The Garbage Dump: 100+ pages of well-aged compost

[Fizzbuzz]

The original Game Boy had a four-color display (if you can refer to those hideous shades of olive to puke green as "colors"), but even that is only a color depth of two bits.

[Vivianinatoga]

White, light grey, dark grey, black. Superimposed on a sea of lime piss.

[Madeline]

Don’t forget the screen smearing Pretty sure the Game Boy still had an 8 bit CPU, so even with 2 bit color depth, I have no idea how someone came up with 4 bits.

[West Filly]

4 bits is theoretically possible but I don't think anyone did it.

[ToastGhost]

Here's an 8-bit picture from MLP:

[Madeline]

Here's an 8-bit picture from MLP:

I laughed

[Factory Factory]

Another oddity of the Game Boy related to the number 4: Its CPU (a custom job forked off the Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 that's mostly compatible with those) ran at a clock rate of 4.19 MHz, but was designed so that every instruction is non-pipelined and takes exactly 4 clock cycles to complete (as opposed to other 8080 designs that could take more or fewer cycles for different instruction or pipelined designs that could start a second instruction before the first was finished). This gave it an effective speed of of ~1.05 MIPS (megainstructions per second), which Nintendo called a 1.05 MHz clock rate.

[Factory Factory]

Also 4-bit CPUs did exist commercially, very briefly, in the early 1970s. They were mostly used for electronic calculators. Which, in 1971, were big fuckin' business not unlike modern cell phone rivalries.

[Factory Factory]

4-bit CPUs still persist to this day in certain super-simple microcontrollers, like the kind of chip you'd use to operate a coffee pot. But even that's coming to an end. These days, 8-bit microcontrollers and increasingly even 32-bit micros are no more expensive or power-hungry to build and use, and because of their increased capability, they are more likely to be built in the first place. So fancier stuff is becoming, ironically, cheaper than the simple stuff.

[Factory Factory]

As it turns out, the copy-protection lockout chip in the original NES was a 4-bit microcontroller. Huh.

I am basically narrating what I'm reading on Wikipedia now.

[Highbrow Dash]

I am basically narrating what I'm reading on Wikipedia now.

Now tell us about 4 bit CPUs in Popular Culture.

[Vivianinatoga]

Now tell us about 4 bit CPUs in Gamindustri.

[Gloomy Rube]

Here's an 8-bit picture from MLP:

I want to celebrate this post

[ToastGhost]

Thank you both, I'm fairly proud of that one.

This is how Angel Beat must feel all the time with puns.

[Madeline]

I just learned a bunch of things about 4 bit processors that I didn’t know.

Also, yw, Toast

[Angel Beat]

Thank you both, I'm fairly proud of that one.

This is how Angel Beat must feel all the time with puns.

Very much so.

[Mr. Big]

In an art stream I went to, there's a user who always shows up, whose name has "yanny" in it. I called him "Laurel". I've been waiting all week to do that joke

He only responded "BAN".

...so anyone want to go to a "Yanny and Hardy" movie festival?

[Logicgate]

Today at work someone linked a blog post they had made 8 years ago, and I apparently replied in the comments? Anyway I used the phrase "An arbitrary individual, be it Heracles or a hippopotamus" and I have so many questions for my past self

[Aramek]

"Heracles? I always thought it was Hercules."
- The Spirit.

[Princess Flufflebutt]

"Heracles? I always thought it was Hercules."
- The Spirit.

Yes.

[Aramek]

I have seen that movie seven times.

I wonder if I'm the only one who liked it.

[Logicgate]

I figure I must've chosen Heracles to sound more pretentious, but I'm not sure why that was my objective

[The Ghost of Ember]

i for one am glad my past self's dead

[Logicgate]

Considering 8 years ago was pre-transition? Hard same.

[Pocket]

They say all the cells in your body that were alive seven years ago are dead now. So yeah, Current You and Past You are completely different people. You just happen to be cursed with all their memories.

[minty]

I don't want to think of how I was 8 years ago.

Maybe I'll say the same about me now in 8 years.

