I've recommended @foone's feed on here before, but I'll do it again now. I don't even know who this guy is or how I started following him, but his feed is full of interesting fun threads like this, often looking at older tech like this. I think most people on here would really enjoy following him.
It's more like code than state, isn't it? The thing that changed is the implementation of a circuit for computing the result of some calculation, i.e. a function.
We don't generally count hardware as state because we expect it to be a reliable abstraction, but this same attitude applies to other things we do too: note that any program you've ever compiled can also count the compiler itself as state; this is the whole foundation for trusting-trust attacks!
I usually say “check environment”, which is usually the reason — cron jobs run in non-interactive mode, new version of system library, wrong PATH variable, new math co-processor and so on.
Check out this talk by Chris Gerlinsky at 33c3 (2016)[1] about how he went about cracking the encryption of cable/satellite television set-top boxes. It is a very detailed talk, and he goes into detail about delaminating a ROM chip and visually extracting the contents of its memory bit-by-bit using a microscope and then software to speed things up a little. It's a long talk so he goes into more detail about the rest of the process, but I really enjoyed it.
You know, I think the crashing demo is more compeling game design wise. I watch it and have an itch to pull up a bit the nose and give a bit more throttle. That itch is the demo pulling me in, causing me to want to play. The perfect landing is meh, clearly the computer can do it, why would I bother picking up the controls? Interesting that the developers disagreed enough to roll a new chip, at what I guess was a considerable expense.
My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing.
So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".
It's a bit different than that. The newer version here is physical. So they would stop making the older version at some point. Not like software that the old version is always available. They likely realised it was happening, but just didn't think fixing it was worth it.
Pilotwings Resort was a launch title on the 3DS. Neat little nod to Pilotwings (SNES) and Pilotwings 64 launching with those consoles. It was really cool seeing it on the 3D screen.
I have this and can highly recommend it. Can be picked up at a fairly reasonable price. Also, if you don't really like the 3D, you can always turn it down/off.
As a game, Pilotwings Resort is definitely a worthy successor to the N64 version.
This hits on something I've wondered about for a long time. Since carts did not just include data, but also mappers and coprocessors, how do you write an emulator that can accurately play an arbitrary ROM dump?
Does your emulator have to have knowledge of every single game, and what mappers and/or "helper" chips each had, and emulate just the ones appropriate for a given game?
They do, absurdly enough. See for example BSNES, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123 , "In order to extract these programs from most of the DSPs, we had to decap the chips, scan them in with an electron microscope, and 'tweak' the processors to allow us to dump their protected program ROMs."
If you're talking about an MSX game, then yes. Nothing about the carts are preserved in the ROM images, and you need a per-game database, or you'll need some kind of "cartridge type" list that the user has to choose from when booting the game.
If you're talking about the NES, sort of yes. People stick a fan-made "iNES" header at the top of the ROM data, but they made the format before all the details of the NES were known. So using that information is not enough for many titles, and so you need a database for those titles to work properly.
For the SNES and Genesis, the games have internal headers that tell you most of the details of the games, but not enough for complete emulation. SNES emulators in the past have been able to add bizarre tricks that just so happen to line up with the existing commercial games to not need a database, but it really turns out to be a mini database disguised by being obtuse. Example: "if the ROM is larger than 2MB, and has save RAM data, and has 32K bank granularity, then map the save RAM data to a smaller area of memory." Rather than "if the game is Fire Emblem, treat it differently than Ys 3."
For the Game Boy Advance, emulators and flash cart tools will scan the ROM looking for signatures from code libraries from Nintendo that handle save memory, like "FLASH512_V", "EEPROM_V", "SRAM_V", etc. Developers wised up and started including fake strings to fool them, so once again ... you end up needing a database.
There's very, very few cartridge-based systems where only the ROM dump is all you need. If I had to name one, I'd say the Neo Geo Pocket is one.
There are even cases like Mega Man X (Japan), where they made a mistake with the copy protection, and to fix it, resorted to wiring a resistor right onto the back of the PCB of every cartridge released to change the memory map.
And databases + heuristics fall apart when it comes to homebrew, fan translations, ROM hacks, etc.
True preservation requires games include a detailed description of the entire PCBs of these games, not just the ROM chips. But unfortunately, after trying for 15 years, I've not been able to come up with a stable, simple format for every system in the world that doesn't rely on emulator-specific design decisions.
