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Throwing yourself at something that's never been done is fun.

But know what's really fun? Taking something that's been done before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.


This was the secret sauce of my best startup idea: something that once existed, but had been forgotten.

(Because, I believe, either the flood of people into the market space never knew it, or it wasn't the dominant model for exploitation of the user base.)


Any examples?

For example, the project I’m working on today…

People have made orreries (rotating solar system models) for centuries.

I’m designing a digital version with over 600 LEDs. It’s a massive challenge and I’m pretty sure I’ll be the first.

I’ve been making things like it for years:

Https://digitalhorology.com


Bret Victor's list of papers and references would be one:

https://worrydream.com/refs/

It's a deep, deep rabbit hole.


That is more a black hole, thanks!

yes, our work with applying logical models of nondual systems like Advaita Vedānta, Daoism, Dzogchen as remedies for hallucination, sycophancy, adversarial instability and false continuity in AI systems is pretty unique and obscure.

Emulator?

Are you asking for articles that show how connected car data is being sold left and right?

Never let your memes be dreams nor your dreams be memes.

The moment my JSON has any sort of depth and I need to write a parser for it and potentially account for unspecified behavior. JSON's nice when it's nice, but it's terrible when it's terrible. It's 100x easier to write SQL than writing jq and... dear god if I have to use grep -A or -B, I'm doing something wrong. Constraints are actually a good thing!

The underlying database isn't the most important thing. Just use SQL. Its namespacing (eg, through CTEs) is good and you're more likely to have colleagues who know SQL compared to jq.


> It's 100x easier to write SQL than writing jq and... dear god if I have to use grep -A or -B, I'm doing something wrong. Constraints are actually a good thing!

As an occasional consumer of JSON/CSV, that's why I really like DuckDB, it's just SQL for such file formats. And it manages to be super fast at it too.


For folks wanting to answer this question, please ask yourself:

Which laws?

Where were the cameras installed?

Are the fines disproportionate?

Are subpoenas necessary to access footage/data? If so/not, who's accessed it?

Are there ways to FOIA the data to answer these questions?


I submitted a request for exactly that to my city clerk a few days ago. They confirmed receipt from the clerk and the local PD, but still waiting for anything substantial.

Sure, but there are some jobs that are so bad that this advice readily applies to. The sort of job that takes you away from your life, family and friends in a way not entirely unlike poverty does. It's good to recognize whether working somewhere will turn into this because it's... hell... working at those places.


Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.


Presumably it's a system that can be viewed from a phone or from dispatch remotely right? All they'd have to do is share the credentials and that's that.


Worked at an exchange in 2007/2008 and... we had systems still running from the 80s. Mostly tape audit stuff.


That honestly sounds amazing. Imagine booting into something like a grub menu that's just a list of classic games.


I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.


It's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.


Stupid question but... would bundling the binary with an ASM port of something that could run this technically make it possible to run without the OS?

I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment


Well, the "ASM port of something that could run this" would be the OS...


Right. I guess I mean like an app specific OS haha


Possibly stripped down to only support that game, but basically yeah


Probably your parents setting it up?

As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble.

I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.


I bet it wasn't actually the bootloader but something with autoexec.bat - you could setup choices in it and windows was just one launch option.


Well, if you treat DOS as a bootloader for Windows 98 - which it was actually - then modifying autoexec.bat would count as setting up the bootloader.


No, I set it up. My parents were non-technical. I had a CD-ROM re-release of Worms for DOS from one gaming magazine or another. I guess the installer set it up somewhere somehow but I remember it wasn't easy to get it installed and there were further problems trying to launch it. It's possible the installer itself was a DOS program, not a Windows program.


MS-DOS Shell was one popular option to do this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell

Brown Bag PowerMenu was another.

https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/15739/software-spotl...


I would guess a modern BIOS chip is as powerful as an NES, right?


You can do substantially more in UEFI than NES-level games. (See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Suppo...)


What do you mean by "BIOS chip"? Like, the flash memory that stores the motherboard's firmware? I don't think that contains any processing elements.


BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.


VESA BIOS Extensions support direct framebuffer access in protected mode, and I don't imagine the lack of accelerated 2D operations would be a practical bottleneck when implementing NES-style graphics on modern PCs.

UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.


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