Viewing profile — PopePompus

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I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do t…

Don't forget the N950! It was an aluminum body successor to the N900, with a glorious slide-out keyboard. Built like a tank. They were never released for sale to the public, perhap…

I'm still alive, and college wasn't really sold primarily as a financial investment when I attended in the 1970s.

What happened if you used auto-decrement addressing with the PC? Did that hang the computer?

I've read this paper several times, over the years, and I've never understood why its considered such a landmark. I think it could be losslessly compressed to one paragraph of mode…

I had an old astronomy app I wrote for pre-iPhone app store era Nokia phones (N900 etc.). I decided to get Claude code recreate it as an Android app. The old app produced several d…

How do you do the cleanup? Just /simplify or something you rolled yourself?

Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches,…

This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive n…

On my unrooted Pixel, I get "Permission denied" errors if I ls /sys, /dev, /proc and / within Termux. And /usr and /var don't exist.

I don't think it's actually the VM crashing, it's the Android OS killing what it thinks is an idle app.

Because, wonderful as Termux is, it has a very nonstandard filesystem layout, so installation scripts for something like Anaconda will not run without extensive modifications. And …

Also, if your Android phone is a Pixel, you can run the recently added Terminal app, which runs a plain vanilla Debian distribution within a VM. So you then have a pocketable Linux…

Mass surveillance by corporations, bad as it is, is less of a threat than mass surveillance by the government. Google can't put you in prison.

Yes, but all problems with tainted food are not as visually obvious as mold. After some bad surprises, I've decided to never eat anything I ordered from Amazon.

The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It…

I'm sure grateful that you did that. I've been surprised by how little online discussion of this app I've seen. It's just extremely cool to be walking around with a real gnu/linux …

There is a third option (in addition to the native app and Termux) to get emacs running. The recently added (to at least Pixel phones) "Terminal" app runs a standard Debian distrib…

Iowa City is the bluest of Iowa cities. It's a university town.

It's actually not in the app store, and it may only be available on Pixel phones. You get the app not by downloading it from anywhere, you just enable "developer mode" in the syste…

I use Android phones, and there are at least two ways to get iPython going on an Android phone. The first is Termux, which provides a gnu userspace atop the Android kernel. This ap…

There was a time when I would have salivated over this. But now I can run iPython on my phone, and have numpy, sympi, scipy, astropy and countless other packages. Physical keyboard…

Yes, DEC did use a non-IEEE floating point format at least through the VAX-11 era. I was fooled by the title too.

> If elon musk makes interstellar car that can reach the nearest star in 1 second and priced it at 1k, I guarantee within a year people will be bored of it and finding some angle t…