I mean, how do you represent every possible circuit board configuration on the planet in a text file, that isn't going to make emulator authors for just the NES or just the Game Boy balk?
For example, The iNES format, for NES emulators, has a 16 byte header, not part of the original ROM, that identifies the mapper, screen mirroing if not controlled by the mapper, and whether or not battery backed RAM is included.
NES mapper numbers were standardized among emulator authors. Look for "NES mapper list". Some very early games didn't use a mapper (that's what mapper 0 is).
SNES games do have an intrinsic header that describes the cartridge content. What’s missing has to be guessed through heuristics. bsnes has a file format for describing this stuff in detail, but it’s so far not been very popular because users like things to be self-contained.
That brings up another interesting point. foone says the ROM data dumped would be identical, but that’s disingenuous. The DSP firmware is part of the cartridge, too, and it is clearly different. byuu has proposed catenating the DSP image to the base ROM for this reason. Of course, the Pilotwings case was unique, being the only game to ship with two different DSP firmwares.
A fascinating read though there were a couple of small mistakes.
>Pilotwings came out a month after the SNES, not a year.
>ROM as in a file copy of the contents of ROM chips is not technically short for "ROM dump" because, though it is a ROM dump, the usage of ROM to describe it does not originate with usage of the term ROM dump.
TLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different outputs, even though the game ROM is identical.
Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.
It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three times faster.
Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.
They could do that because the SNES's main CPU was ridiculously pokey even for the time it was released. Even calling it 16-bit was a bit of a white lie.
Not just back then. Nintendo has put a lot of wacky stuff in cartridges. Learn with Pokemon Typing Adventure had a bluetooth adapter in its cartridge to communicate with its bundled bluetooth keyboard. Some early NES games were actually Famicom boards with a 60 to 72 pin adapter embedded in the cartridge. Morita Shogi 64 had a modem and a phone jack built into its cartridge. Animal Crossing for N64 had a real-time clock. Mario Artist: Talent Studio had a cartridge that featured an entire composite video capture card. The Japanese version of Tetris 64 had a modified controller pak which connected to an infrared heartrate sensor for a special play mode that tested the user's ability to keep calm.
More examples: WarioWare: Twisted! for Game Boy Advance with a gyroscope sensor, and Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand (also for GBA) with a light sensor for detecting sunlight.
Pokemon: HeartGold/SoulSilver have an infrared comms port to communicate with the pokewalker, and to mystery gift - because the Game Boy Color had one!
Even though the NES chips were still called "mappers" some of the later chips did a lot more, particularly on the Famicom, where cartridges could add extra sound channels. Even on the NES though you saw some minor graphics enhancements.
For me, it just shows up as a bunch of text, approximately divided into paragraphs, with images interspersed, which I can scroll through. Is it different for you?
Twitter seems to be in this weird space where they have enough usability positives over other social media (pretty broadly accessible, doesn't pester you to log in, you can post NSFW content without it getting taken down) that I guess people just force themselves to use it, even if a blog post would be better formatted.
I think it’s the combination of feeling easy to do (both UI & not feeling pressure to write a formal essay) and getting immediate feedback. For most people blogging is mostly solitary in comparison.
A lot of people are complaining about twitter as the delivery method for this kind of content. I actually really like it, having things broken up like this makes it much easier for me to digest because of my ADHD
I have "ADHD" as well. Your brain is like a muscle, and when you actively avoid using it a certain way then it becomes harder to do things that way. The attention economy and the "ADHD" epidemic have a parasitic symbiotic relationship with one another. I'm sure you remember reading books as a kid, so you weren't born like this.
Oh, of course. I have become spoiled from years of graphic improvements in games, I was expecting a depiction of the plane being torn to pieces or an explosion to show that it crashed...
I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one.
I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter.
Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I read).
On Twitter alone, it’s just terrible.
That being said, while the format is terrible, the actual content here is brilliant, especially in that level of detail, and exactly what I’m looking for on Hacker News.
Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?"CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.
The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a popular thread into a blog post, examples: https://foone.wordpress.com/
If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?
I've subscribed to threadreader so I can save posts as PDFs, but I really wish they'd allow me to dump the underlying data as well so it could be put into archive.org.
How many of those stories would have ended up somewhere more permanent without texting though? At least with how I tell stories in my life, text is usually only replacing what would have otherwise been a fully verbal story, not something that would have ever been written at all otherwise.
Actually the Twitter thread format is really innovative. For Twitter users it’s a new way to consume stories and the limitation of each tweet gives the opportunity to the writers to be concise and get to the point.
