https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...

> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.

I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.

When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...

You're probably under-weighing this factor.

The average programmer looks at SML syntax and cannot make, pardon the expression if you will, heads or tails of it.

Indeed, I'd argue the average programmer still considers recursion an advanced topic.

When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was like that too, to be fair.

However, when I described the desired passes and their types:

    collectDefines :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], Map Text Text)
    
    runLitPool :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], [(Text, LitKey)])
    
    evalExpr :: Text -> Map Text Text -> Either AsmError Int

This is a surprisingly controversial question.

I've known more than one person who claims something to the effect of becoming addicted to Flonase. Like now they have to take it only to feel like how they felt before they started taking it.

Rebound inflammation when stopping use is a real effect with long-term use of corticosteroids and can, at least briefly, be worse than the initial symptoms were.

As someone with multiple mild inflammatory disorders I've always been afraid to use steroids consistently lest I have nothing effective when things are worst.

a 60 fps computer display for pigeon vision is like a sequential slideshow it's much too slow to blur into what they would perceive as motion

many species of birds when they switch posture the motion is so fast it is imperceptible to the human eye it's like switching from one still frame to another

humans have perhaps 1/10th the temporal granularity that pigeons have

this leads me to the conclusion that if birds have a subjective experience it has a very different tempo than for humans or indeed most mammals

There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.

And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.

There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.

The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...

I remain unconvinced about Auracast. This kind of short-range broadcast is what analog baseband radio (induction loop) still excels at. (The properties of baseband tends to mimic how sound itself travels, including overlapping transmissions and fading with distance and blocked by walls.)

Auracast feels a bit like a compelled "improvement" for patent portfolio purposes. Though at the rate deployment is going, by the time it's widely deployed I guess the patents will have been expired.

In some ways there has been a significant step backwards for accessibility with tech progress. Traditional speakers function as inductive loop transmitters. Anything with a traditional coil speaker I can just put my head near it and switch my hearing aid to T-mode and I get a direct signal from the electronics with no speaker/microphone intervening.

Piezoelectric speakers (like in a cheap smartphone or TV unit) do not have this property. No coil.

Most 32-bit designs throw an exception on an invalid instruction so it can be caught and handled at runtime. Even basic ARM Cortex-M0 chips throw a catchable exception on illegal instructions.

So one option is to just issue the FPU instructions as if the FPU exists, and then catch and emulate.

This is how operating systems emulated FPUs on processors like the 68020, the 386 and early RISC machines, if they didn't have an FPU.

With photography as an art I have gone back to film. The cost in money and time and space involved with taking an impression of light gives it gravity that is lacking with a phone camera. It's a different kind of process. One thing I've noticed is that developing is like taking the photograph anew. It can be weeks before I finish a roll and get around to developing it, and I surprise myself.

Does it support the 286's 16-bit protected mode at all?

286 protected mode has the 8086-style 16-bit addresses and segmentation. But with virtualization and protection.

Not very many operating systems made use of it. The x86 world skipped over it directly from 8086 real mode to 32-bit paging.

Edit: to answer my own question it seems the recent branch dropped 286 protected mode support

https://github.com/ghaerr/elks/pull/235

No not me it was David Given over at the link I gave (not my blog).

I have poked around Fuzix but I am not a major contributor.

> So is it possible to compile programs for Fuzix on a PC?

Most of the development is cross-devel from PC.

How it is implemented varies by platform. On the 8-bit micros it takes advantage of bank-switching memory hardware if there is any. On the MMUless 68K a flat single address space can be used with position-independent code for the processes. On platforms with paging or relocation hardware that is used. Most of the host platforms do not have hardware memory protection, but there's room in the design to support it.

It has been ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico [1] (ARM Cortex-m0+ based) and could be ported to other microcontrollers which have enough RAM.

Toolchain is the biggest problem. It's hard to get a good cross toolchain that works. FUZIX's creator has been writing a portable C compiler but it's not done yet. The code does compile with Clang and GCC but a working toolchain is a steep knowledge cliff to climb.

I have got the kernel to build and link for a riscv32i target. Just need some real riscv32 hardware to test it on. And free time.

[1] https://cowlark.com/2021-02-16-fuzix-pi-pico/index.html

https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/FUZIX last updated 4 days ago

Alan's currently putting most of his energy into the compiler. It's a C compiler in C which can compile itself, and compile FUZIX, for 8080 and Z80 targets. The goal is to make it compile itself on all the platforms it can run on eventually. :)

https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/Fuzix-Compiler-Kit

North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...

the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought

the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose