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Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

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31–40 of 46 posts

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#31
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because he's a bit of a gun nut on the side? He did some computer videos casually carrying a rifle of some kind slung over his shoulder. I still enjoy his videos.

A lot of vintage restorers don't like him and people like him because he goes Wow! Look at This! and then suddenly a bunch of middle aged men with beards have that exact thing on their shelf. And those of us doing preservation and restoration suddenly are priced out of the hobby we've been in for decades. Also, his technical "work" is not great. In fact, it's really bad. Even his successful fixes show a lack of atten…

Most of his restoration work on videos limited to just being cosmetic at best with his expertise just being retrobriting.

When there was an issue on the motherboard, he almost always outsourced to his more tech-savy friends to fix it for him.

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gun nut on the side, he had a rather ill-informed (at best) video on AI a while ago (before the current LLM craze), and has once done a pretty reckless attempt at repairing a unique IBM machine – as in, opening the PSU with a dremel tool and then then bridging a circuit with a paperclip.

Yeah, that paperclip episode was where I stopped watching.

For reference, here is the video with the timestamp when he shorts the power supply with the paperclip: https://youtu.be/Wh2OCBZpzZ8?t=273

Instead of deleting the video and owning up to his mistake, he just deactivated the comments...

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#34
post #21

python3 -c 'import random, time, itertools; any(time.sleep(0.01) or print(random.choice("\u2571\u2572"), end="", flush=True) for x in itertools.repeat(None))'

This isn't much impressive because can always import some package to do everything to you.

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#35
post #21

python3 -c 'import random, time, itertools; any(time.sleep(0.01) or print(random.choice("\u2571\u2572"), end="", flush=True) for x in itertools.repeat(None))'

This isn't much impressive because can always import some package to do everything to you.

Note that only Python standard modules are imported, no third-party libraries.

The “random” module is needed, because Python does not have a built-in replacement for BASIC’s RND(). The “time” module is merely to add delays, to emulate the style of normal BASIC interpreters on old – i.e. very slow – computers. You could remove it without any change in output. And lastly, the “itertools” module is used to get an infinite loop on a Python one-liner; Python, with its whitespace-based block structure, has a hard time doing anything significant in a single line otherwise.

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#36
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't much impressive because can always import some package to do everything to you.

Note that only Python standard modules are imported, no third-party libraries. The “random” module is needed, because Python does not have a built-in replacement for BASIC’s RND(). The “time” module is merely to add delays, to emulate the style of normal BASIC interpreters on old – i.e. very slow – computers. You could remove it without any change in output. And lastly, the “itertools” module is used to get an infini…

You could use `iter(lambda:1,0)` to get an infinite iterator, then itertools can be dropped.

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that only Python standard modules are imported, no third-party libraries. The “random” module is needed, because Python does not have a built-in replacement for BASIC’s RND(). The “time” module is merely to add delays, to emulate the style of normal BASIC interpreters on old – i.e. very slow – computers. You could remove it without any change in output. And lastly, the “itertools” module is used to get an infini…

You could use `iter(lambda:1,0)` to get an infinite iterator, then itertools can be dropped.

Nice!

  python3 -c 'import random, time; any(time.sleep(0.01) or print(random.choice("\u2571\u2572"), end="", flush=True) for x in iter(lambda: 0, 1))'

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that paperclip episode was where I stopped watching.

For reference, here is the video with the timestamp when he shorts the power supply with the paperclip: https://youtu.be/Wh2OCBZpzZ8?t=273 Instead of deleting the video and owning up to his mistake, he just deactivated the comments...

I think it’s an embarrassing mistake that I probably would have entirely edited out if I were him. But I don’t watch his hardware restoration videos because he’s a source of electrical knowledge. They’re pure entertainment.

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because he's a bit of a gun nut on the side? He did some computer videos casually carrying a rifle of some kind slung over his shoulder. I still enjoy his videos.

Gun nut is fine. One can be a gun nut without supporting the awful ideas/people within that domain. It's the support of awful ideas/people in that domain them that make him "controversial" (a.k.a. anti-social asshole, that insist being an anti-social asshole is simply a personality trait, immune to criticism)

Nah these days you pick a team and cancel the other.

Re: Zero Lines Maze: What the 8-Bit Guy's One-Liner Can Still Teach Us

#40

The lookup table is interesting. I wonder why pretty much no 1980s home computer BASICs included bitwise operations?

They did. AND, OR and NOT were bitwise operations as well as conditional operators. E.g. POKE 254, PEEK(254) AND 127 would turn off bit 7 of memory location 254 without affecting other bits.
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