Child’s play compared to what you’d need to do on a modern chip.

I don’t think it’s the chips, but the operating environments. Modern CPUs offer dozens of multipurpose registers and many more instructions and addressing modes compared to those old, low-cost CPUs, which should make things easier, not harder. But no-one’s building old-style dedicated systems around modern CPUs; our code now has to play nice with firmware, OS, libraries, and other processes, including resource management and preempting.

Compare a single-gear go-kart to an automatic sedan. Getting top performance out of the go-kart on a closed track is difficult and requires nuance. If we could drive the automatic sedan around the same closed track, we could easily demolish the go-kart, and not just with raw engine power. The improved acceleration, braking assist, and power steering are enough. But when we drive the sedan we’re usually doing it on public roads with traffic signals, intersections, speed limits, and other road users. That’s what’s more difficult.

I didn’t know that generative AI could do things like this now.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks

Node =/= JavaScript

“Hopefully it will help with shit. Let’s talk to the originating author, Aasish Pokhrel.”

I once saw a documentary about Bedouin tribes that were dying out. The problem was very simple, from the outside; they were killing virtually all of their female children.

The team interviewed an elder of one tribe, asking him about this practice. As expected, the elder said that parents wanted sons to continue their family names.

“If no-one in the tribe has any daughters, where will these sons find wives?” asked the interviewer. The elder confidently replied without hesitation, “They will get wives from other tribes.” “But what if the other tribes kill their female babies just like your tribe does?” the interviewer persisted (In fact, they had met people from several tribes, and indeed they all followed this terrifying practice). The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. “They will get wives from other tribes.”

“NPM install” isn’t going to be the direct result of a race condition in JavaScript. And while I’m not familiar with Python, I’d guess that an “Indentation error” wouldn’t be one either. A missing library or syntax error that’s only discovered by executing a particular branch is still just a missing library or syntax error, not a race condition.

Also, while Node.js is popular, it isn’t an integral part of JavaScript in the way that the other errors are integral to their respective languages.

For 2, one of the few pieces of Windows software that I haven’t been able to replace in Linux is GetRight. Many HTTP servers support downloads starting at an offset from the beginning of the file, and GetRight uses that to allow download pausing and resumption.

It was a real life saver back when I had an extremely flaky Internet connection.

EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions, I’ll definitely take a look at them. Simply resuming downloads is why I initally started using GetRight, but it also came with a bunch of other useful tools that I came to rely on. While I’ve been able to replicate some of the basic functionality with individual browser plugins or programs, I haven’t seen anything that integrates it all so well, with such a smooth interface. I haven’t looked for a long time, though, so maybe one of your suggestions will be the one!

A potential ley line blockage that’s cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?

Before everyone had Internet at home? Well, there were bulletin boards, but even without those? Yeah, swapping floppies was how they got around. I got hit a few times as a teen, but the worst one actually came from a legitimate copy of a game I bought secondhand. It got into the boot sector and I had to nuke the HDD from orbit to get rid of that one. I’m just glad that software BIOS updates weren’t a thing yet.

“… [it] isn’t actually necessary… the whole spell falls apart without it for some reason.”

That’s peak cargo cult programming spellcasting right there.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks

TL;DR: It all seems to have started with a (possibly deliberately) misnamed pair of socks for sale on Amazon. They began showing up as suggestions when people searched for programming-related items.

I was confused at first, because I saw this post less than an hour after it went up, but the game wasn’t free. Then I read the top post by developer and found that the game is free with ads through some other site/service called “Playmanity”.

Here’s a direct link.

This looks like an attempt to copy the “Hello Neighbor” concept wholesale, although the most trustworthy looking review has much worse things to say about it. The majority of the reviews are pretty obvious shills, but I’ll give a special shout-out to whoever wrote this line that made me laugh (I don’t think I’ve seen it before):

“Made me cry but the tears came out of my underwear.”

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner’s photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup “options”, which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do it while using the “service” normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these “services” with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I’d imagined.

Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol…

…Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust…

The list is infinite.

Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I’ll show you someone who can’t recognize spaghetti code when it’s written in one of their favourite languages.

I haven’t done it myself, but briefly flirted with the idea a while ago. This seems to be a solid guide, including tips specifically for the Surface Pro 8:

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup

Guys, I know AI slop sucks, but maybe don’t shoot the messenger (downvote OP)? I think it’s worth knowing how mainstream media is presenting this.

In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

MDN is great, especially for finding current best practice, but I’ve always found their material much more useful for reference once I’m already familiar with the general usage of whatever I’m trying to use. I often find it difficult to get to grips with something new just with MDN.

I usually go read W3Schools first. It’s mostly a bit out of date, but not so much that it’s useless, and I find the tutorials much easier to digest. Once I’m comfortable with the basics, I switch to MDN to get up to speed.

And OP, it sounds like you’re already wary of this, but don’t let yourself be tricked into using a hodge-podge of libraries for every little thing. A lot of JS programmers will tell you that you “need” some library or other to provide a function that you can often replicate with just two or three lines of raw JS, if you know what you’re doing.

I think the JS library addiction stems from the bad old days of browser incompatibility, when almost everything had to be wrapped in layers of complex compatibility shims.