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I never thought about it but one day AI will port itself to another device. That’s a crazy thought.
We'll probably see that happen in professional malware first.
+1 to software/hardware necromancy. How does a Linux port make it easier to port emulators or console games? Is this a step towards getting an N64 on a modern (?) stack like qemu+linux?
> How does a Linux port make it easier to port emulators or console games? It helps emulator development by giving you something to work with inside of your emulator that actually has some tooling to let you look around and test out the system from the inside, unlike trying to get a game working. If Linux-N64 can boot, you can expect that a lot of your code is working properly.
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Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1] Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
Yes, and also GEOS running in a Commodore 64
This completely blows my mind, but also seems a natural fit considering the SGI lineage of the N64. It's like a super budget IRIX workstation ;P
But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
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Win3.x would be fine with 4MB of RAM, and it's (just barely) enough for Win95 too. But those OSs were definitely optimised for low resource consumption far more heavily than Linux.
Linux wasn’t always this bloated. My first Linux system had 3 megs of RAM. This was back in 1993. A 386SX laptop with 1 meg on the motherboard plus a 2 meg expansion. I could barely run X.
There are significantly less bloated desktop environments, but people like their bling, and bling by default includes an accompanying increase in resource consumption.
Look at Raspbian. It looks pretty good, but uses a lot less resources than gnome and kde. You can add to it if you want it to be as bloated as the typical desktop environments. But it's a choice.
Personally I'm in love with tiling desktops which use even less resources yet. And they're blazingly fast.
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We'll probably see that happen in professional malware first.
TBH, if I recall correctly, something similar happened already in the past just by pure coincidence. I'm pretty sure somebody somewhere already experiments with self-porting AI malware.
> "But why", I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. > Most importantly, because I can. Good. All I can say is at least it is something different to what I keep seeing on HN. (React, Rust, Kubernetes, JAMstack, JavaScript, etc.) Probably present this somewhere in a conference (CCC, FOSDEM, etc). Who knows who could be looking at this.
Are the Linux tests deterministic, and the tests for this change will not run unless something directly affects it? If not, then I’m not a huge fan of these commits, which seem more about vanity.
> "But why", I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. > Most importantly, because I can. Good. All I can say is at least it is something different to what I keep seeing on HN. (React, Rust, Kubernetes, JAMstack, JavaScript, etc.) Probably present this somewhere in a conference (CCC, FOSDEM, etc). Who knows who could be looking at this.
> and fb or console games. Btw., what are "fb games"?
Wow, four people guessed (or trolled) framebuffer. Interesting.
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Linux wasn’t always this bloated. My first Linux system had 3 megs of RAM. This was back in 1993. A 386SX laptop with 1 meg on the motherboard plus a 2 meg expansion. I could barely run X.
I would argue that it isn't Linux that is bloated. Linux is the kernel. It is the desktop environments and the things added to them to make each distro distinct (and fat). There are significantly less bloated desktop environments, but people like their bling, and bling by default includes an accompanying increase in resource consumption. Look at Raspbian. It looks pretty good, but uses a lot less resources than gnome…
> "But why", I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. > Most importantly, because I can. Good. All I can say is at least it is something different to what I keep seeing on HN. (React, Rust, Kubernetes, JAMstack, JavaScript, etc.) Probably present this somewhere in a conference (CCC, FOSDEM, etc). Who knows who could be looking at this.
> and fb or console games. Btw., what are "fb games"?