But I agree with you, I think it’s more enjoyable to read it on a single page. I built Threader, a Twitter client that allows you to read these threads in an article format, without advertising clutter and fake news suggestions at the bottom:
Agree. I dont even understand why people use what is essentially a system made for spreading SMS to write long form articles. Just laziness? Plus, no guarantee the content wont disappear at any moment's notice. Accounts can get banned, Twitter may change their archiving policy, etc.
I swear I can't understand why people use Twitter like this.
I can understand someone young and non-technical bring lazy and writing whatever it comes to mind on a series of Tweets, but someone with this level of technical knowledge not being able to understand how unintuitive it is to write a blog post on a series of 140 characters...?
I can’t speak for foone as I’d never heard of him before today. But I have asked people why they post long threads on twitter (because they drive me crazy too) and this is the exact reason they give. A link to a blog post is far less likely to get clicked than a twitter thread is to get read. It’s right there in front of you and you’ve already read the first tweet after all.
It's not terrible. Twitter just isn't your preferred venue so you find it unnatural. It's natural for me to read and for others to read and for the author to have written on Twitter.
Why not put it elsewhere? Twitter is our place. And we like when content is natively published there. I have no interest in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Tumblr but I don't insist all the content in those places shouldn't be there. If all those people came to Twitter it would be a nightmare.
Low text density, atrocious typography, breaking of standard grammar, arbitrarily-spaced interruptions, no inline images (for mobile), limited external links and quotations, no headings, no custom formatting, random interruptions from other users.
I really can't fathom an argument that Twitter is in any way optimal for reading content of any length. Value added is exclusively in convenience and social factors.
For all those who hate trying to read this as a tweet: please see parents’ link. There’s a whole site built to compile all these into a blog like thing for you.
Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks.
It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.
This happens every time for me and a bunch of others have reported it. I think it's meant to be a dark pattern to get you to use the app. To get around it you have to reload the page from the browser reload button.
If you don’t like to read long-form content on Twitter, use Threader. (Disclaimer: I built it). It turns Twitter threads into a single page article.
> https://threader.app/thread/1126996260026605568
I've recommended @foone's feed on here before, but I'll do it again now. I don't even know who this guy is or how I started following him, but his feed is full of interesting fun threads like this, often looking at older tech like this. I think most people on here would really enjoy following him.
His Twitter is Patreon funded which he literally never advertises, so I will do it for him. https://www.patreon.com/foone
It's "literally" in the bio.
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Yeah, he's got some good stuff. I really appreciated his thread on human vision. I learned a lot. https://twitter.com/i/moments/1016910004262088704
Great content, and then I followed @foone and one of the recommended people was another account that I just followed because the pinned tweet was this: https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/732005292808900608
I saw it before and probably on HN itself, but was left hidden in some place in my memory, it is an amazing project!
Had the pleasure of meeting @foone in Seattle a month ago. Definitely follow that twitter, this is -normal- levels of awesomeness.
There is a good debugging advice related to this story: "if your code is the same but suddenly starts behaving differently, check for hidden state."
It's more like code than state, isn't it? The thing that changed is the implementation of a circuit for computing the result of some calculation, i.e. a function.
I very often think of the current definitions of functions as part of the program state.
You're right – but I don't think "hardware" usually counts as state!
We don't generally count hardware as state because we expect it to be a reliable abstraction, but this same attitude applies to other things we do too: note that any program you've ever compiled can also count the compiler itself as state; this is the whole foundation for trusting-trust attacks!
I usually say “check environment”, which is usually the reason — cron jobs run in non-interactive mode, new version of system library, wrong PATH variable, new math co-processor and so on.
> you carefully dump acid on them, and you visually extract the ROM data.
Super interested in how that works. Do they literally map out the chip at a transistor/gate level?
Yup check out https://hackaday.com/2017/05/02/how-to-reverse-engineer-a-ch... and Ken Shirriff's excellent blog http://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering
Check out this talk by Chris Gerlinsky at 33c3 (2016)[1] about how he went about cracking the encryption of cable/satellite television set-top boxes. It is a very detailed talk, and he goes into detail about delaminating a ROM chip and visually extracting the contents of its memory bit-by-bit using a microscope and then software to speed things up a little. It's a long talk so he goes into more detail about the rest of the process, but I really enjoyed it.
