It is sad that read comprehension is dropping such that you interpreted my comment that way.

Very little, if any, “home” or small-business software would make use of a floating-point unit though (maybe some spreadsheet apps did?). The most common use for them was CAD/CAM, and those doing scientific modelling without a budget that would allow for less consumer-grade kit.

If you were running 16-bit software they were little slower than a 386DX at the same clock and significantly faster than a 286 because of higher clocks (286's usually topped out at 12MHz though there were some 16MHz options, the slowest 386s were running at 16MHz with some as fast as 40MHz), but also in part, when not blocked by instruction ordering issues, to the (albeit small by modern standards) instruction pipeline which the 286 lacked.

32-bit software was a lot slower than on a DX because 32-bit data reads and writes took two trips over the 16-bit data bus, but you could at least run the code as it was a full 386 core otherwise (full enhanced protected mode, page based virtual memory, v8086 mode, etc).

The SX also only used 24 bits of the address bus, limiting it to 16MB of RAM compared to the original's 4GB range, though this was not a big issue for most at the time.

But the “ask the LLM” thing is a sign of how off kilter information passing has become in the current world. A lot of stuff is packaged deliberately inefficiently because that is the way to monetise it, or sometimes just to game the searching & recommendation systems so it gets out to potentially interested people at all, then we are encouraged to use a computationally expensive process to summarise that to distil the information back out.

MS's documentation the large chunks of Azure is that way, but with even less excuse (they aren't a content creator needing to drive interest by being a quirky presenter as well as a potential information source). Instead of telling me to ask copilot to guess what I need to know, why not write some good documentation that you can reference directly (or that I can search through)? Heck, use copilot to draft that documentation if you want to (but please have humans review the result for hallucinations, missed parts, and other inaccuracies, before publishing).

In fact since enlarging live ext* filesystems has been very reliable² for quite some time and is quick, I tend to leave a lot of space initially and grow volumes as needed. There used to be a potential problem with that in fragmenting filesystems over the breadth of a traditional drive's head seek meaning slower performance, but the amount of difference is barely detectable in almost all cases³ and with solid state drives this is even more a non-issue.

> And most importantly 10% […] nowadays it's 50-100GB at least.

It doesn't have to be 10%. And the space isn't lost: it can be quickly brought into service when needed, that is the point, and if there is more than one volume in the group then I'm not allocating space separately to every filesystem as would be needed with the files approach. It is all relative. My /home at home isn't nearly 50GB in total⁴, nor is / anywhere I'm responsible for even if /var/log and friends are kept in the same filesystem, but if I'm close to as little as 50GB free on a volume hosting media files then I consider it very full, and I either need to cull some content or think about enlarging the volume, or the whole array if there isn't much slack space available, very soon.

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[1] The root-only-reserved blocks on ext* filesystems, though that doesn't help if a root process has overrun, or files as already mentioned above.

[2] Reducing them is still a process I'd handle with care, it can be resource intensive, has to move a lot more around so there is more that could go wrong, and I've just not done it enough to be as comfortable with the process as I am with enlarging.

[3] You'd have to work hard to spread things far and randomly enough to make a significant difference.

[4] though it might be if I wasn't storing 3d print files on the media array instead of in /home

You are completely ignoring the “you don't always know the full nature of the task until after clearance” part. If you don't know it isn't one that will be a problem for you, it could be one that is. My point there is that bit.

> And I specifically excluded the military.

So did I. Hence I explicitly said afterwards “And that is before considering those who want “conscientious objector” status with regard to anything military related."

I stopped reading at this point because if you didn't bother properly reading my previous before blurting out a response, then explaining more, giving you more to not fully read, will likely achieve nothing beyond consuming my time.

It also serves to leave some space unused to help out the wear-levelling on the SSDs on which the RAID array that is the PV¹ for LVM. I'm, not 100% sure this is needed any more² but I've not looked into that sufficiently so until I do I'll keep the habit.

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[1] if there are multiple PVs, from different drives/arrays, in the VG, then you might need to manually skip a bit on each one because LVM will naturally fill one before using the next. Just allocate a small LV specially on each and don't use it. You can remove one/all of them and add the extents to the fill LV if/when needed. Giving it a useful name also reminds you why that bit of space is carved out.

