Now I want a scavengers' guide to identify machines that might have a compatible microprocessor within them, because I haven't seen a Commodore or Apple II in a long time. Arcades with older cabinets obviously have them, but if most post-apocalyptic media are prophetic, they'll probably be occupied by a gang of young ne'er-do-wells. I suppose, thanks to the College Board, Ti-83s (Z80) are still quite common in the US. Are there toys, medical equipment, or vending machines that still use these chips?
I wonder if ESP32s and Arduinos might be more commonly found, though I could see the argument that places with those newfangled chips may be more likely to become radioactive craters in some scenarios.
The Z80 is still an insanely popular microcontroller, that can be found it so, so many devices. Head down to your local Walmart's toy aisle open some of the electronics there (Post-collapse, of course) and you'll certainly find a few.
That's not as easy as just dropping a full computer on your desk, but having a low power processor that's easy to find replacements for would be useful. That is, of course, if you spent the time pre-collapse to learn how to make a useful system out of those components, which I suspect is the real goal of Collapse OS.
Can you name two such devices? Because the only thing I've ever found a Z80 in is an S1 MP3 player. I've found ARMs, 8051s, and weird Epson microcontrollers they seem to have never published the instruction set for, but never a Z80.
According to [0], TI were launching new graphic calculators with Z80s as late as 2016 - the TI-84 Plus CE-T Python edition (which is still available on Amazon UK[1][2]!)
Not a hugely compelling argument for "the z80 is still a popular microcontroller", mind.
Well, Z80-compatible but more efficient processors, sure. That pretty well counts because you can still run your own software on them, such as KnightOS, but KnightOS can't compile itself, and I don't think CollapseOS will run on a TI-84.
They only stopped making them last year. Someone was buying them, enough to keep the production lines going, and not to run CP/M.
TI uses them in one of their calculator lines. I've seen gobs of them as embedded controllers in invarious industrial systems (I have family in manufacturing). I understand a lot of coin-op games (think pinball or pachinko) use them. I've seen them in appliance controller boards (don't recall the brand).
Thanks! That sounds pretty plausible, except that the chips in TI's calculators were low-power Z80 clones, of which there are plenty still in production. Still, "various industrial control systems" is a far cry from "Head down to your local Walmart's toy aisle (...) and you'll certainly find a few."
except that the chips in TI's calculators were low-power Z80 clones
So? That's like saying "there are no 8051s because Intel doesn't make them", even tho there are millions if not billions of clones made every year (since you'll undoubtedly say "well I haven't seen one", if your car tells you when your tire pressure is low, there's 4 8051s).
If we're talking about the ability to repurpose salvaged chips for new purposes, it barely matters what the instruction set is. What matters enormously about the 8051 in particular is that (1) by default it runs code from mask ROM you can't change, unlike the 8751, and (2) it has a pin called "external access" which lets you force it to run code from external SRAM or EPROM. Neither (1) nor (2) is generally true of the clones. What matters most then is whether you can figure out how to get it to run your code and toggle its pins. Can you load code via JTAG? UPDI? Changing an external ROM chip? Maybe it boots from an SPI Flash? That's what matters most.
(It also matters whether you need things like an external crystal or three power rails.)
I mean, it's convenient when you can use an existing compiler, or at least can find documentation for the instruction set; and 8-bit instruction sets and address buses are constraining enough that they can really make it hard to do things. But these are not nearly as important as being able to get your code running on the chip at all.
So, no, instruction-set-compatible clones (like the ones I mentioned I found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488079, the day before your comment) are not interchangeable with Intel 8051s in the context of improvising computational capabilities out of garbage. Pinouts matter. Programming waveforms matter.
With respect to the Z80-clone TI calculators, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488344 Virgil explained that they can in fact run CollapseOS, but can't yet self-host because CollapseOS can't yet access their Flash. If you want to use them to control motors or solenoids or something, you still need some pinout information, which I'm not sure we have.
Talk about missing the point, although you accidentally stumbled over it while ranting away...it doesn't matter if it's a clone or an original if you can still hack it.