[West Filly]

In 8 years I've gone from someone who was failing at A level qualifications to someone who works 12 hour night shifts in manual labour. In other words I am where I am now because of who I was 8 years ago.

[ToastGhost]

8 years ago I was a senior in highschool, excited for college, and full of potential!

Let's not talk about where I am now.

[Octavia]

8 years ago I still lived in Los Angeles.

4 years ago today I closed on my home!

[Mr. Big]

8 years ago I was still in college, and discovered Ponies for the first time

I'm no longer in college, although I'm still watching Ponies. Some things never change, I guess

[Madeline]

I’m a better person than I was 8 years ago, and 105 pounds lighter. Although, 8 years ago I was happy and optimistic for the future, so that definitely didn’t work out well

[Fizzbuzz]

8 years ago I'd just dropped out of my first university after an awful year where I was vastly unprepared for being an adult, where I was so anxious that I failed 1/3 of my classes due to just not showing up or participating in them, where during the worst of it I was going to bed night after night hoping I would die during my sleep. I'd at least gotten out of my phase where I thought 4chan was hilarious, but that was because I'd replaced it with me thinking FYAD and other such high goonery was hilarious.

I really do wish I could go back and reassure 18-year-old me that things weren't so bad and that I could actually improve my life. I wasted pretty much all of 2010-2015 living with my parents and doing nothing (though at least I met you all in 2013), convinced that I couldn't succeed in life and that all I could do is be a household servant to my parents or maybe unskilled manual labor at best. Things are much better for me now, but that's still several years of my life that I wasted, years I'll never get back and that I'm concerned will hurt me in terms of savings and career advancement the rest of my life. Still, hopefully I can make the best of what I do have.

[Mad Surge]

Garfield no

[Pocket]

There has been a font based on the lettering from Peanuts for ages—it's so common that it's even popped up in Homestar Runner a few times—but there's something vaguely unsettling about discovering that Blambot sells one inspired by Calvin and Hobbes.

Whoever made it did a spot-on job reproducing Bill Watterson's handwriting, at any rate.

[Mechanical Ape]

SOLO! Well, since 1983 I’ve seen some good Star Wars films, some emotional Star Wars films and some thought-provoking Star Wars films.

But I hadn’t seen another fun Star Wars film until today.

[Madeline]

I kinda want to see Solo just for Donald Glover as Lando.

[West Filly]

It's time for another story idea that I'll never write.

Humans have built a fully automated society. We have thrown machines far and wide into space in order that they can automatically harvest resources and build factories across the galaxy. These machines automatically self replicate and build rockets to spread themselves further into space. This allows humans and androids to live in the wake of a self-propagating galaxy-eating industry built just to serve us.

The story focuses on a ship's crew. They go out to fix any anomalies that have been noticed within the galactic automata. Certain factories on certain planets might not be producing the right products, or some sectors might have even stopped producing altogether. Since these machines have been left to reproduce themselves across space, a whole mechanical ecosystem has begun to evolve. This ship and its crew are tasked with figuring out why certain machines aren't behaving as expected.

For example:

Some machines have become predatory, dismantling other machines in order to reproduce. While that's sensible from an evolutionary standpoint, humans actually needed the products that the prey machines were building.

Some machines have become intelligent, requiring difficult negotiations as well as a lot of education for the newly enlightened machines.

Some machines have just got themselves in a really complicated tangle, requiring some detective work and micromanagement.

One machine is a real pain in the ass. It was built to do the job the crew are doing, but doesn't do the job well. It's hard enough to do the detective work on a faulty machine, let alone when another machine has started messing with it!

[Octavia]

I kinda want to see Solo just for Donald Glover as Lando.

Childish Landino is also the biggest reason why I want to see it.

[Adiwan]

I watched it for the droid. They are always the best in the recent years (e.g. BT-1, 000 (Triple-Zero), AP-5, C1-10P (Chopper), K-2SO, BB-8), and L3-37 is no exception.
And the rest... It was very fine this time

[Pocket]

Wait wait wait. You're telling me there's a droid in this movie named L3-37?

...

Sign of the times, I suppose.