Notices by Elias Mårtenson (loke@functional.cafe), page 7

@lynnesbian Which of your projects has the most commits?

@craigmaloney Wow. You're right. I only got into Atari with the ST, so I'm not familiar with the history.

I do like the 8-bit Ataris though. I fairly recently played some games on them for the first tiem and they were very good.

@craigmaloney Specifically talking about 8-bit computers of course. Atari made 16- and 32-bit computes in the 90's.

@craigmaloney Which Atari from the 70's were you using? I was under the impression all the computers were from the 80's?

@craigmaloney I meant to say “learned”. 🙂

@craigmaloney Ah yes. I agree actually. I did a little bit of assembly on the C64, but I also never really did that much of it. I started doing a lot of assembly on the Atari ST. The 68k architecture was much more pleasant to work with.

@craigmaloney I'm not sure I was trying to help. 🙂

I was providing my perspective, which would have been interesting if you, as I believed, leaved programming in the 2000's.

@craigmaloney What did the programming magazines say? Back in the 80's, the magazines that were devoted to the C64 and similar machines were definitely talking about assembly. It was pretty much the only way you could get anything resembling high performance. BASIC was really too slow.

@craigmaloney What year did you learn programming?

I come from a generation where you learned programming by working very close to the hardware (8-bit micros) and even when using a high-level language you still knew precisely how that translated to low-level instructions.

This knowledge has served me very well, and even today I try to avoid looking at any component as being a black box, but rather think of things in terms of the underlying hardware.

@craigmaloney I was looking at assembly code from a core dump as late as last week. Assembly knowledge is definitely still needed.

@juliobiason I have several. What kind of gloves should I get?

I'm also wondering if I'm holding the handlebars too tightly when mountain biking

@eal
Domestic flight? Given your username I'd expect you to be russian?

@er1n @substack Bach is Heavy Metal for the Baroque

@amiloradovsky @veer66 The term variable, meaning "a value which may vary", seems to pretty accurately represent the programmer's view.

@quad There isn't much. You can show how much time is spent doing IO, and iotop is pretty useful for that.

It also depends on what you mean by bottleneck. For example, a "cp" will spend pretty much all its time doing IO, but there isn't necessarily any bottleneck.

@quad If I recall correctly (I have to reach back a long time here) the history of iowait was that when you had single-core machines, the iowait percentage indicated how much time the CPU had to wait for io while it had no other tasks to do.

In other words, it gave you an idea as to how much faster your system would be with faster disks.

Once multi-core systems became common, this number stopped being very useful.

For you, it is indeed telling you that your IO is bad, but that's not new. 🙂

@quad iowait doesn't use any CPU resources though, so saying it takes some percentage of CPU time is a bit inaccurate.

@veer66 I have to say that that is not very surprising to me. What makes you think it wouldn't be used?

@piggo
Doesn't mstdn.jp have a lot of that?

@kaniini @Aerdan @annika It's available at much lower cost in other countries, so it's definitely doable.