mos_8502 :verified: 🇨🇦

Retrocomputing Maker and Designer in Ontario, Canada. I make stuff without promising a delivery date. I don't do crowdfunding, but I do gratefully accept Patreon and Ko-Fi support for what I do. 

Public Key

npub10wsmpgddr3tl4a5xa4h4mfhape70hree4rjqmx266054dq360u2s9lrxeh

NIP-05 Address

mos_8502@studio8502-ca.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8hgds5xk3c4l676rw6m6a5m7sul8m3uu63eqdn9dd862ksga879gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dspduwem

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub10wsmpgddr3tl4a5xa4h4mfhape70hree4rjqmx266054dq360u2s9lrxeh

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-08-11 23:52:19 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…vsjg Serious question: what can we actually do, as a profession, to deserve the title of "Engineer"?

2026-06-22 17:28:47 UTC

I honestly think that those data farms are intended for surveillance rather than LLM usage. There's no profit path for LLMs. The only company who has made a dollar from LLMs is nVidia.
But if you want to be the private contractor that provides the government with compute and capacity to track every person in North America, those data farms are table stakes.
What I can't work out is why they'd bother with that level of surveillance in a society already disinclined to rebellion.

2026-05-31 01:12:21 UTC

- reply

Linux was supposed to be for people who liked computers. Now it's just another incarnation of the same capitalist bullshit wearing a penguin costume.

2026-05-31 01:10:13 UTC

God I'm so sick of computer.
Not good computer, I still love my C64s and such. I mean the evil computer I have to use for everything else.

2026-04-22 02:18:38 UTC

Okay. I'm curious. I've tried the coding AIs. I didn't find them compelling or that interesting, beyond the level of "neat trick".
You have to use them at work. How are you doing it? What's your workflow like? What do you experience that I didn't?

2026-04-20 00:07:02 UTC

Honestly, I worry I may be burning out on programming full stop.

2026-04-14 12:33:04 UTC

The lesson of Y2K was this: if you fix the problem and do a very good job, you will be treated like you didn’t do anything and that the problem wasn’t real to begin with.

2026-04-08 16:47:48 UTC

Hrm. I have loads of ideas for countercomputing, but ideas aren’t worth much on their own. What the notion needs is more people involved.
Any interest in forming an informal Countercomputing Council to define and promulgate a standard design for a countercomputing system tha a community of user developers can build up together?

2026-04-07 02:17:02 UTC

Countercomputing Principles I just made up:
if you didn’t build it, you don’t understand it.
if you don’t understand it, you don’t own it.
if you don’t own it, it will be used to extract value from you.

2026-04-06 14:05:25 UTC

What a countercomputing platform needs. We will call this the “Level 0” spec - the absolute minimum definition of countercomputing.
It needs the ability to create and consume text, build software from source code, manage files, and the source for the OS must be available. The hardware design must be open source. All components must be available new from multiple distributors. The hardware and software must be extensible. Obviously this is a very broad spec, meant as a starting point for discussion rather than a guide to building something specific.

2026-03-23 23:49:38 UTC

I want GNUstep to look like this mock-up I made a couple years back. After I finish my game, I’m thinking I’ll get back to this.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/281/165/532/132/278/original/2cfc3a3862924d6f.png

2026-03-07 22:00:54 UTC

What's a fair price to pay someone for composing a SID tune for my game? Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?

2026-03-07 21:27:50 UTC

Trivia about me for #MARCHintosh: I own the fastest stock machine on which you can natively boot Mac OS 9.2.2: A dual 1.42GHz G4 MDD.
It fucking screams under 9.2.2, as well. Like, photoshop opening in a second fast.

2026-03-07 21:16:31 UTC

Why have I softened on AI? Not because I've used it and not been subject to addiction and madness, obviously. I still think it's less useful than advertised.
I'm just bothered by the harshness of the anti-AI side, because that sort of thing is unproductive in my experience. So I'm taking a gentler path with discouraging its use, or rather encouraging actual programming.

2026-03-02 17:29:12 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…ggeh “To a high degree” isn’t an argument that’s going to hold up in court, given the precedent and facts.

2026-03-02 17:25:35 UTC

The problem with calling LLMs plagiarism machines is that it’s not actually as simple as that. The statistical nature of the thing means it doesn’t actually contain the training data, just metadata about the shape of the training data. It’s a statistical anomaly that it can “leak” training data by accidentally reproducing something close to verbatim segments of it.
This matters both legally (it’s not copyright infringement to measure relative word frequency) and ethically (it’s not plagiarism to do that either).
This is a serious problem because sheer scale of compute has made it practical to generate vast quantities of plausible prose very fast, and reductive arguments that don’t match the facts won’t help stop it.