It's a little frustrating to me that the paper breaks out major chains as the big contributing factors, but doesn't analyze the remaining bucket. If possible I'd like to see the restaurants sliced by $/visit to see the effects on mid- or high-end restaurants.
Congratulations, that is a roaring success I daydream about all the time!
I think you've already answered a lot about your development journey, so I want to ask about the post-release experience.
- How were the weeks immediately after release? Hectically shipping out patches 3 times a day?
- Now that we're months out after release, what are you doing now? Are you still spending a lot of time on this game (ports, updates), or are you thinking of another game or returning to office work?
Frankly I bought it on release but couldn't get into it because the meta progression (unlocking triggers that dilute the trigger pool for little perceivable gain) didn't feel as good as Luck be a Landlord or Balatro. I hope later updates address that.
If you get stuck there between ~10PM (the last train back to Hachioji that could connect to Shinjuku) and 11PM (or midnight if you can spare the change for the limited express), you can also consider going west to Yamanashi and Kofu. Let's just say that I was almost in this exact scenario from a long day in Kawaguchiko, but I ended up making it back to central Tokyo.
Anime has had no shortage of adaptations disrespectful of the original. Most of the time it's due to not having enough source material like HBO GoT, which somehow sent Fullmetal Alchemist to 1920s Germany in the first adaptation's movie. But sometimes you get people like Bokurano's director who straight up said he hated the manga.
Fullmetal Alchemist and its movie are both excellent, though, even though they it's vastly different from the source (and of course, the more faithful adaption in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood).
I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy is also quite good, even though it does stray quite a bit from the books, omissions aside.
It's really hard to make good media and I haven't found any reliable indicators hinting at whether an adaptation will be good or not. I found The Hobbit trilogy to be laborious despite having Peter Jackson at the helm of it as well. Though in that case, maybe the source material itself is the issue.
LOTR was a work of passion , The Hobbit was a mess.
With The Hobit , there was a change in directors (originally Guillermo del Toro) and lots of studio meddling (eg pushing for 3 movies when the original is a 200 pages book, inclusion of LOTR actors for wider appeal).
I think Peter Jackson was brought in to try to salvage what he could.
I will gladly do the work myself if it means not being stuck behind people chatting up the cashier or doing complicated coupon/return/exchange/gift card transactions. The value is in the consistency and predictability of time spent for someone who just wants a single bag of onions or a single T-shirt. If stores had no-BS lanes (more than just "X items or less" lanes) operated by human cashiers I would use that too, but I suppose we as a society consider it as impolite or bad service, so machine checkout it is.
> The value is in the consistency and predictability
"Consistency" and "predictability" are not the words I associate with self-service checkout. Maybe I'm spectacularly unlucky, but almost every time I use one of these machines with more than 3 products, the machine will get confused about the weight, or decide to randomly check me, or find another reason to lock up and have me wait for a clerk to show up and unlock it, which takes anything between 1 to 5 minutes. And I'm not the only unlucky person, either - I see it happening often enough to others, which usually reassures me that I made a good call standing in the queue for the old-fashion human-operated register.
That's still a lot more predictable than my human cashier experience. I wish I didn't have to dread being held up by the only cashier in store holding a riveting conversation with 4 groups in front of me. Will the other groups hold up the line too? I guess we'll see!
I'm curious about investing and economy, and I always wonder about P/E ratios like Crowdstrike's (currently 450-something, was over 500 last week).
Some P/E ratios for today, for some companies I find interesting:
- Shopify: 615.12
- Crowdstrike: 455.70
- Datadog: 341.98
- Palantir: 212.34
- Pinterest: 187.67
- Uber: 99.0
- Broadcom: 77.68
- Tesla: 58.33
- Autodesk: 52.36
- Adobe: 49.23
- Microsoft: 37.97
What's going on here? Do investors expect Shopify, for example, to increase their earnings by an order of magnitude despite already having done extraordinarily well in a very competitive market? Can anyone ELI5?
