Comment by NetOpWibby
5 hours ago
Before figuring out how to tackle this project, I needed to know whether it would even be possible. According to a 2021 Reddit comment:
There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Feeling encouraged, I started with the basics: what hardware is in the Wii, and how does it compare to the hardware used in real Macs from the era.
I LOL'd
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me.
My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.
I've seen more than one half-joke-half-serious chunk of code that would "encode" arbitrary info into stack traces simply by recursively calling `fn_a`, then `fn_s`, `fn_d`, and `fn_f` before continuing with the actual intended call, giving you a stack trace with (effectively) "asdf" in it.
They've also been useful more than once, e.g. you can do that to know what iteration of a loop failed. There are of course other ways to do this, but it's hard to beat "stupid, simple, and works everywhere" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
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Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
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Similarly, one of the great things about Python (less so JS with the ecosystem's habit of shipping minified bundles) is that you can just edit source files in your site_packages once you know where they are. I've done things like add print statements around obscure Django errors as a poor imitation of instrumentation. Gets the job done!
The solution to every software problem is another layer of indirection :-)
Adversarial software development is also when I do my best work
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Agreed. Also who doesn't like knocking a smug commenter down a peg
I'm remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.
So many. The Dropbox comment on HN
Funny enough about the Dropbox comment, it caught so much flak that it’s gone full circle and I’ve often found people defending it saying what the guy said made sense at the time etc
I guess Reddit is just less empathetic than HN
They're kinda like high-effort shitposts. Which are my absolute favorite kind. The worse the effort/reward payoff, and the more it makes you ask "WHY??!!?", the better.
100% agree, I find that sometimes I hit a dead end, but the things I build or learn on the way are usable at a later date.
Now tell me your opinion on P==NP being confirmed within 5 years.
Love that it's actually linked as well; too bad that user isn't still active.
Yes, I’ve found at work that the best way to get me off my ass and work furiously is to tell me something isn’t possible
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)
It's a variation of "because it's there" when asked why would you climb some giant mountain.
Impressive work! Now run Dolphin on it. ;)
Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?
Or eventually you could answer wrongly to a question without answers, triggering plenty of correct ones
yeah, it's an interesting socio-psychological phenomenon
I have a project on my desk that started as a response to a line in the Adafruit docs for their RP2040 based MacroPad
Oh yeah, really? There is a port hanging off the side that can be reconfigured for UART, are you sure Adafruit, what if I add an ESP32?
> Readers with a keen eye might notice some issues:
> - Everything is magenta.
was fun too
HN is not as bad but I think a lot of internet commenters do this because it gives them a little hit of superiority
Plus the internet basically equates cynicism with intelligence
There is somehow no concept of "ignorant cynicism"
So much has happened in the tech world because someone wrote at one point, "You can't do that"
My favorite part of our online world.
The "zero percent" guy definitely opened a browser tab to check after the post went live.
The missile knows at all times where it is, by knowing at all times where it isn’t.
I had the same reaction.
Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:
>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said
The best part is the comment ranting about how the Wii's CPU is so fundamentally different, and then:
> The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL processor - an evolution of the PowerPC 750CXe that was used in G3 iBooks and some G3 iMacs.
Hilarious.
Tempted to necro a 5 year old reddit post just to tell that guy he was wrong, honestly
This is why Reddit defaults to archiving posts (preventing new comments or votes) after 6 months.
User hasn't posted in 4 years. Sadly, they'd probably never see it.
I wanted to, but no replies are allowed now :)
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Make a new thread calling them out personally.
Comments are blocked there
The comment score is 1. It doesn't even have a controversial flag. The gamification of social media is a mistake.