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Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

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Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#111
post #43

There was a coding competition at a local podunk BBS back in ~’91. I figured I would use it as an excuse to learn some assembly. The goal of the challenge i entered was to find all of the prime numbers between one and a million. Of course my goal with the assembly approach was speed and executable size. In both of those I smoked the competition by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude. But the scoring mechanism was heavily weig…

Get this, an old greybeard I worked with told me managers used to harsh on LoC at companies like IBM back in those days as a measure of productivity. Like people got fired over what you lost the contest on. Insane, I can see why that would tick you off

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#112

It was so fun working with Hack Clubbers on this project! Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened. We ended up making this guide as we learned, since a lot of the resources we were working with weren't the easiest to parse. Happy to answer any questions :)

I gotta say, it's pretty cool how nice young people have it these days with what's available in terms of stuff like Hack Club. The whole scene has become WAY more inclusive as a result of things like that, and the acerbic hacker archetype who snaps at you for not knowing things the way they do is so dead as a result - that to me is great, I don't miss those guys and their gatekeeping. If you want to check out some fu…

You just brought a random memory from uni where a small group of people wanted to get others interested in cybersecurity and did a weekly session on teaching others.. First meeting had a huge turnout and I expected future meetings to consist of learning through teaching us concepts with some practical tasks, except it became a session of just a few people talking to each other using security terminology that no one understood because it was meant to be introductory.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#113
post #36

I'd like to share an old Dylan Cuthbert blog post on his hypothesis that Assembly is actually easier for kids to learn programming. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-03-30-machine-co...

that was my experience too. An abstraction like "add" is not less complicated than "1" if both are equally new things. The number actually gives additional features. The next instruction is called "2" while in abstraction to words it is unguessable and hard to remember: unGuessAble? un_guessable? ungu? ung?

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#114
post #92
post #14

Assembly language is actually simple stuff. You just need to read the datasheet. No difficult type systems to deal with. In the old days programming assembly language was nasty because one mistake could mean your computer had to be rebooted and you lost your work. Not anymore.

Just read the data sheet! googles Intel CPU data sheet Ah, here we go. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces... Just two volumes and 1000 pages of reading. Simple!

Intel assembly is complex due backwards compatibility and extensions.

I've found working with a simpler, smaller processor can be an absolute joy.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so amazing, I completely agree! It's really inspiring honestly. And... OH MY GOD FURBY SOURCECODE THIS IS AWESOME THANK YOU

Glad you find joy in it. It's 6502 assembly, in case you were wondering - Though the chip was a low-voltage 6502-alike called the Sunplus. Those things were pretty crazy when they glitched out, my friend had one which would get thrown in into a loop where it just open and close its eyes looking from side to side going WEAOWEAOWEAOWEAO like some kind of possessed demon until you took the batteries out. Oh yeah, obliga…

> Those things were pretty crazy when they glitched out [...] thrown into a loop like some kind of possessed demon

I was under the impression that this is the primary memorable feature of Furbies.

The second one is the Furby Organ, of course: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta say, it's pretty cool how nice young people have it these days with what's available in terms of stuff like Hack Club. The whole scene has become WAY more inclusive as a result of things like that, and the acerbic hacker archetype who snaps at you for not knowing things the way they do is so dead as a result - that to me is great, I don't miss those guys and their gatekeeping. If you want to check out some fu…

You just brought a random memory from uni where a small group of people wanted to get others interested in cybersecurity and did a weekly session on teaching others.. First meeting had a huge turnout and I expected future meetings to consist of learning through teaching us concepts with some practical tasks, except it became a session of just a few people talking to each other using security terminology that no one u…

I think the big thing is that pedagogy itself is a hugely broad subject and especially skill that you might just dunning-kruger yourself hard on thinking you're good at. I always thought school would have been a lot more engaging if the teachers were actually paid enough to give a damn, they have a tremendously undervalued skill set and we put our kids in the trust of them while cutting their salaries every other year or so? What the hell is the motivation at that point?

I really cut my teeth on programming getting yelled at a lot by a guy in German about meeting OpenBSD kodequalität and that kind of sucked, to be honest I was at a point one time after enough workplace toxicity in IT (Getting sexually harassed by a boss at a megacorp guaranteed I don't ever want to work at one of those places again especially) where I figured I'd rather be a bee farmer or something instead. There's really no necessity for that kind of attitude but some people have been going around acting like this is the way things are in IT so you better suck it up and get used to it, especially when there's a lot of money on the line, and it's definitely true that a LOT of people could learn better on how to write code that doesn't get hacked or crashes, because often there isn't just tons of money on the line but people's health, safety, and wellness - but if the health, safety and wellness of the person writing the code is affected by some insanely stupid cultural assumption that's existed in this industry, then how good are they ultimately going to be at it in their code? It was kind of funny watching Linus Torvalds explode at people for these things back in the day, but in hindsight I'm very glad he took some time off to become a more emotionally and socially mature person for the good of the project. I don't want to work in an industry where it's just smelly angry brogrammers with maturity issues, the more that changes the better and I think I see it happening quite rapidly.

What these kids are doing is a huge step in the right direction, I applaud them. They seem to get what the past half century or so of people seem to have been kind of embarrassingly bad at and that's just being decent human beings with each other.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#117
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you find joy in it. It's 6502 assembly, in case you were wondering - Though the chip was a low-voltage 6502-alike called the Sunplus. Those things were pretty crazy when they glitched out, my friend had one which would get thrown in into a loop where it just open and close its eyes looking from side to side going WEAOWEAOWEAOWEAO like some kind of possessed demon until you took the batteries out. Oh yeah, obliga…

> Those things were pretty crazy when they glitched out [...] thrown into a loop like some kind of possessed demon I was under the impression that this is the primary memorable feature of Furbies. The second one is the Furby Organ, of course: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o

My favorite demonic animatronic toy must be the ol' setting tickle me elmo on fire while he starts laughing like a maniac about how much it tickles [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYGhmJD9LKc

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#118
> why the Rollercoaster Tycoon creator would write 99% of the game in it

Not sure how true it is, but I heard that keeping track of a lot of objects required plenty of optimization, and apparently such levels of detail may have not been in games before. RCT was the second Tycoon game by Chris Sawyer, after Transport Tycoon from 1994—which is also in assembly and which keeps track of buses and trucks each with its own parameters, trains with each car, signals on the roads; of every passenger and every batch of goods: where it's from, how long it's on the way, etc. (At least if OpenTTD recreates the mechanics faithfully.) You can also pop up several windows with views to different parts of the map or following various vehicles.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#120

It was so fun working with Hack Clubbers on this project! Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened. We ended up making this guide as we learned, since a lot of the resources we were working with weren't the easiest to parse. Happy to answer any questions :)

>Happy to answer any questions :) what happens when a member hits 20?

They’re taken away to be… replaced by someone more fit, capable, and attractive.
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