121–126 of 126 posts
This is super cool. Would love to see a Z80 simulator set up with these examples to play with!
It's just one-shot AI slop - literally, the prompt was 'make a web based version of [github url of this project]' and it spat this out. It appears to work fine.
I'll keep it up for a couple of months and then it'll be auto-deleted, no sense in keeping it around longer than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have great doubts that you were doing simultaneous screen sharing from multiple participants with group annotation plus HD video in your group calls, all while supporting chatting that allowed you to upload and view multiple animated gifs, videos, rich formatted text, reactions, slash command and application automation integrations, all simultaneously on your Pentium 3. I would be interested to know the name of the…
You're grasping at anything to justify the unjustifiable. Not only did I do most (not all, obviously) of those things in my Pentium 3, including video and voice chat, screenshare, and silly animated gifs and rich text formatting, but also: that's beside the point. Let's compare like with like then; how much memory does it take to have a group chat with a few people and do a voice/video in MSN messenger or the origina…
And you bring up things that are supposedly bad about Slack that are basically non-existent boogeymen. UI stutter, load time, and excessive memory use, I can’t think of any time any of these things have existed at all or noticeably impacted my experience on Slack on a basic low end laptop.
Those older apps like MSN Messenger and the original Skype didn’t actually do the things that Slack does now. I mean specifically multiple simultaneous screen shares plus annotations plus HD video feeds (with important features like blurred and replaced backgrounds, added by Skype in 2019) for all participants plus running an entire productivity app in the background at the same time.
Skype didn’t have screen sharing, at all, until 2009.
https://content.dsp.co.uk/history-of-skype
You call this situation “unjustifiable” but we would struggle to find any personal computing device sold at any price point that can’t handle the application smoothly. If I go back five years and buy a $200 mini PC or a $300 iPad or $500 laptop it’s going to run Slack just fine.
Specs are just arbitrary numbers on a box. It doesn’t matter that we got to the moon using a turd and a ham sandwich for a computer.
You can’t accept that the layperson doesn’t care that back in my day we walked uphill both ways for 15 miles on our dial-up connection. If it works, it works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. And CU-SeeMe did that in the early 90s with even worse hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323 > It’s an extremely powerful application when you really…
Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what specs you think Slack should run on and link me to an example program that has 100% feature parity that stays within those specs? Showing me a black and white Showing me that someone thought of a protocol is pointless. Just look at the history of HDTV. We wouldn’t really describe HDTV as being available to consumers despite it existing in the early 1990s. I’d also like you…
1 Ghz processor, 512 MB RAM (might even manage 256 MB), 1080p monitor. And "a graphics accelerator", "a sound card", and "a webcam and microphone".
Probably even less on the RAM and CPU.
> and link me to an example program that has 100% feature parity that stays within those specs?
Windows 2000. Or XP.
That's the point. The OS supports all the apps needed to do whatever.
Making Slack into a monolithic blob to do all is just an example of the inner platform effect.
But if you insist: IE 7 would have been able to do all this. It's an app. It's also an example of the inner platform effect.
> Showing me a black and white You should've thought of that before trying to "well akshually" me about which versions of FaceTime support multi-user video calling.
You want video calling? We had that 30 years ago on systems with total RAM smaller than current CPU cache, with internal busses whose bandwidth was less than your mobile's 5G signal, on screens smaller than the icon that has to be submitted to the App Store, with cameras roughly comparable to what we now use for optical mice, running over networks that were MacGyvered onto physical circuits intended for a single analogue voice signal.
Out of everything you list that Slack can do, the only thing that should even be remotely taxing is the HD video calling. Nothing else, at all. And the only reasons for even that to be taxing is correctly offloading work to the GPU and that you want HD. The GPU should handle this kind of thing trivially so long as you know how to use it.
All the "business logic" you mention in the other thread… if you can't handle the non-video business logic needed to be a server hosting 2000 simultaneous users on something with specs similar to a Raspberry Pi, you're not trying hard enough. I've done that. Business logic is the easy part for anything you can describe as "chat". Even if you add some minigames in there and the server is keeping track of the games, it should be a rounding error on a modern system.
I tried on a cycle-accurate emulator of a TRS-80 Model I with Omikron CP/M mapper. Most Z-80 machines of the time were 4MHz, but the TRS-80 was only 1.77 MHz.
1. Type "GUESS", get question prompt.
2. User types: "Are you an animal?", ENTER key
3. Wait 25 seconds
4. Program prints "N"
5. Wait 20 seconds
6. Program prints "O"
7. Wait 23 seconds
8. Program prints linefeed, returns to question prompt
Total time to return 2-char answer to user's question: 1 min 9 sec or so. I bet a longer answer would take proportionally longer.
"The wonder isn't that it does it well, it's a wonder it does it at all."
It runs, but it would be very slow on actual hardware. I tried on a cycle-accurate emulator of a TRS-80 Model I with Omikron CP/M mapper. Most Z-80 machines of the time were 4MHz, but the TRS-80 was only 1.77 MHz. 1. Type "GUESS", get question prompt. 2. User types: "Are you an animal?", ENTER key 3. Wait 25 seconds 4. Program prints "N" 5. Wait 20 seconds 6. Program prints "O" 7. Wait 23 seconds 8. Program prints li…
I think I can do a little bit better; maybe 10% faster.
It runs, but it would be very slow on actual hardware. I tried on a cycle-accurate emulator of a TRS-80 Model I with Omikron CP/M mapper. Most Z-80 machines of the time were 4MHz, but the TRS-80 was only 1.77 MHz. 1. Type "GUESS", get question prompt. 2. User types: "Are you an animal?", ENTER key 3. Wait 25 seconds 4. Program prints "N" 5. Wait 20 seconds 6. Program prints "O" 7. Wait 23 seconds 8. Program prints li…
Though it'll still be kinda slow on a Model I, I've written an about 9 times faster Z-80 code for the network evaluation. I imagine the pull request will end up in the main depot but for now you can find it in https://github.com/gp48k/z80ai I think I can do a little bit better; maybe 10% faster.