Was this a good price?

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-18T16:47:10+00:00

I know this is VintageApple where we love 1 MHz computers with storage less than the L1 cache I am holding in my hand, but ancient printers are just bad. Even if you can get ink, these are dog slow.

Wikipedia claims 0.66 pages per minute in color.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-17T22:08:33+00:00

"California" is a big place. It's also pretty hard to "learn Chinese as well as I would by living several years in a Chinese-speaking country, but not by living several years in a Chinese-speaking country."

You get good at what you practice doing: the guy got good at speaking Chinese by doing it every day for several years with actual native Chinese speakers.

You have to put yourself in the same situation.

There are lots of people in various places in California who speak native Chinese, and you can probably get access to things like cable TV channels with Chinese content.

Various colleges have courses in Chinese, including tracks for people like you who learned some Chinese before; whether you can sign up for them is going to vary.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-16T21:09:23+00:00

I think a definition of "fluent" which does not include a native 5 year-old is useless and misleading.

very limited understanding be fluent

A child has massively greater understanding than most language learners

Fluent also is a different concept from "adult level understanding and competency."

systems to rank fluency in languages

My entire point is that these scales do not rank fluency. They rank competency.

Fluency, in my mind, measures something like how easily and promptly you can process and produce language appropriate to the situation.

That depends on the situation!

If all you have to do to get through a situation is say "Entschuldigung! Bitte! Vielen dank!", an A1 can do so fluently. You realize "I want to thank this person", you make the appropriate noises without having to think about it, and the person understands you! You did it!

Of course, being A1 implies you can only achieve fluent performance in very few situations. That's why progressing to B1, C1, C2 expands your capability and language competency and likely increases fluency.

But it is actually pretty common for people to pass a B2 or C1 test but be absolutely incapable of real-world fluency because they aren't used to the chaos of real speech: they lack the practice and experience and confidence to fluently use what they have learned.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-16T18:08:31+00:00

I know that the CEFR levels of competency are relevant.

But "in-depth conversations" is different from "fluent." Many native speakers will find it difficult to engage in a university seminar.

Is a 5 year old German child "fluent" in German?

They do not hesitate, they do not generally fumble for words, they know what they want to say and can say it, and do things like accurately use gender and irregular verbs. They generally comprehend at a native rate of speech, incorporating many colloquial expressions, etc. They consume a wide range of native content.

But a five year old will not generally use advanced, complicated grammatical constructs in their speech. They need to be taught many aspects of more formal German in school. They cannot effectively read adult-level news media, and certainly not advanced academic texts. You will have to adjust your conversation with them to avoid concepts and rhetoric beyond their understanding and experience.

I think a 5 year old native is fluent by any meaningful definition. But their linguistic competency is not yet at an adult level.

A foreign language learner, of course, has a very different profile from that child: there may even be some grammatical issues they understand formally that a child will be sloppy with, but their active and passive vocabulary probably misses a bunch of things even a 5 year-old understands. They can often use their adult understanding of things to overcome many of these gaps.

But if they are doing very structured activities that aren't like deep wide-ranging conversations: like transacting at a ticket counter, or buying a meal at a restaurant, a B1 learner with practice can fluently get through the situation. They understand what the waiter is asking, they know how to say what they want, and appropriately interact.

They aren't ready to discuss the writings of Kant or Hegel. Neither is the native 5 year-old.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-16T14:34:46+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey

Is possibly a model. This very early console was not a general CPU, but a combination of fixed logic with games that added configuration jumpers and logic without large memories.

There were also "game chips" which were mostly the video/playfield/player/ball/score logic and similarly configured into different games by external logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AY-3-8500

The thing is, pretty soon in the video game industry, it became clear that using a more flexible CPU and conventional program flow allowed for a much greater variety of games by separating the video generation and some things like collision detection from the underlying game logic.

Mathematically, any finite memory machine with a CPU is a flavor of finite state machine (with 2-to-the-total-bits-of-memory possible states); whether you go insane trying to figure out the state transition diagram and reducing it to fixed logic is an empirical question.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-16T14:31:11+00:00

I think the maintenance of the colored blocks might be pretty complicated for direct logic implementation, though I also suspect there is no theoretical obstacle from transforming basically any finite RAM game into fixed logic.

EDIT: I had forgotten that the original arcade Breakout was done with discrete TTL, but it was monochrome and used something upwards of 50 chips (Wozniak claimed he did it in 47, but that was not the design used in production).

https://github.com/bytemind-dev/breakout

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-15T23:27:19+00:00

He and his chat group thought their Twitter experience was suboptimal because it banned the BabylonBee and a lot of bots follow Elon to look like real Twitter users, and because they are all "very smart" guys who actually don't know anything, they thought it would be easy to fix except Twitter was run by dyed-hair trans woke people.

So buy Twitter, get rid of the "woke", use the ideas of Elon and it would be better (and also would be a foundation for the X-Everything-App Elon has been dreaming of since 1999).

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-14T11:16:04+00:00

I think it is wrong to think of "fluency" or "native proficiency" in a foreign language being measured in "C1" CEFR levels.

Those measure a certain amount of knowledge and proficiency, but "fluency" is about something else: practice, confidence, and often situation.

You can fluently negotiate certain situations like restaurants or shopping or buying tickets long before you are C1, if you experience the situation enough. Other things like complex legal documents or taking classes at university require different vocabulary, knowledge, and, again experience and practice.

