(Code)named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppermine_River , apparently.

POD was pretty rad :) Thanks for the reminder of it (and all the MMX marketing around it.)

I read those tutorials as well! Around the same age, in '96 or '97, when I first got online, in the UK. And it might have been someone's "translation" of them into C, although I do recall reading the Pascal originals as well.

Namedropping another contemporary reference, I probably downloaded them from the Hornet Archive or a mirror.

They were a major step along the short but satisfying road to my first 3D starfield using Borland C++ (acquired via a magazine coverdisc). I felt so l33t.

> You’re conflating consciousness with intelligence. Consciousness is subjective experience

Indeed. Thinking is not the same as experiencing thinking.

> there’s no way to know if any other people, much less machines, are conscious.

Or even ourselves :D

"Consciousness is just an illusion" "If so, who's experiencing the illusion?" "Yes"

Even those still halfway up said ladder: https://x.com/flowersslop/status/2058161240350794165?s=20

> a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+

I'm curious what were you referring to here. Did Packard Bell make Apple 2 clones? I didn't find anything in a quick search.

They might be thinking of the Bell+Howell clone:

https://www.oldcomputers.net/bellandhowell.html

https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-bell-and-howell-apple-ii/

Yeah, that’s what I meant. Oops.

Aha, thanks!

Please don’t post AI slop to HN. It’s against the guidelines.

> Please don’t post AI slop to HN.

??? - My comment doesn't even look like an LLM wrote it.

> It’s against the guidelines.

To be clear:

I wRoTe

- E V E R Y - w o r d -

by [picture ASCII art of "human hand" here]⠀

Do not accuse me of using an LLM as a substitute for thinking.

I do not use LLMs to write any of my Hacker News comments, and I never have.

I have used LLMs to help me search for information, but I have never once in my life posted the outputs of an LLM into a post verbatim as my own. That's laziness.

I'm not dismissing LLMs here. They produce better writing than a lot of humans. They are fantastic tools for constructing media, for getting work done, and for furthering your own capabilities.

But I curate my thoughts and craft my arguments. That sort of wanton dismissal of my comments is worse than using an LLM as a substitute for thinking. That's real "human slop".

I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.

It was supposed to be "a" gigahertz, Google transcription fail.

Right. It captures the destabilizing effect of stochastic terrorism, without the terroristic intent. It’s a neat phrase.

This, but (or "and") use the 4-row layout that dozens of tracker programs used[0], to fit over 2 octaves on the computer keyboard.

On a US keyboard:

QWERTYUIOP[] is the white keys starting at middle C. (The row above is the black keys; the 2 key plays C#.)

ZXCVBNM,./ is the white keys starting an octave lower. (S plays a low C#.)

The two ranges overlap; e.g. Q and , both play C in the same octave.

Grew up composing music on a computer this way when my (musical) keyboard didn't have MIDI and I couldn't afford a better one :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

Can you name a piece of software that uses this scheme? Or, better still, the OG software that used it. If I steal this, I'd like to have something to call it. (I've seen this scheme before: I think it might be used by the keyboard built into the Squeak image that comes with Scratch 1.4.)

The earliest I've used was Protracker, which was the most popular tracker in the early heyday of the format (late 80s - early 90s), but the earlier Soundtracker was the OG "tracker", and probably used the same layout, but I'm not sure. https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Soundtracker_History

But if FL Studio (formerly FruityLoops) and Renoise use the same layout, as others have said, then those are probably going to resonate with a wider modern audience :D Or maybe just call it "FL Studio / Renoise / tracker layout"?

I don't do computer keyboard note entry any more, but I still have the muscle memory for that 4-row layout from hours spent with it in the late 90s :D And I'd totally use it in your game. (My MIDI keyboards are kinda too far away from the mouse and monitor.)

renoise use that convention https://files.renoise.com/manual/Renoise%20User%20Manual.pdf (page 38). I used psycle modular music in 1999 and I know that it was not the first tracker-like software to use that convention but it's as far as my memory goes.

FL Studio (fka Fruity Loops) uses this layout, or something very close to it.