with the resources to survive a disaster to further increase their access to resources at the expense of those without the resources to survive the disaster on their own.

Some of my favourite reading comes from those who argue against the doomers throughout history. For example, it’s trivial to find someone who says Malthus was wrong, but very difficult to find anyone who actually argues against the foundational thesis that populations, including humans, grow to the limits of available resources. That is, breaking new ground, literally or technologically, can never be more than a temporary solution. Likewise with respect to everything from social service programs and the failure of critics to properly account in detail for the actual sources of profits associated with privatization.

For defining and constructing societies that serve people, I think the best writers are found among the science communicators, especially those who focus on how to communicate science. They describe the methods by which knowledge is gained, validated and updated, and disseminated.

So that was pretty long on text and pretty short on specific recommendations. Some of that is bad memory, but mostly I don’t actually find many writers addressing what society should look like, only that this one ain’t it. Even thinner on the ground are those who address foundational solutions rather than specific changes in one element.

There probably is, but I haven’t found it yet. I realized pretty early in the game (in human lifespan terms) that our the solution was not to be found in technology but in the structure of society.

In the long view, technology has always advanced, sometimes in “pure” terms, sometimes in response to situations, and sometimes in service to one ideology or another. So there is a sense in which the technology takes care of itself.

What doesn’t seem to take care of itself is society. It’s my view that useful social structures are constructed in opposition to human nature. Individually, we are largely slaves to intuition and a variety of cognitive biases, not least of which is the difficulty of separating a sequence of events from a true causal chain. We tend to embrace ideology, which is about doing what we wish would work, rather than doing what does work.

The great projects of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution it engendered started paying clear and obvious social dividends following the Second World War in the wake of critically important foundational work done during the Great Depression. We were starting to make progress on global issues by the 1970s and then something derailed us.

I don’t know what the underlying causes were, but it took only a couple of decades to turn the clock back, possibly as much as a century on some measures. One of the things that gives me hope is that maybe that quick reversal is evidence that we can do it again, but this time in a direction that makes things better.

For myself, I’ve all but dropped trying to address climate change directly (except in my own life) to focus on the larger project of social change. That is my nod to “long history” because I’m old enough that whatever happens to the climate and its impact on me are basically baked in. Thus I’m trying to do what I can to get people around me to start moving toward a more just, equitable, tolerant, evidence-based society.

I think you have a view of time and history that is quite rare. You seem to be using centuries as your unit of measure where very few people can get to even decades as the unit of measure. On your time scale, or larger ones up to and including evolutionary or geological time scales, it’s relatively easy to conclude that “in the fullness of time” will “solve” the problem.

On ordinary time scales, where people look at the next 100 years at most, disaster is looming. That loss of life, major economic depression, and those wars you seem to shrug off as “business as usual” is exactly what is fueling their anxiety. Many of those people would say that your “fullness of time” view is actually a big part of the problem because it looks like complacency and can in fact foster complacency.

On top of that, few people do anything other than linear extrapolation based on recent data. So where you see little blips on a trend line, they see a continuation to infinity of whatever seems to be happening now.

And, of course, there are even people like me, who think that it takes coordinated effort at all scales from individual behaviour to the creation and honouring of global treaties to solve the problem. We already have plenty of those practical people you speak of and we now know that they are all but useless unless we can all agree join them. And we haven’t and aren’t. In that view the tipping point was c. 1980 and we’re now so far over the cliff that the creation of the right kind of society now looks like a pipe dream. Which means that only a “black swan” event or technology can save the day. Hardly the stuff of optimism.

I think that the test systems I helped set up for my clients made it pretty obvious that they would have run into a variety of problems had we not done something. Most issues would not have been business ending, but there were a couple that would have made life quite interesting for a few months.

Preventative action is always tough to justify, because it always looks unnecessary when it works.

I think it was 300 baud. I couldn’t afford it, so followed the schematics to figure out how to connect a military surplus acoustic coupler modem at 110 baud. I didn’t know any better, so I thought it was fantastic. Still, a few months later I got a good job and upgraded to an Apple//c clone and a 1200 baud modem.

My first modem was 110 baud acoustic coupler modem that I got from military surplus. I couldn’t afford the modem Commodore sold for the VIC-20, so I figured out how to wire this thing in.

I didn’t really do all that much with it, because not too much later I got a better job so upgraded to a Laser whatever clone of the Apple//c and a 1200 baud modem.