2026-03-01 17:35:03 UTC

Need to eat better. Pizza and ramen is no diet for a 43 year old who wants to see 73.
Starting today, with a light lunch of whole grain bread and a bowl of heavily spiced black beans. Cumin, paprika, oregano, etc.

2026-02-22 15:36:36 UTC

If you are against LLMs and forced to use them at work, I would like to know about your experience. What do you use it for, how do you use it, what do you do with the output, what’s your workflow? Do you feel productive? Do you resent being forced to use a tool you might or might not choose if offered the choice?

2026-02-08 02:32:17 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…vsjg Do you have an example of what you’re talking about I could look at?

2026-01-24 20:24:30 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…vsjg Sooner or later someone is going to have more than they can take. I worry about that day a lot.

2026-01-15 03:58:57 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…t05x I have an old GPU, but 64GB of system RAM and 24 logical cores in my Xeon workstation?

2026-01-15 03:54:55 UTC

- reply

Like… what does it cost for a model to run for just one person, self hosted?

2026-01-15 03:51:40 UTC

Okay. So the AI bubble bursts. It’s no longer financially viable to provide LLMs as a service. Okay. But the actual tech still exists. What do I, as a coder, need to own in that world to run something like ChatGPT or Claude locally?

2026-01-14 19:54:20 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…8udl The scam isn't the model, the scam is the rent-seeking capitalism in play.

2026-01-14 19:48:35 UTC

I would really like to know what training data was used by ChatGPT, that let it generate a working SID tracker engine, for the Commodore 64, in C11, that met every requirement I could name to the bloody thing, right down to code style notes, digi samples, sfx overriding voice 3, the whole schmeer, while making the code legible and comprehensible.
I know full well it can't think. I'm just puzzled by how exactly it synthesized this from a vague prose description.

2026-01-07 04:00:59 UTC

Discord, Matrix… why did we stop using IRC again?

2026-01-05 23:38:04 UTC

I would rather use XVESA and Motif and BDF fonts the rest of my life than use AI-generated OS code.

2025-12-30 22:03:14 UTC

Do the weird thing. Install Debian Potato on a modern threadripper.

2025-12-25 04:33:37 UTC

Happy Christmas to all. Hope you get that retro system you’ve been after in the morning.

2025-12-03 16:11:16 UTC

Forgive me for being a Luddite, but I just don’t think a toilet needs to have a camera installed in it.

2025-11-18 22:11:31 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…shhu @nprofile…pysq The money is a non issue to me. He’s done the right thing transferring the control to a non profit.

2025-11-11 18:10:15 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…zjv9 Wait, he’s mad about approximate methods? The thing you are supposed to use when there’s no way to get an exact answer?

2025-10-31 02:23:08 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…t48u It's worth noting that installing via this method requires files from an existing Windows installation, which is a problem if you have no such thing.

2025-10-12 19:59:27 UTC

What should I have for dinner today?

2025-08-09 17:54:17 UTC

Here's a question for someone smarter than I am: How do you know you're in denial? How do you tell the difference between what you know about yourself and what you only think you know?

2025-07-20 16:21:40 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…jcqa Alcohol.

2025-07-14 02:45:34 UTC

Let me put it to you: How many active Commodore 64 users, "real" hardware and modern equivalents, do you think there are in the world? 5,000? 10,000? Retrocomputing is a small world.

2025-07-10 22:02:24 UTC

Shit just worked better when you used a text editor for 99% of the things you did on a computer.

2025-07-10 03:16:40 UTC

Seriously? $300 for a console, no games included? Not even a copy of Gunhed or Bonk?
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/826/763/755/064/897/original/aa77a21a6144a749.png

2025-06-01 00:35:00 UTC

Needs more mounting holes, and the silkscreen can be rearranged a bit to use up some space, but it's routed and passes DRC.
This version is more or less the same as rev 1, but adds a ROM cartridge port (mapped to 0x400000-0xBFFFFF, 8MB of address space without banking!) and the clock port, which provides 64 addresses of I/O space with a select line, plus bit-banged I2C pins to play with. Perfect for small add-ons like a wifi modem or a realtime clock.
Fujinet, maybe?
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/605/292/077/101/621/original/fab476f73647af8e.png

2025-05-31 22:50:47 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…0kak Long term that will be possible.

2025-05-31 20:17:54 UTC

I'm half tempted to double the width on the Sentinel 65X board, and add back the cartridge slot and two more SNES controller ports.

2025-04-22 18:42:20 UTC

Back from the sleep clinic. Diagnosis: Severe obstructive sleep apnea.
Fuck.

