Richard Downer

When your life's in a mess, take the National Express 🎶

A fragment of a comment at the top of a C source code file. The relevant parts are: QSORT.C Well, I actually implement a merge sort here, because I have no idea how much stack is available for a quick sort.

My whole life has been a lie! Well, the couple of years between learning C and the end of the Amiga, and only the bit of my life that is programming-related. From the source code of the DICE C Compiler, at the top of the file that implements qsort(), the Quick Sort routine in the C standard library:

Massive purple lit letters outside Edinburgh Airport. It should read “EDINBURGH” but I have “hilariously” cropped out the first five letters so it says “URGH” Ha ha ha ha

Edinburgh is great for this stuff

A fancy wine glass full of Irn Bru (a luminous orange fizzy drink) and a dish of also luminous orange jelly babies sweets

Celebrating Scotland's greatest poet Rabbie Burns' birthday with... Irn Bru jelly babies 🤣 (haggis in the oven for later!)

AMX Paint! I haven't seen that since I was at primary school 😁

Let's talk about generative AI, contaminated information, and rhubarb.

Once upon a time, Europe was at war.

Food was scarce, and the government of the quote-unquote United Kingdom looked for alternatives. 1/

In 1908 Jack London wrote "The Iron Heel" which is arguably the very first dystopian novel.

The plot is also ridiculous... extreme wealth disparity causes socialism to become popular, so the oligarchy class uses their wealth to put politicians they own in power, who brutally repress any dissent.

A photo of an Amiga 500 with matching mouse, external floppy drive, and monitor, taken from the computer's Wkipedia page. It's a beautiful grey wedge of a machine that appears as if it's mostly keyboard. By Bill Bertram - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=350965

Sleek, simple to use, powerful, and boots directly into games when required but is also a versatile machine capable of running desktop software? Plays nicely with TVs and monitors? Great controller support? It can only be...

Huh? You were expecting a photo of a Steam Machine?

Google boss Sundar Pichai warns 'no company immune' if AI bubble bursts Speaking exclusively to BBC News, CEO Sundar Pichai said the artificial intelligence boom had been an

The absolute selfishness of tech bosses 😡 creating this tech, pushing it in our faces, overhyping it, putting up our prices to justify it, and setting us up so that if it fails, we all to suffer.

Google boss warns 'no company immune' if AI bubble bursts - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I can’t believe how stupid everything is

A terminal window fragment showing a crash dump. The opening words are "Guru Meditation", a reference to the system crash message of the Commodore Amiga computer in the 1980s

I'm trying out ESP32 programming for the first time (early impressions: pretty impressive). I accidentally caused a crash bug and was very surprised to see the below appear on the serial console - Amiga is clearly still influential in modern computer systems! #Amiga #Commodore #GuruMediation #ESP32

Back on retrocomputing this evening, writing some new code for the Amiga - this time, for the new (to me) ReAction GUI toolkit that is now the OS-supplied standard for UIs!

Really REALLY starting to understand the tech landscape today as the age of "loss of consent". My settings don't stay set. Features are forced on me either forced upgrades or by inclusion with a critical security patch. I increasingly have ZERO CHOICE in my interactions with computers.

As a parent with a kid who’s starting to play games on the iPad, I’m so pissed at the predatory state of kid’s games.

1. I pay $7 to remove all ads from this game. Yet catch my kid watching ads - even after paying they are offered to watch for in-game rewards. WTH

2. (cont’d)

Cartoon strip by me who is Stephen Collins. The imagery of the comic starts off with a single electron and then each panel zooms out one step - first to the microchip, then the OLED screen, then the iPhone, the person holding the iPhone, and onwards Script: An electron, forged in the first fire of the Big Bang Courses through a deeply intricate maze of transistors and diodes mined with unfathomable ingenuity from our planet’s deep geological past and assembled from all over the world Into a device perfected through centuries of technological evolution to perform a beautifully synchronised pixel dance on an OLED screen in an intricate moving pattern of shifting light [Show a phone screen with an Instagram post featuring Ryan Gosling and bearing the legend:] WATCH RYAN GOSLING EAT A PASTY FOR THE FIRST TIME! whose choreography is powered by an global information network of unknowable complexity which is specifically tailored to the interests of the being observing the screen who is a member of the most advanced species on Earth [Show a shlubby looking GUY idly looking at the Ryan Gosling/sausage roll Instagram reel on his phone while sitting in his pants and a stained t-shirt and eating a massive bag of crisps] with a brain perhaps more capable of reconfiguring these signals into conscious thought than any other for billions of miles around [Guy has a thought]: “Mmm…" in this endless, silent void. [Pull back to show the Earth as a tiny blue dot among the stars with a thought bubble coming from it] "… I want a pasty.” [ends]

Zoom out 🙏 🤩 #wonder

Me wearing a dark green t-shirt and holding a coral (orange-ish) jumper

Family have just pointed out that I'm wearing orange and green just like the new album theme colours 😂

Taylor Swift launch day, and wife and daughter have been listening to it for the last hour while making friendship bracelets! Radio 2 have just played Fate of Ophelia and it's exactly the kind of sounds I'm in to. LP is in the post and cinema tickets for the launch party tonight are ready!

Angela Rayner accidentally pays less tax than she should have, resigns, and the media gives her hell.

Nigel Farage deliberately pays less tax than he should have, and the media gives him a free pass.

That, right there, is the problem.

Logical fallacy detected 🤖
Artist credit: Michele Rosenthal michelerosenthal.com

Microsoft Releases Historic 6502 BASIC - Microsoft Open Source Blog Explore the original 6502 BASIC—now open source! Dive into retro code, history, and emulators. Fork it, run it, and relive computing's roots.

Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC is now Open Source opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09...

Same here - many clubs and groups rely on it, so I can't dump it completely. However the "Social Fixer" Chrome extension makes the experience a LOT better, I'd recommend trying it.

"And after that, collapsing on the sofa to watch TV only to doze off halfway through an episode. My musical tastes include K-Pop Demon Hunters and Taylor Swift because that's all I ever hear these days."

Start: "I want to reply to this!" First decision: Is it an opinion? Yes → Do you know them? No → "Why would somebody who doesn’t know you care what you think?" → Do not say the thing Yes → Are you a recognized expert? No → "Why would somebody who doesn’t know you care what you think?" → Do not say the thing Yes → Will knowing this be useful to them? No → "Don’t give people useless information" → Do not say the thing Yes → Say the thing! No → Is it a fact? No → Is it a joke? Yes → Is it funny? No → "Laugh quietly at your inner thoughts" → Do not say the thing Yes → Who will they think it’s funny at? Them → "Don’t be a douche" → Do not say the thing It’s unknown → Is it a question? Yes → Could you Google for the answer? Yes → "Turns out there are stupid questions" → Do not say the thing No → Are they likely to know the answer? No → "Turns out there are stupid questions" → Do not say the thing Yes → Will they be happy to hear this? No → "Don’t be a douche" → Do not say the thing Yes → Say the thing! No → "Laugh quietly at your inner thoughts" → Do not say the thing No → Can you prove it’s true? No → "Don’t give people useless information" → Do not say the thing Yes → Will knowing this be useful to them? No → "Don’t give people useless information" → Do not say the thing Yes → Say the thing! End states: Green circle: Say the thing! Red circle: Do not say the thing

Just remembered this flowchart I made many years ago for Twitter. Still very relevant to BlueSky.

Thanks, appreciate your reply. I get a bee in my bonnet about this stuff, so much interesting content in the retrocomputing community is in 20+ minute YouTube videos that I just never have the time to watch and I'm tired of missing out. This one was pretty short so was perhaps unfair of me.

Please can we have these kinds of things in press releases, blog posts, websites - video announcements are so frustrating 😫 - I'm so rarely in an environment where I can stop to watch and listen to a video in full so I end up missing out. How many people are being excluded!

Fowl Language is a great webcomic about the funny infuriating aspects of being a parent. During a subscription purge a while ago I cancelled, but I've now resubscribed and am enjoying catching up again!

Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" vinyl record, showing some signs of wear because it was bought from a second-hand shop

As a bearded middle-aged man who recently got a record player, there's a whole new genre of #AchievementUnlocked moments ahead of me

I've had to deal with striations like this - although fortunately nowhere near as complex - and it's not fun. K8s is great, but it *is* a treadmill, and teams have to plan for regular upgrades throughout their product's life. My experience: cloudsoft.io/blog/cloudso...

4-panel comic. (1) PERSON 1: This stick is one meter long. PERSON 2 WITH SHORT HAIR: Cool. PERSON 3 WITH WHITE HAT: That’s a nice stick. (2) PERSON 1: This rock weighs one pound. PERSON 2: I’d believe it. PERSON 3: Looks like a normal rock. (3) PERSON 1: This battery is one volt. PERSON 2: Seems fine. PERSON 3: Might need a recharge. (4) PERSON 1: This capacitor is one farad. [2 and 3 leaning away attempting to shield themselves] PERSON 2: *AAAAA! Be careful!!* Person 3: Put it down!!

Farads

xkcd.com/3106/