The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries.
I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.
Acorn didn't so much drop the ball as that the industry took off in a way that they simply could not have dealt with for the exact same reason that your EU start-up that is successful usually ends up being acquired: lack of access to easy capital. SV was well established by the time that the personal computer took off and even though they found their own nice niche (education) they never started out to conquer the world, they achieved their goals - and then some, see linked article - and managed to pivot fast enough and well enough to eventually give intel a run for their money, which is no mean achievement.
RiscOS wasn't even on the table for the likes of IBM and that is what it would have taken to succeed in the business market. But for many years the preferred machine to create Videotext or ATEX (automatic typesetting system) bitstreams was to have a BBC micro and there were quite a few other such interesting niches. I still know of a few BBCs running art installations that have been going non-stop for close to 45 years now. Power supplies are the biggest problem but there are people that specialize in repairing them, and there are various DIY resources as well (videos, articles).
I had a BBC B as my first computer and would likely have enjoyed having an Archimedes greatly, but in retrospect "IBM compatible" was winning the day even then.
The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.
If you need all the orders and all the customers sure.
But usually you need some of the orders and you need the customer info associated with them. Often the set of orders you’re interested in might even be filtered by attributes of the customers they belong to.
The decision of whether to normalize our results of a database query into separate sets of orders and customers, or to return a single joined dataset of orders with customer data attached, is completely orthogonal to the decision of whether to join data in the database.
I guess maybe it’s the nonstandard sMEL chunk that bumps the size of the PNG file up so high. Seemed more to me that they were talking about an image of random noise though.
This has to be a vast gulf in terms of usage patterns for different users - I’ve managed at times to get up to six icons in my menu bar; what are you doing that fills up half the screen?
The bottom corners of a MacBook screen are not rounded. The top corners are because the corners of the case are rounded. The corners of the case are rounded because you need to be able to do things like slide it into a laptop bag.
> The bottom corners of a MacBook screen are not rounded.
They are on my M4 MBA. They're software-rounded rather than in the hardware. You can move the pointer over the lower rounded corners; you can't over the upper ones.
Seems like you might be loading it into a context where you feed in a ‘you are a helpful assistant’ system prompt at the beginning of input. This isn’t a chat finetune - it’s not oriented to ‘adopting a chat persona’. Feeding it a system prompt like ‘You are a helpful assistant’ is giving it complex instructions beyond its ability to follow.
The purpose of this model is to be fine tuned towards specific tasks. Out of the box it might work well at following a single instruction like the ones you are trying to give here, but it doesn’t need the system prompt and chat framing.
Or straight to an EB-1a greencard - the criteria are virtually identical. And if they’re that good, they should be able to insist on being sponsored for the greencard not the employment-based visa.
Although for China and India the priority date for EB1a is three years currently so if you’re from either of them O-1 will be a necessary stopgap, but for anyone else EB1a applications are open immediately.
Nothing in the article mentioned how good the LLMs were at even entering valid text adventure commands into the games.
If an LLM responds to “You are standing in an open field west of a white house” with “okay, I’m going to walk up to the house”, and just gets back “THAT SENTENCE ISN'T ONE I RECOGNIZE”, it’s not going to make much progress.
I did see that. But since that focused really on how Claude handled that particular prompt format, it’s not clear whether the LLMs that scored low here were just failing at producing valid input, struggled to handle that specific prompt/output structure, or were doing fine at basically operating the text adventure but were struggling at building a world model and problem solving.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, there was too much output from too many models at once (combined with not enough spare time) to really perform useful qualitative analysis on all the models' performance.
I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
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