2025-04-01 15:43:24 UTC

Another change in revision 5 of the prototype is that I extended the board length a bit, to flush up the SD card slot and the fronts of the controller ports. This would make it much easier for someone interested to design a console style case.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/263/467/150/776/002/original/c249cccf8eb787f5.png

2025-03-25 20:59:07 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…m3qg Worst to use, or worst ethically? Because this is about ethics.

2025-03-25 13:05:59 UTC

Imagine a world where people who want to work as programmers had to maintain ethical standards to keep their licenses. How much better the world would have become.

2025-03-09 05:03:20 UTC

Inspiration: A pi400 like keyboard wedge computer, but with the design language of an old school Unix workstation like an SGI or a Sun SPARC system.

2025-03-07 03:59:25 UTC

Sometimes programming is like a model train, or a big minecraft build. You just want someone to look at it and validate all the work you clearly put in with the same enthusiasm as you feel when you solved the last big problem.

2025-03-03 16:26:13 UTC

- reply

You're already a criminal in their eyes for existing while queer, trans, immigrant, or racial minority. The law will come down on you when it wants to, regardless of what you do or do not do, so you have no incentive to care what is and is not legal. Instead, follow your conscience.

2025-03-03 16:23:43 UTC

"Is that legal" isn't a question worth asking anymore. If you want things to get better, you're going to have to get comfortable with going against the law.

2025-03-02 19:13:48 UTC

You may well be asking yourself, what is it these evil fucks want so badly?
It's simple. They want to abuse you and be loved by you for it. They want you to admit that they are superior, you are inferior, and that you deserve whatever they do to you.

2025-03-02 17:22:42 UTC

I'm unconvinced that the Web is worth saving at this point.
We were better off with FTP, Gopher, and BBSes.
I'm not just being nostalgic here -- I mean, the modern web is a technological monstrosity which ruins everything it touches. And yes, I am typing this in a web browser. And yes, I do hate it.
We used to solve problems by creating open protocols which were simple to implement on any platform. We didn't create a shitty fake computer to run shitty fake applications and disguise it as a web browser.
The Web is the ultimate example of toxic scope creep.

2025-02-27 23:55:50 UTC

Okay, look, guys, I know I can be a bit... rough, curt, even rude at times. But this Accidental Haiku account's behaviour is fucking rancid.
https://mastodon.world/@AccidentalHaiku/with_replies

2025-02-25 00:18:33 UTC

As programmers, our discipline must reckon with the fact that we have permitted men of the lowest sort of character to acquire our skills and use them to ill ends.

2025-02-25 00:08:53 UTC

- reply

To put it more simply: Don't write programs that fascists can use to hurt minorities. Don't write programs abusive spouses can use to spy on their victims. Don't make the world worse by your ability, don't waste your talents on the undeserving.

2025-02-25 00:07:45 UTC

I believe the moral duty of every programmer is to make programs that enhance life -- be it by amusement, aesthetic, or practical utility -- for those who are deserving of their work, and to deny their work to fascism and all other toxic ideologies. It's that simple.

2025-02-21 20:46:39 UTC

Seems pretty simple, no?
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/043/833/172/395/429/original/46b6f50aa0177e11.png

2025-02-16 03:39:36 UTC

The real reason a working class revolution has never happened in the US is because none of them seem to even know what "working class" even means.

2025-02-15 19:21:44 UTC

People used to imagine being a superhero. Now they just imagine being saved by one.
The difference points at something very bad. Our imaginations fuel our future, our narratives shape our lives -- and the narrative has been poisoned.

2024-09-10 00:31:48 UTC

If Wayland is so great, how come it doesn't have an eight volume set of big thick technical manuals that explain every aspect of it?
(This is only half-joking -- this is the level of documentation I expect from Very Important Software™ if they want me to take it seriously.)
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/113/110/430/536/896/731/original/a71f053141646357.png

2024-08-30 13:20:33 UTC

sed is a text editor. Specifically it’s a non-interactive editor for text streams. It’s meant to be used as part of a pipeline that processes text. It can do many types of edit, but the one I use most is basically “find and replace”.
sed -e ‘s/foo/bar/g’ < infile.txt > outfile.txt
will make outfile.txt a copy of infile.txt with all instances of “foo” replaced with “bar”.

2024-08-17 03:00:36 UTC

How come Access Control Lists haven’t supplanted Unix permissions yet?

2024-05-03 02:08:53 UTC

This is just lovely.
Devzat is a custom SSH server that serves an IRC like chat service instead of a shell login.
https://github.com/quackduck/devzat

2024-03-03 21:13:37 UTC

So many people are so close to realizing how important open hardware is.

2024-03-03 21:07:39 UTC

- reply

@npub18yv…xxyn BNC?