[1] https://youtu.be/lhbSD1Jba0Q
You know, I think the crashing demo is more compeling game design wise. I watch it and have an itch to pull up a bit the nose and give a bit more throttle. That itch is the demo pulling me in, causing me to want to play. The perfect landing is meh, clearly the computer can do it, why would I bother picking up the controls? Interesting that the developers disagreed enough to roll a new chip, at what I guess was a considerable expense.
(Spoiler)
My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing.
So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".
It's a bit different than that. The newer version here is physical. So they would stop making the older version at some point. Not like software that the old version is always available. They likely realised it was happening, but just didn't think fixing it was worth it.
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I'm just gonna say Pilotwings 64 is one of the few games out there that really hasn't had a ~proper~ sequel.
Come on Nintendo.
Pilotwings Resort was a launch title on the 3DS. Neat little nod to Pilotwings (SNES) and Pilotwings 64 launching with those consoles. It was really cool seeing it on the 3D screen.
I have this and can highly recommend it. Can be picked up at a fairly reasonable price. Also, if you don't really like the 3D, you can always turn it down/off.
As a game, Pilotwings Resort is definitely a worthy successor to the N64 version.
Pilotwings (SNES) would like a word with you.
But SNES was before N64 - this person (me too!) wants a Pilotwings 64 sequel!
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This hits on something I've wondered about for a long time. Since carts did not just include data, but also mappers and coprocessors, how do you write an emulator that can accurately play an arbitrary ROM dump?
Does your emulator have to have knowledge of every single game, and what mappers and/or "helper" chips each had, and emulate just the ones appropriate for a given game?
They do, absurdly enough. See for example BSNES, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123 , "In order to extract these programs from most of the DSPs, we had to decap the chips, scan them in with an electron microscope, and 'tweak' the processors to allow us to dump their protected program ROMs."
It depends on the system.
If you're talking about an MSX game, then yes. Nothing about the carts are preserved in the ROM images, and you need a per-game database, or you'll need some kind of "cartridge type" list that the user has to choose from when booting the game.
If you're talking about the NES, sort of yes. People stick a fan-made "iNES" header at the top of the ROM data, but they made the format before all the details of the NES were known. So using that information is not enough for many titles, and so you need a database for those titles to work properly.
For the SNES and Genesis, the games have internal headers that tell you most of the details of the games, but not enough for complete emulation. SNES emulators in the past have been able to add bizarre tricks that just so happen to line up with the existing commercial games to not need a database, but it really turns out to be a mini database disguised by being obtuse. Example: "if the ROM is larger than 2MB, and has save RAM data, and has 32K bank granularity, then map the save RAM data to a smaller area of memory." Rather than "if the game is Fire Emblem, treat it differently than Ys 3."
For the Game Boy Advance, emulators and flash cart tools will scan the ROM looking for signatures from code libraries from Nintendo that handle save memory, like "FLASH512_V", "EEPROM_V", "SRAM_V", etc. Developers wised up and started including fake strings to fool them, so once again ... you end up needing a database.
There's very, very few cartridge-based systems where only the ROM dump is all you need. If I had to name one, I'd say the Neo Geo Pocket is one.
There are even cases like Mega Man X (Japan), where they made a mistake with the copy protection, and to fix it, resorted to wiring a resistor right onto the back of the PCB of every cartridge released to change the memory map.
And databases + heuristics fall apart when it comes to homebrew, fan translations, ROM hacks, etc.
True preservation requires games include a detailed description of the entire PCBs of these games, not just the ROM chips. But unfortunately, after trying for 15 years, I've not been able to come up with a stable, simple format for every system in the world that doesn't rely on emulator-specific design decisions.
I mean, how do you represent every possible circuit board configuration on the planet in a text file, that isn't going to make emulator authors for just the NES or just the Game Boy balk?
For example, The iNES format, for NES emulators, has a 16 byte header, not part of the original ROM, that identifies the mapper, screen mirroing if not controlled by the mapper, and whether or not battery backed RAM is included.
NES mapper numbers were standardized among emulator authors. Look for "NES mapper list". Some very early games didn't use a mapper (that's what mapper 0 is).
SNES games do have an intrinsic header that describes the cartridge content. What’s missing has to be guessed through heuristics. bsnes has a file format for describing this stuff in detail, but it’s so far not been very popular because users like things to be self-contained.
