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higher ed, pedagogy, assessment, LLMs, sloperators
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Ethan Blanton
@elb@social.sdf.org
mastodon 4.7.3I'm here for old computers, radios, and cool nerdery.
I identify with #Unix #Linux #HamRadio #retrocomputing and #making.
Professionally I am a computer scientist, now primarily an educator of college students. I am a #SystemsProgrammer with deep experience in #networking, #EmbeddedSystems, and #OperatingSystems. I have also worked in #security from time to time.
The operating system you're using has code written by people who were consulting documents that I co-authored to get it right.
363 Followers
110 Following
40 Posts
Joined November 24, 2022
Hey look, @veronica@explains.social put out a video on a subject I've spent a lot of time with: AIM and the OSCAR servers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDQTuJWST4M
She also teased a future post about @pidgin@fosstodon.org, which I look forward to.
Forget Discord, I'm switching back to AIM
I don't know who needs to see this, but here's an UltraSPARC III cpu module. #retrocomputing #SPARC #SunMicrosystems
Replying to
higher ed, pedagogy, assessment, LLMs, sloperators
You can tell that Typst is a successful LaTeX competitor because when I'm done with a Typst session I have dozens of tabs open to DuckDuckGo, the Typst documentation, various Typst packages and their documentation, and the forums.
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@ricci@discuss.systems This is freaking awesome. I took the liberty of posting it here: https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/unix-v4-tape-found-at-the-university-of-utah/5400
How many domains is too many domains? Asking for a friend.
(Also why have they gotten so expensive?!?)
Marchintosh is almost over and I haven't even powered up a classic Mac. :-(
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@florian@bsd.network That's basically what I said ... stuff like IP and TCP and DNS is lifetime achievement material, and if a company could turn out something like that on demand they'd dominate whatever market they were in.
A new friend, from Summer of '84. They should have a familiar look, for those of us of a certain set of interests.
640K? What about 64K? Do more with less, right?
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@lindsey I was just talking about this kind of thing with @akhirsch at lunch yesterday. I'm super proud of your student for noticing that, what I was specifically musing on is that I find it difficult to teach students to find trivial solutions even when prompted. (I think this is similar to finding corner cases and limits; it requires an inversion of thinking that takes some practice!)
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@autiomaa@mementomori.social So true. It's been years since I was involved with the IETF/etc, but so many just really competent and knowledgeable people were happy to give me the time of day when I was a snot-nosed twenty-year-old. Sally Floyd (RIP) and Van Jacobson happy to discourse on congestion control, Randy Bush and Geoff Huston on routing and autonomous systems, etc. I really believe the Internet we have today (whether we're doing the right things with it or not) is because they shared experience.
@florian@bsd.network
We're losing computing history at an incredible rate, but there are people doing just amazing work out there collecting not only information about the technologies, but also the people and processes that brought them to be. If you're interested in that kind of thing but not sure where to start, let me recommend some sites that have some great stories (in no particular order):
https://folklore.org/0-index.html
https://multicians.org/
http://www.tuhs.org/
There are others, of course! #ComputerHistory
https://www.instructure.com/incident_update
"The data fields involved include information like usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages. Core learning data (course content, submissions, credentials) was not compromised."
"Canvas by Instructure is fully operational and remains safe to use. Core learning data is not compromised."
So, basically, personal information and federally protected data was stolen, but it's safe because nobody's slides were compromised?
#HigherEd #BigTech
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@millihertz And why do paste and join have different options for selecting delimiters?
I've been doing this stuff for 30+ years and I have to check some of these things all the time.
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@davefischer@hachyderm.io I wish I were closer, I hope you find a good home for them. I have neither Sun nor SGI glass, and a 13W3 to VGA adapter just isn't the same. ;-) It is _lighter_, of course ...
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@migratory@jorts.horse I actually gave that speech on Monday, I think; distributed systems are like C, you PROBABLY don't want to use it. Most systems will run just fine on a core 2 duo you found in a closet UNTIL you try to distribute them. ;-)
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@hazelton@sparkgap.marsfreeradio.org For many years I carried a 6" metal scale in my pocket (marked down to 1/64ths, so not as fine as .1mm!; inches are the customary measurement here). I stopped because it kept cutting holes in my pockets, but it was indeed convenient to have. It is now sitting beside me on my desk, and I have various inch and metric scales at my other desks. I always pick them up when I find them at flea markets/estate sales/etc.!
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@aburka@hachyderm.io "Classic Mac" in this case is a technical term used to refer to Macs of the Motorola 68k architecture, which were discontinued in the mid to late 1990s (in favor of PowerPC). 2008 is probably early x86 Mac, yet another architectural change later. It's still a cool machine, though, and you should definitely do something fun with it!
https://blog.himanshuanand.com/2026/05/the-90-day-disclosure-policy-is-dead/
I think this is a use case for LLMs and coding assistants that I can actually see and get behind. The fact that they're exploitative and unsustainably expensive to generate/maintain is still a problem that I don't have an answer for, but running bug and vulnerability checks against your _own codebase_ seems like just a good idea, in 2026. I'm still not convinced for routine code development.
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@brian@awesome.garden Did it keep working after that? Did the foul-smelling smoke smell kind of fishy? Is there a burnt plastic box (possibly with little leaves of paper/plastic/metal fluffing out of it, possibly not) immediately behind the power entrance plug, there?
A lot of 1970s devices have a kind of power line filter capacitor called a RIFA, and they fail safely but stinkily. When they fail it normally doesn't inhibit usage of the device. If you web search "RIFA capacitor" you'll see photos.
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@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space @thalia@discuss.systems yeah but if it's actual RS-232 then you are obligated by a law as old as time to use at least three different adapters in between at least two lengths of cable.
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@mwichary There is one of these at the Info Age Science Museum in Wall, NJ (where VCF East is held) attached to a ... Nova, I think.
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@rayk @millihertz In particular, in the V5/V6/V7 time frame, the Unix from the CSRG (which is the one with all the Vs) and Programmer's Workbench (PWB) Unix were merged, and there were a lot of differences there.
But in general, in the early days, these programs were just written by somebody and lived in their ~ until someone said "man that's really useful, let's give it to usr" or whatever.
Nonetheless it is painful in 2026.
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@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social I like how all the retrocomputing people took Saturday off to post about cats.
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@vkc@linuxmom.net SO TRUE.
$ grep elb aliases | wc -l
168
... and that's just on one domain. Maybe we can just list entire domains, along with the addresses on each domain that _aren't_ ours?
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@brian@awesome.garden That is unfortunate, indeed. Then I suspect, as a previous poster suggested, that some sticky lube somewhere burned up either a driver component or a motor. There are a lot of capacitors on that board, they're not out of the woods, but those larger-size caps from that era would tend to have low capacitance but not pop and smoke.
JFK is the second worst airport
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@ericwastl@hachyderm.io Thank you for your service, and I look forward to Advent of Code 2025! I teach (among other things) programming at a large state university in the US, and I frequently advocate that students pick old Advent of Code problems to get programming practice. Unlike leetcode or hackerrank or similar, I find that you have done a great job of tailoring them for problem solving, not for memorizing common tricks (although tricks might sometimes help!). You're doing great work.
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Oh, oh, I know this one! It's @cwebber@social.coop! She also asks it to explain the Fediverse.
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@geb@mamot.fr @bortzmeyer@mastodon.gougere.fr That's fine; in class, we discussed TLDs, gTLDs, some of the drama behind ISO country codes, what happens when a domain expires or is repossessed, etc.
