As you identified there is a lot of parallel sentence structure.

They also have a bunch of lists of 3-5 items which is a classic.

It doesn't have the anodyne rambling never getting to the point style common to LLMs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161864

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The color Next machines only had 12 bit displays, 4 bits per channel, but with careful use of dithering it was often indistinguishable from a 24-bit display (so called "true color")

It you specify n points and the pick a new point at random, then iteratively randomly select (uniformly) one of the original n points and move the next point to the mid point of the current point and the selected point. Coloring those points generates a sierpinski triangle or tetrahedron or whatever the n-1 dimensional triangle is called

The refresh rate is, of course, a different issue

It's a lot of fun to work through, other prolog resources can be a little dry

I can think of a couple of things at play

The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this type of contract works

Even in 1998 USB was very new, so thumb drives weren't an option

CDs were ubiquitous, but cd writers were not

Proprietary tech was available, Zip and Jazz drives come to mind, or maybe even minidisc in that timeframe, but any would have been a poor choice in hindsight

Tape would presumably have been considered, but was already notorious for long term compatibility (in 99 I had to restore from a tape backup that was only a couple of years old and we couldn't easily find compatible hardware)

There were other proprietary optical storage media in the market, but they were expensive and aimed at the long term storage market (heaven help you if that's how your archives are stored)

If they needed a cheap, easily written, and distributable media, they didn't have a lot of good choices.

We still don't have a good choice for this if you want your system air gapped. I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone plug a USB device into a safety critical system

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

Written in 1873 by James Clerk Maxwell

They also reference Genesis 1:3 "Let there be light"

My concern with it is more about legitimately old code (android is 20ish years old, so reasonably falls into this category) which was written using standards and tools of the time (necessarily)

It requires a constant engineering effort to keep such code up to date. And the older code is, typically, less well understood.

In addition older code (particularly in systems programming) is often associated with older requirements, some of which may have become niche over time.

That long tail of old, less frequently exercised, code feels like it may well have a sting in its tail.

The halflife/work-hardening model depends on the code being stressed to find bugs

(Vlasic is an American pickle brand.)