TL;DR: Three weeks of weeknotes in one go. Wrote a blog post about AI grief that hit Hacker News (and got accused of being written by an LLM), fell deep into an Amiga 1200 rabbit hole, soldered the wrong potentiometer onto my Tempest PCB, survived a work trip to California, and spiraled into hardware-ownership doomsday thinking.

Meta

Ope, three weeks this time. Look, the Amiga was calling to me, and then I was on a work trip, and then I was soldering things. Weeknotes happen when they happen. I'm the only one pressuring me. Let's catch up.

Grief and the AI Split

I wrote a standalone blog post about how AI-assisted coding isn't creating a split among developers. It seemed to resonate with people, which was nice. Also it got picked up over on the Orange Site and kicked off a huge thread.

Some folks are telling me it sounds like an LLM wrote it. Oddly enough, I did write it myself. Admittedly, I did also run it past an LLM for some editing ideas. But, I was the author. I've had folks send me examples of what reads like an LLM in the post, and those have nearly all been bits from my first rough draft. Oof. I guess I write like a bot. (Or bots write like me.)

The Amiga Rabbit Hole

So remember how last time I was waiting for Digikey parts for the Tempest? Well, while I waited, I spent a couple nights setting up an SD card with Amiga software in an emulator, planning to plug it into my real Amiga 1200. As one does.

Turns out Amigas don't like big hard drives. And by "big" I mean 125x bigger than the 128mb hard drive I bought with my allowance back in the day. And that's just one of the smallest SD cards I have on hand — I'd melt my teen brain if I went back in time and showed him a storage device over 7800x bigger yet small enough that I accidentally dropped it between the floorboards (which is a thing I did, a few years ago).

The real saga was fighting with FS-UAE, the Amiga emulator. I learned the hard way that FS-UAE uses copy-on-write for floppy images by default. And you can only disable it with a writable_floppy_images=1 config option mentioned nowhere in the launcher. So if you're trying to prepare an ADF floppy image for a Gotek floppy emulator, the disk keeps looking empty because there's a copy-on-write overlay that never updates the actual ADF file.

In other words, FS-UAE was gaslighting me. Several attempts involved going up and down stairs because the Amiga and the PC were in different rooms. Sneakernet madness.

But eventually: I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

Well, sort of: I realized the stock Kickstart 3.0 ROMs in this thing aren't up to the task of anything bigger than 2GB drives. So, I'll need to shop for replacements, maybe get myself set up with an EPROM burner.

Tempest Update

The Digikey parts arrived (cue PAKIDGE INTENSIFIES):

I finally got around to soldering in a replacement pot on the Tempest PCB. The 3D-printed adapter blocks work great! Just turns out I used a 200 ohm pot where a 10k ohm pot is needed. Glad I didn't go ahead and replace all the other pots already. Back to Digikey for another order.

Work Trip

Was on a work trip for a bit, and my hotel room had windows that open to the actual outside??? Novel concept. By the end of the trip I was at that phase where I kind of wish I could pay someone to fire a burrito through my hotel room window. Like I don't want to talk to anyone, just FOOMP CSHHHH burrito.

This made me remember the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, which is the kind of infrastructure investment I can get behind.

Also dreamed that my boss was mad at me. He's not, as far as I can tell, and especially not for the reason that only made sense in the dream. But I still felt like I was in trouble. Work trip anxiety is a whole thing.

It was nice and sunny in California but my moleman eyes were glad to be back in cloudy Oregon.

Hardware Ownership and Doomsday Thinking

Read an article about "Hold on to Your Hardware" and it got me thinking: What if governments and bastard oligarchs actually manage to reverse the personal computing revolution of the last 50 years? Nothing in tech is inevitable, not even individual practical access to hardware.

On one hand, I'm kinda looking forward to when bubbles burst and used hardware shows up cheap as liquidated surplus. On the other hand, I've got doomsday thinking like "how hard would it be to manufacture a DIY 6502 or Z80 in my garage?" I know just little enough about IC production to think that building a DIY microprocessor would be akin to when that kid David Hahn tried building a nuclear reactor in his garage in the 90s. But then again, maybe that's what they want me to think.

Yeah, so anyway, I never throw a computer away, so I'll just be over here muttering "my precious" as the world goes to heck.

Then Bezos chimes in saying everyone having their own PC "makes no sense" and you're going to "buy compute off the grid." Cool cool cool, really helping with the doomsday thinking there, Jeff.

Miscellanea

Three weeks is a lot of weeks. I'll try to get back on a more regular cadence, but honestly, between the Amiga and the Tempest and the work trip, I fell into a fugue state.