11mo ago

Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language

www.tomshardware.com Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language

Inkbox on YouTube asks, "Remember when I said my sanity stood in the way?" before detailing his Excel-ASM16 language

Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language

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EVERYONE IS SO MUCH BETTER AT COMPUTERS THAN MEEEEEEEE
- Everyone? You sure? Just off the top of my head, I've witnessed:
  A fellow millennial recently calling his tower "the modem".
  A user who thinks a computer experiencing a "crash", as in the unexpected termination of a process, means everything on the hard drive was just lost.
  A teacher who swears their fiber optic internet connection always slows down when it rains.
  A family member who thinks cell phones are actually miraculous.
  An IT director who decided to save time while rewiring an entire school district's network by forgoing patch panels completely, terminating hundreds of CAT-6 cables (which he first laid directly on top of the drop ceiling grid) with RJ45 connectors plugged straight into switches, labeling each with masking tape.
  A police officer who called his chief and supervisor over to his desk in order to explain that he discovered a massive vulnerability on the agency website, demonstrating the risk by showing them how he was able to change some text with the browser's element inspector.
  A software developer who only used Internet Explorer (years ago when Chrome was still arguably the best option) because "Google tracks you". He was later sentenced to decades in federal prison for organizing the production of CSAM on the surface web, not the darknet, mostly over Craigslist.
  
  To be fair to 4, cell phones are miraculous.
  
  In its simplest form, they're amalgamated rocks we taught to internally process lightning.
  
  Daaamn that’s a good one
  
  3 is possible if the physical run to your home is in bad shape. I've known two people who had weather dependant internet due to that.
  
  Actually, I'd chalk it up to a radio backhaul between the fiber demark and the ISP's router. Providers do weird shit sometimes.
  But I'd be surprised if getting a fiber connection wet would affect it.
  
  Fiber can be surprisingly resilient to bad connections so if water is getting into a lose connection or very minor break that could be messing with the laser path and increasing the optical loss
  
  6 got me LMAO
  
  My boss called me immediately to tell me about that one because he knew I'd laugh my ass off.
  
  It's true. All of it.
  
  that doesn't make my unencrypted jellyfin server look so bad.
  
  The last one bugs me. I keep my mouth shut about my issues with tracking because I fucking hate being a product for corpos, but because child predators avoid it as well, I get looked at like a perv for doing that. Apparently good people do their utmost to remove their privacy in order to avoid such appearances.
  
  Number 4 is kind of correct, but I suspect the family member means it in a magical kind of miraculous?
  
  Right, as in something other than the result of careful research and development. She's just older and doesn't have the slightest idea how anything works, habitually trying three different appliances to warm up her coffee when the power goes out before realizing they all need electricity, so it's all just magic and mystery.
  Then again, it's people like us who say things like "computers are just rocks we tricked into thinking by putting lightning inside of them" so I don't not get it.
  
  It's absolutely mind-blowing to me that people discovered how to get electric into homes not 200 years ago and now we have really powerful computers in our pockets.
  No need for fancy stories about rocks and lightning. And the absolute majority of people have no idea how most common household stuff works, because it just werks and you have running water, heating and cooling, refrigerators, hot showers and what not
  
  Calling something magic because you're using that to mean "something made with science beyond my understanding" is definitely different from using it as "this is literally magic made by sorcerers".
  One is a joke, the other is evidence of the failure of the educational system.
  
  At least it's a real world demonstration of the concept that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
  
  I've been that, only it was "processor", not "modem".
  I've met a guy of the "Windows reinstaller" kind, who thought that you can reformat a hard drive if it has SMART warnings and they'll go away.
  This may not be entirely false, if it rains in a wider area. Say, lots of people use the same infrastructure via wireless connections, and when it rains, their have packets dropped more often etc, sometimes connections interrupted because of this, then even on L3 there's more actual traffic because of resending packets, even on application level trying to do something many times instead of doing it once. So in the end there's more load on the same infrastructure, and the connection may be slower even for people connected via fiber. I'm not a network admin so this may look clumsy.
  Well, life is less interesting for them than it could be.
  Seen too much of similar things.
  I've been that.
  Actual criminals think differently from us, and I'd say there's an element of evolution to this, so they are likely right and we are likely wrong.
- I know how to navigate a Windows file system and my 13-year-old daughter doesn't. So I can still feel superior to someone!

57 comments