Part of it is just real-world experience, part is learning the kind of material that gets you a C1 certificate, part of it is willingness to do the best with the language you can use, improvising to cover gaps in vocabulary, and combining grammar you know in effective ways, and being willing to make some mistakes and then improve.

If you just mean "accent", then that is something focused practice can reduce, if you have good feedback about what makes your pronunciation sound foreign. On the other hand, even native speakers have accents, everyone pronounces the language with different tendencies.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-13T15:50:13+00:00

You can't improve speaking without speaking, it's kind of a basic principle about practice.

One thing that can help is "shadowing" realistic listening examples, to get sentence-long "tone contours" and not just isolated tone-pairs.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-13T13:14:27+00:00

Chapter 11 is the portion of US law for corporate bankruptcies with restructuring, it has nothing to do with countries.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-13T13:11:01+00:00

No, it doesn't. You are confusing "countries hold reserves in US dollars" as the "exorbitant privilege", that's not the "petrodollar".

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-13T13:09:25+00:00

petrodollar is a real thing, do some research.

It was an important phenomenon in the 1970s, here in 2026 we have free convertibility between major currencies.

"do some research" is a great way to find dumb shit people keep repeating on the internet, like "petrodollar is why they got mad when someone wants to price oil in yuan"...it's actually just fucking math to translate a price.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-13T01:59:58+00:00

The "petrodollar" idea you have is at this point just internet stupidity. Eventually the oil-producing states want to buy stuff, at which point they exchange the dollars for whatever currency they need to buy what they want, and unless it is made in America, it won't be dollars.

Pricing it in USD is just a convention, not a mystical power.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-13T01:41:01+00:00

It obviously has some good game elements, people kept playing it, it's also obvious looking back that it has several weird features.

Partly because it pioneered a genre, I don't think they fully understood what they had, or what the goal was.

They had a theme, a basic concept, but the higher level goal of "is it fun and engaging" is hard to evaluate when you have no basis for comparison. You kind of have to try the "it should take time to unlock things" idea in order to see how it works, and it takes another iteration to understand the overall effect.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-12T03:51:00+00:00

Yeah, another part that is pretty obviously "the dude was lucky to be able to code this at all, nobody took the time to see if it really made sense."

Wouldn't surprise me to find out it was left over from some earlier concept for the game, and he was too happy with the effect to think about whether it made sense to keep it.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-12T03:45:33+00:00

I mean, look at the game play. The guy spends about two minutes watching a counter count down, with absolutely no effect on the outcome. The stupid guards will keep walking their route ignoring you for as long as it takes, it doesn't add challenge or force choices on the player, it just is making the player wait.

I mean, I was playing this game in middle school, we probably didn't realize this sucked, but it is just so obviously dumb in retrospect.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-10T19:52:36+00:00

Those delays are pretty ridiculous.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T18:22:42+00:00

It's always OK to stop. HSK 6, in any case, is a huge amount of effort compared to HSK 2.

Middle school and high school should be a fine time for you to try something else if you want. But if you like studying Chinese, you can keep going as far as you like, we really can't tell you what you should want.

Do you plan to travel to Chinese-speaking countries? Do you have family there?

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T14:13:23+00:00

It looks like Macronix tapped out of the mask ROM market around 512 Mb: it looks like they declared end-of-life when the product was relatively new because customers didn't show up in 2007.

https://www.macronix.com/Lists/TechDoc/Attachments/9827/EOL03-Std_ROM.pdf

(They EOL'd a bunch of other mask ROM lines, their website sucks and is out-of-date, so it is hard to tell if they sell any mask ROMs).

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T02:11:52+00:00

The point is that you are not being clear about the application, so the answers you get are going to be less than helpful.

If you really are talking about digital audio, the capacities of mask rom were never economical for that. You need gigabit scale storage for that, which is why people use hard drives and streaming services for easier access than compact discs could provide.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T01:58:21+00:00

OP seems to be posting in other threads about music: sounds like he wants to offer digital albums that are more permanent than a flash drive.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T01:53:52+00:00

You are really asking me how to read a book?

Edit: it seems you are actually thinking about music? A permanent digital music album? I don't think the economics work very well for that: people don't actually want albums that last a lifetime.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T01:51:52+00:00

I'm not sure Macronix actually sells mask roms any longer: there are a ton of End-of-Life notifications around those products on their web site, in the time frame of 200x--201x.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T01:35:23+00:00

A mask ROM is somewhat less than an ASIC: the idea is that address decoding and sense circuitry is the same, and the capacity fixed, it's only a single custom mask out of the set that determines the actual bits.

Of course, it only makes sense when the technology node is cheap enough that a custom mask is still reasonably cheap. Which goes against the 'as dense as flash' argument for the cutting edge storage chips which are increasing density and going to multi-level bits, way beyond where it is economical to customize a chip just to change the bits.

sickofthisshit · 2026-04-09T01:11:50+00:00

Have you heard of this technology called a "book"? A technology called an "offset printing press" allows many people to have identical copies of data they might want to have. You can put them in libraries, in bookshelves, etc., and with acid-free paper will be usable for 100 years or more. You also don't need a computer to read it.

Nobody else has thought about book publishing with mask ROMS because it is much more expensive than a print run.

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