Sijmen 🧑💻 @sjmulder@bsd.network
Programming, retrocomputing
Joined Aug 2018
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
OH: slop-driven development
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
Dinsdag 27 januari is er in de Tweede Kamer een rondetafelgesprek over de Amerikaanse overname van #Solvinity, het platform waar #digid op draait. Met @bitsoffreedom, @brenno, meer wijze mensen & mij. Hier mijn position paper, en een oproep om langs te komen zodat de tribune goed vol zit!
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/overheid-operationele-afhankelijkheden/
This is not what I meant when I said I wanted to use GPT for my partition table
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
I've completely lost interest in debating generative models or how big tech has almost completely transitioned into an authoritarian political project. These days what I try to do is just mentally flip the bozo bit on anybody still defending this shit and then do my best to move on.
(Bozo bit, in case you didn't know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit)
Just learnt that Stewart Cheifet of Computer Chronicles fame passed on Dec 28 😢
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
Desktop computer usability has been going backwards for 20 years.
Now we've moved on to the wickedness of using variable-length text files for source code, which allows "sloppy, disorganized thinking and bad factoring"
Reading 80s programming books is an experience. Three chapters in and you have yet to learn anything about the language, but have read extensive discussions on the benefits of functions, the dangers of objects (except the proper ones like Smalltalk has), and the unimaginably large programs possible with 32-bit addressing
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
Sad that @simon had to write the obvious in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work", but at least it's now been written. If it goes without saying, I guess it goes even better saying it.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
I've now also completed part 2 of "Factory" - Day 10 of #AdventOfCode in #TurboPascal on the #Xi8088 !
It takes about 25 minutes to run and was quite the challenge to write, I had to learn more than I was prepared to.
But with it, that's all 12 days completed, all in #Pascal, all on the #i8088.
What a journey! Thank you so much, @ericwastl
Oh, and I'm never doing Advent of Code in Pascal again! That was really a dumb idea 😅
Advent of Code day 9
Well this one got me stumped for a bit but after a few false start’s, lots of debugging and some cleanup I’d say I have a pretty good solution now! The points being tiles rather than zero-width corners was the tricky bit here.
My solution walks through the points, keeping track of normal vectors (the “outside” direction). With those, it generates the zero-width outline around the points, and from there on it’s pretty much old fashioned line intersection checks.
The initial nasty solve took 1.2 seconds on my Raspberry Pi 400, but some optimization (like sorting the edges list) brought that down to 0.08s on the Pi, and 0.02s on my 10-year old PC, and I’m quite happy with the code now.
Code: https://codeberg.org/strlcpy/aoc25.rom/src/branch/_start/c/day09.c
Advent of Code day 7 visualization in 16-bit real mode assembly
With bonus palette animations!
Repo (includes the 12 KB download on the releases page): https://codeberg.org/strlcpy/aoc25.rom. Full video: https://sjmulder.nl/2025/aoc-day07-full.mp4
Sijmen 🧑💻
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I just completed "Secret Entrance" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/1
Solved in #TurboPascal on my #Xi8088 computer. Perfect for #DOScember !
Slight content warning, the picture shows most of my (pretty dirty) solution.
Sijmen 🧑💻
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Advent of Code, day 01, Python 1 on SuSE 6.4
The number of times I’ve muttered “apparently I’m an idiot” was greater than zero.
And I gotta say, I love the story so far. New project management, new security guidelines, … 🤣
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
#adventOfCode day 1 in #LuaLang
https://gitlab.cs.washington.edu/fidelp/advent-of-code-2025/-/blob/main/01.lua
- PC: 1 ms
- Raspberry Pi 2: 70 ms
- #hp200lx: Error after 2 minutes. I wonder if the garbage collector settings need to be tuned to avoid memory exhaustion.
Advent of Code as a hybrid DOS + BIOS-bootable binary! (x86-16 assembly)
Related, last night I heard about an Xbox indie thing so after a long and draining day I sat myself in front of the TV and turned on the Xbox only to be immediately met with a login and MFA sequence. The phone in question was upstairs, screen shattered. So much for the convenience of a game console!
Logging into Slack:
- Work through cookie banner (there is no "No" button)
- Dismiss the "Your browser will be unsupported soon" (it's just Firefox LTS)
- Input email address
- Click all tiles with a pedestrian crossing
- Now click all the traffic lights
- Wait for email, input code
- Pull out phone, input MFA
I already forgot what I was going to do
Sijmen 🧑💻
boosted
@antsu but even MBR has a chatbot! https://chatmbr.com
Programming, retrocomputing
Joined Aug 2018
