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Not a lawyer but I don't think home repairs void most home insurances in common law countries unless you are working with parts that are particularly dangerous, part of a safety system to protect others, and/or absolutely require a skilled professional.

I'm pretty sure that if a fire starts in my central vacuum unit, and my insurance company does an investigation that finds a DIY swap of power electronics components in that unit, I would at the very least be in a lengthy legal battle to get any money back.

That’s not true in the US, which is what the post above yours was trying to explain.

The move from LGPL to Apache/MIT as the default license only _really_ benefit business.

There was a lot of FUD against LGPL that was probably driven by the fact that businesses wanted to slurp up open-source libraries and bundle them into valuable bits of tech without having to contribute back or compensate the library authors.


Ooh. I've been putting together a VT420 emulator and I am trying to figure out the best way to build one from scratch. I will probably end up building an RP2040 version of the video controller.

These look great, but I wonder if there's an 800x420ish version out there.


Related, I'm working on a VT420 emulator that's about 90% there...

https://github.com/mmastrac/blaze

It's prerelase and I haven't pushed the experimental graphical interface yet but you can actually use it, configure it and run everything using a TUI mapper that renders the text framebuffer on your terminal.

There's one or two memory mapper bugs that seem to break multi session mode but those are somewhat obscure and will probably require some experimentation with real hardware to solve.


Oh man, that brought a memory! I learned C and made my first "bigger" steps in programming on VT320 and VT420 connected to one of the Sun boxes. I'm still fond of that amber glow.

I wasn't even born back then but I love those amber crts. I had the luck of finding a Zenith ZVM-1220-EA composite display in pristine condition on ebay (I live in Germany where it's way harder to find nice amber crts) and it looks fantastic.

But there is one thing, the noise. I very much hear that super high pitched sound and it makes running it just as a 2nd monitor almost impossible.

Also I haven't quite found a good way of integrating it into my setup yet, raspi+tmux+ssh is the easiest but it'd be much cooler having it as an actual 2nd display.



Nice! I still have a real VT520 here. This would be cool for when it dies eventually

Cool.

Do you have more literature on the SSU? Do you know if the roms tolerate more than two sessions being available (or can be trivially patched to support more?)


The SSU feature is woefully underdocumented and the patent gives you _some_ information, but it's missing all of the details. I hope to break this part out into a project of its own.

I am 100% certain a VT420 will never be able to support more than two sessions, as the ROM explicitly has a ton of checks that look like "if session1 { ... } else { ... }". Unfortunately your best bet here would be putting a more advanced terminal multiplexer behind your VT420 and then making the F4 key a full passthrough (disabling the native session switcher).


Cheers.

I haven't had a VT420 in a few decades, but I remember wondering about its built-in multisession support (I never saw it in action)


The emulator supports it, though there's a few bugs in it so you can try it out. The animated GIF in the README demonstrates it too :)

I would call the splitscreen multisession... gimmicky at best? The two-session version is alright, but juggling windows is not great in general.


That's pretty neat. I look forward to the graphical version, though: love those double-sized characters.

I just pushed the graphical driver and they really do look great!

I've started working on a VT420 emulator which is about 70% complete: https://github.com/mmastrac/blaze

I tried it on a low-complexity Rust PR I worked on a few months back and it did a pretty good job. I'd probably change where the highlights live (for example x.y.z() -> x.w.z() should highlight y/w in a lot of cases).

For the most part, it seems to draw the eye to the general area where you need to look closer. It found a near-invisible typo in a coworker's PR which was kind of interesting as well.

https://0github.com/geldata/gel-rust/pull/530

It seems to flag _some_ deletions as needing attention, but I feel like a lot of them are ignored.

Is this using some sort of measure of distance between the expected token in this position vs the actual token?

EDIT: Oh, I guess it's just an LLM prompt? I would be interested to see an approach where the expected token vs actual token generates a heatmap.


Happy to hear!

> Is this using some sort of measure of distance between the expected token in this position vs the actual token?

The main implementation is in this file: https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/blob/main/apps/www/lib/s...

EDIT: yeah it's just a LLM prompt haha

Just a simple prompt right now, but I think we could try an approach where we directly see which tokens might be hallucinated. Gonna try to find the paper for this idea. Might be kinda analogous to the "distance between the expected token in this position vs the actual token."


What's interesting is that HDMI is supposed to have a scrambling system that prevents any repeating pattern from causing EMI. I wonder if there was an unshielded, unscrambled raw data path somewhere in the switch.


For those of you who watch Adrian Black on YouTube, you might remember him angrily tearing out RF shielding from the older computers.

On the other hand, I have been struggling to get my IP KVM at home working and it turned out that the cause of its failure was some cheap PoE extractors that spew noise across the spectrum, especially interfering with VGA sync.

Modern equipment, assuming you aren't buying bargain-basement AliExpress junk (which I do, from time to time) is surprisingly good at RF rejection.

And, amusingly, this just popped up on Twitter: https://x.com/hakluke/status/1980479234159398989


"Drugs won the War on Drugs"


Shocker


"The efficiency gained from using Carmichael’s totient is minimal. More efficiency can be gained by using Garner’s algorithm."

The proof of which is left to the reader?


stares at the board for ten minutes

disappears into the back room for fifteen minutes

"Yes, it's trivial."


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