this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

(logo credit, with modifications by @[email protected])

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Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?

When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about "artificial life" — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like "when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant," I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

in school, I installed Linux on my pc, played around and then fucked up my primary disk’s boot sector and partition table.

the classic! your recovery from this was a lot smarter than mine — I think losing my data on Linux was what got me started on BSD

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

LOL, now that you mention it, I think installing FreeBSD was exactly the thing that got my MBR blown up that way. Ever since, I’ve taken a snapshot of the first 512 bytes of any bios-formatted drive…