Former equity analyst here. Nobody on "The Street" is actually valuing these companies on PE ratios. Tech companies often intentionally re-invest earnings back into the business in real time and so their reported EPS is often quite low and a poor metric to evaluate the underlying business on. So instead, analysts typically use other metrics like EV/EBITDA or even P/Sales ratios in their valuation models.
Very generally speaking, trading these companies is kind of more of like placing a bet on whether or not their future top-line growth will be dramatically different than the market's current expectations.
The only common belief held by investors in a stock is that the price is going to go up. You may have value investors with a belief that Shopify is undervalued based on earnings, you may have investors betting that the rest of the market will buy Shopify, you may have people who’ve seen the line go up and decided to buy…
Stock prices have been decoupled from earnings or “value” for a long time now and that’s toothpaste we will never get back in the tube. We are in the Robinhood age where you can buy and sell a stock in seconds with no effort.
> Stock prices have been decoupled from earnings or “value”
No, they aren't, but the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent. It doesn't help that our dear government seems loathe to actually ensure competitive markets.
not regardless, but only if. The future is unknown, so their bet is also based on that unknown. Is it foolish? Who knows. Did nvidia seem foolish if somebody made that bet before their ai boom?
You can also just say things you don't understand are always created by fools.
Now, there are some fools buying these stocks. But to say that each one of these has a high P/E because every shareholder is a fool is very reductionary.
> these are real, well run companies with good fundamentals
I'm not disputing that. But even "real" companies don't warrant P/E multiples in the three-digit range, unless there's a very good reason to expect them to grow their profits by 10x or more in the foreseeable future – and that has to be the expected value of earnings growth (roughly, the average growth over all possible futures), discounted by the time value of the investment.
P/E multiples over 100 are practically never justifiable, except as "someone else will come along and pay even more" – i.e., the greater fool theory.
TBH I don't think many figures here make any financial sense -- but I gotta hold it if my friends all hold it. And once everyone holds it no one is allowed to mass sell it because it's going to hurt your friends, and in finance that's a sin.
With numbers like that, either the market is crazy or the market believes the actual meaningful earnings are substantially higher than the GAAP reported numbers. Although even there the difference would have to be pretty big.
There's a lot of comments knocking the due diligence, but the call out of the threat vector and timing of this make it a bit hard to brush off as coincidence.
The problem was Windows giving arbitrary access to the kernel to software that can be updated OTA without user intervention and allowing that to crash the kernel, right? Wouldn't this mean that Windows is considerably less secure and stable than assumed?
Not really. These were kernel modules authorized and installed by the system admin. Of course kernel code runs the risk of crashing your system. The same is true on Linux, and according to another commenter it already has happened with Crowdstrike for Linux
He says he bought seven put contracts for $7.30 at the $185 strike. Absolute max profit, from CS going to -0, would be (185-7.3) x 7 X 100 = ~$125k.
I don’t know if the absolute amount of profit affects decisions here. It seems if he were more certain of what’s going on he would have bet a lot more.
> It seems if he were more certain of what’s going on he would have bet a lot more.
Outside of the HN bubble, $125K is already a pretty big sum of money to get all at once, and unlikely to bring too much scrutiny, if it was somehow not a coincident. Seems like a smart strategy, if the user was sitting on inside information and didn't want to ring too many alarm bells.
However posting on reddit about it, would not be such a smart strategy. I think it's genuinely just a coincidence, WSB gets plenty of worthless "DD" posts every day that end up amounting to nothing.
This smells of some inside trading. Someone internal at crowdstrike (or their relative/friend) got wind of this and is trying to save face if they get investigated.
Reading the post its obvious they don’t have a deep understanding of tech, while having that be core to their thesis.
It’s prohibitively hard to hack into a “cloud system” due to few possible entry points - as a reddit commenter said, open S3 buckets are tough to crack!
I wonder if ESP32s and Arduinos might be more commonly found, though I could see the argument that places with those newfangled chips may be more likely to become radioactive craters in some scenarios.