[2] drives under-allocate by default IIRC

Defence in depth is a good idea: proper alarms, and a secondary measure in case they don't have the intended effect.

I didn't read Idiocracy as eugenics/anti-eugenics. It wasn't saying that stupid people breeding made the population stupid, it was saying that the less educated breeding resulted in the more educated being pushed to the periphery and eventually fading out.

The people of the film's future were not stupid, just massively uninformed and misinformed. They were able to grasp the problem and solution in the end.

Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!

I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.

Is the ROI from the potential audience going to be worth it?

Or does it help some people enough that I might want to do it despite no real ROI (i.e. I make the effort to make things not compatible with common assistive tech, even where there is little or no end benefit for me so it is sunk time in that respect, does this new platform quality for my time & attention enough in that way?).

Or is it simply cool enough for me to be interested in playing with it myself?

If none of the above, is there any other reason we should care?

This is especially true if building for the platform means building something new, not just making tweaks to ensure your existing output is compatible.

True. Though to be frank, before typing my longer response I did consider just telling you the same about the “but forget everything else and think of the children” line of reasoning.

Sometimes you don't know the exact nature of the task until after you've gone through the rigmarole of applying, getting clearance, etc. In that case if you consider some of the jobs to be morally bankrupt, you consider all of them to potentially be morally bankrupt. You could go through all the hassle then turn it down, or leave during a probationary period when you discover the details, but that is a significant wasted time risk to take.

> You should literally be ashamed of yourself.

Many people state-side are ashamed of their government, and don't want to feel their reputation is tarnished by working directly for it, and quite frankly I don't blame them right now nor would I have at all at numerous points over recent years. And that is before considering those who want “conscientious objector” status with regard to anything military related.

> If you make working for the government a badge of shame, it will become true in time?

For some, it has become true. That time is now or before.

As much as “join and fight the corruption from within” is a laudable goal, I entirely understand people not thinking that they've got the nerve for that. Especially given that the first thing a bad administration does to someone raising concerns is to sack and blacklist them in a way that will affect future employment opportunities.

> such as helping to feed poor children

The “but think of the children” argument cuts both ways: many governments have, directly or indirectly, done and continue to do, terrible things to children. It may not be possible in the short/medium term to do anything truly useful about that (you go try tell the current administration over there to refund the good works that have been gutted recently and see how seriously they take you!) and dealing with the crap until things stear back towards the good is too much for some.

Not everyone has the fortunate needed to fight a bad system from within, or the desire to, no matter how many heartstrings you pull to try shame them into reconsidering the good within the bad.

In any case, if they don't want to publish the name on their own web page, they'll not want to publicly post it as a reply on HN either…

And is who they are relevant to the lesson (stealing time/effort is easy to get away with, you need to protect yourself from that)?

Or a convincing representation of that. A lot of old tricks mean that the games are doing less than you think that they are, and are better understood when you stop thinking “how do they do that” and “how are they convincing my brain that is what they are doing”.

Look at how little RAM the original Elite ran in on a BBC Model B, with some swapping of code on disk⁰. 32KB, less the 7.75KB taken by the game's custom screen mode² and a little more reserved for other things¹. I saw breathy reviews at the time and have seen similar nostalgic reviews more recently talking about “8 whole galaxies!” when the game could easily have had far more than that and was at one point going to. They cut it down not for technical reasons but because having more didn't feel usefully more fun and might actually put people off. The galaxies were created by a clever little procedural generator so adding more would have only added a couple of bytes (to hold the seed and maybe other params for the generator) each.

Another great example of not quite doing what it looks like the game is doing is the apparently live-drawn 3D view in the game Sentinel on a number of 8-bit platforms.

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[0] There were two blocks of code that were swapped in as you entered or self a space station: one for while docked and one for while in-flight. Also the ship blueprints were not all in memory at the same time, and a different set was loaded as you jumped from one system to another.

[1] the CPU call stack (technically up to a quarter K tough the game code only needed less than half of that), scratch-space on page-zero mostly used for game variables but some of which was used by things like the disk controller ROM and sound generator, etc.

[2] Normal screen modes close to that consumed 10KB. Screen memory consumption on the BBC Master Enhanced version was doubled as it was tweaked to use double the bit depths (4ppb for the control panel and 2bbp for the exterior, instead of 2bbp and 1ppb respectively).