That brings up another interesting point. foone says the ROM data dumped would be identical, but that’s disingenuous. The DSP firmware is part of the cartridge, too, and it is clearly different. byuu has proposed catenating the DSP image to the base ROM for this reason. Of course, the Pilotwings case was unique, being the only game to ship with two different DSP firmwares.
Yep. Exactly.
A fascinating read though there were a couple of small mistakes.
>Pilotwings came out a month after the SNES, not a year.
>ROM as in a file copy of the contents of ROM chips is not technically short for "ROM dump" because, though it is a ROM dump, the usage of ROM to describe it does not originate with usage of the term ROM dump.
TLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different outputs, even though the game ROM is identical.
Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.
The most hilarious enhancement chip is the SA-1, used in the Super Mario RPG and other games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...
It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three times faster.
Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.
This was almost a thing with Xeon Phi... 57 CPU cores for 2 slots...
They could do that because the SNES's main CPU was ridiculously pokey even for the time it was released. Even calling it 16-bit was a bit of a white lie.
A 9hz microprocessor would indeed be something. Start the game up, come back 10 days later and one frame would almost be rendered...
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Not just back then. Nintendo has put a lot of wacky stuff in cartridges. Learn with Pokemon Typing Adventure had a bluetooth adapter in its cartridge to communicate with its bundled bluetooth keyboard. Some early NES games were actually Famicom boards with a 60 to 72 pin adapter embedded in the cartridge. Morita Shogi 64 had a modem and a phone jack built into its cartridge. Animal Crossing for N64 had a real-time clock. Mario Artist: Talent Studio had a cartridge that featured an entire composite video capture card. The Japanese version of Tetris 64 had a modified controller pak which connected to an infrared heartrate sensor for a special play mode that tested the user's ability to keep calm.
More examples: WarioWare: Twisted! for Game Boy Advance with a gyroscope sensor, and Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand (also for GBA) with a light sensor for detecting sunlight.
Pokemon: HeartGold/SoulSilver have an infrared comms port to communicate with the pokewalker, and to mystery gift - because the Game Boy Color had one!
Small correction, these are SNES games. The extra chips on NES games were primarily memory mappers and not as interesting as what SNES games did.
Even though the NES chips were still called "mappers" some of the later chips did a lot more, particularly on the Famicom, where cartridges could add extra sound channels. Even on the NES though you saw some minor graphics enhancements.
I enjoyed this but I hate twitter as the delivery method for things of this length. Its a terrible way to digest the content.
I agree, it seems like a bad choice.
threadreaderapp.com can help: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html
Came here to say the same. Someone needs to tell these people that Twitter is not a blogging service...
One or two people have mentioned it to him before. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1127083480674750465
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Maybe he is emulating a blogging service with restricted technology?
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But... that's exactly what it is
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Maybe some of us like Twitter as it is?
Or you should be a little more sensitive and read about the OP and why he doesn't use a blog (severe ADHD).
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It is a not a blog. Its not one thought, it discreet thoughts on the same topic.
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I'm not a fan of this essay type thing being on twitter, split into lots of little tweets.
Already mentioned here before: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128
It's like every time anyone writes anything about CockroachDB, the top comment has to be "yeah but the name tho..."
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For me, it just shows up as a bunch of text, approximately divided into paragraphs, with images interspersed, which I can scroll through. Is it different for you?
Neither do I, but the content is interesting, lets not let preferred form detract from the discussion.
Twitter seems to be in this weird space where they have enough usability positives over other social media (pretty broadly accessible, doesn't pester you to log in, you can post NSFW content without it getting taken down) that I guess people just force themselves to use it, even if a blog post would be better formatted.
I think it’s the combination of feeling easy to do (both UI & not feeling pressure to write a formal essay) and getting immediate feedback. For most people blogging is mostly solitary in comparison.
Twitter does pester you to log in when scrolling down someone's profile, I think. Maybe it was on mobile.
A lot of people are complaining about twitter as the delivery method for this kind of content. I actually really like it, having things broken up like this makes it much easier for me to digest because of my ADHD
I have "ADHD" as well. Your brain is like a muscle, and when you actively avoid using it a certain way then it becomes harder to do things that way. The attention economy and the "ADHD" epidemic have a parasitic symbiotic relationship with one another. I'm sure you remember reading books as a kid, so you weren't born like this.
No video of the crash landing, though?
It's the very first tweet?
Oh, of course. I have become spoiled from years of graphic improvements in games, I was expecting a depiction of the plane being torn to pieces or an explosion to show that it crashed...
I often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one.
I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter.
Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I read).
On Twitter alone, it’s just terrible.
That being said, while the format is terrible, the actual content here is brilliant, especially in that level of detail, and exactly what I’m looking for on Hacker News.
Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html
Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.
The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a popular thread into a blog post, examples: https://foone.wordpress.com/
If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?
Just copy tweets to post?
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I've subscribed to threadreader so I can save posts as PDFs, but I really wish they'd allow me to dump the underlying data as well so it could be put into archive.org.
I wonder how many stories will be lost because of stuff like this.
In particular, text messages.
I can't tell you how many stories have been told between myself and family and friends that are just one lost device away from oblivion.
Apple should have an official app to let people save their text with photos and videos, because they are really family heirlooms.
I suspect they are one of the primary reasons for icloud, and the new apple seems pretty "practical" in this respect.
How many of those stories would have ended up somewhere more permanent without texting though? At least with how I tell stories in my life, text is usually only replacing what would have otherwise been a fully verbal story, not something that would have ever been written at all otherwise.
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> I wonder how many stories will be lost because of stuff like this.
If you read his explanation, he'd actually never write it at all if you forced him to blog. So the answer is not as simple as you make it seem.
Actually the Twitter thread format is really innovative. For Twitter users it’s a new way to consume stories and the limitation of each tweet gives the opportunity to the writers to be concise and get to the point.
But I agree with you, I think it’s more enjoyable to read it on a single page. I built Threader, a Twitter client that allows you to read these threads in an article format, without advertising clutter and fake news suggestions at the bottom:
https://threader.app/thread/1126996260026605568
Yeah, I don't have the patience or interest in putting up with Twitter as a platform for information sharing or real discussion. It's terrible.
Agree. I dont even understand why people use what is essentially a system made for spreading SMS to write long form articles. Just laziness? Plus, no guarantee the content wont disappear at any moment's notice. Accounts can get banned, Twitter may change their archiving policy, etc.
I swear I can't understand why people use Twitter like this.
I can understand someone young and non-technical bring lazy and writing whatever it comes to mind on a series of Tweets, but someone with this level of technical knowledge not being able to understand how unintuitive it is to write a blog post on a series of 140 characters...?
Mind boggling.
Less clickthroughs = more engagement = better viral loop
Thats the why, since you asked
I can’t speak for foone as I’d never heard of him before today. But I have asked people why they post long threads on twitter (because they drive me crazy too) and this is the exact reason they give. A link to a blog post is far less likely to get clicked than a twitter thread is to get read. It’s right there in front of you and you’ve already read the first tweet after all.
Somehow I don’t think that’s foone’s motivation at all.
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So money? Or exposure? I just don't get it. It is literally text messages.
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It's not terrible. Twitter just isn't your preferred venue so you find it unnatural. It's natural for me to read and for others to read and for the author to have written on Twitter.
Why not put it elsewhere? Twitter is our place. And we like when content is natively published there. I have no interest in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Tumblr but I don't insist all the content in those places shouldn't be there. If all those people came to Twitter it would be a nightmare.
> It's not terrible
Low text density, atrocious typography, breaking of standard grammar, arbitrarily-spaced interruptions, no inline images (for mobile), limited external links and quotations, no headings, no custom formatting, random interruptions from other users.
I really can't fathom an argument that Twitter is in any way optimal for reading content of any length. Value added is exclusively in convenience and social factors.
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Imagine a feature length movie delivered as 300 webms.
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Unrolled version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html
Great story!
For all those who hate trying to read this as a tweet: please see parents’ link. There’s a whole site built to compile all these into a blog like thing for you.
Twitter is the worst platform for long-form content like this.
> Twitter is the worst platform
Ftfy
Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks.
It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.
This happens every time for me and a bunch of others have reported it. I think it's meant to be a dark pattern to get you to use the app. To get around it you have to reload the page from the browser reload button.
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If you don’t like to read long-form content on Twitter, use Threader. (Disclaimer: I built it). It turns Twitter threads into a single page article. > https://threader.app/thread/1126996260026605568
I both agree and disagree. It's a terrible way to read anything long-form, but in the case of a suspenseful story like this it's pretty great.
Ah interesting, the demo changes based on the state. In a way it's a growing organism.
>>> then you collect all three types of DSP chips, you carefully dump acid on them, and you visually extract the ROM data
Tell me more !! How? Do a YouTube video on this ! Hell, Netflix will pay for a ten episode series on hardware hacking easy!