Neat. 3MB would have been insane. That year, my family bought the 512KB trapdoor expansion for A500, so that we could play Monkey Island. It was every bit worth it!
Of course, the extra 512KB made our Amiga that much more useful, and eventually we did the solder-jumper change to make it chip, as our A500 is a rev6 with the 1MB ECS Agnus.
I still have this A500; now it also has 8mb fast on cpu slot, an ECS denise and a 68010.
Cool! I never knew anyone who did a 68010 upgrade back in the day.
I also had a 30 meg hard drive on my A500 (Supra, which included the RAM expansion.) It was a pretty decent Amiga setup. I taught myself C on that machine (Lattice / SAS C)
I would expect something truly intelligent to be able to communicate well, if nothing else. That means knowing your audience, using plain language where it makes sense. Also, it yaps on and on, babbles endlessly when it a human would likely express something in a much shorter concise way. This is especially obvious when you generate project READMEs or technical docs. I find them borderline unreadable.
It smells of corporate speak, a total nonsense phrase. Even by your own admission, it is essentially meaningless. If I release a model an hour late, I'm "pacing the frontier."
This sounds right. There was a "dark ages" in the early 2000's, where Unix/Linux browser support was terrible. You were either stuck with old Netscape 4.x, which crashed every half hour, or you had to work with half baked, almost unusable beta builds of Mozilla (pre-Firefox). Because of this, I actually ran Windows on my desktop for a while!
It wasn't just the chip, it was the whole ecosystem.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
Yes you could do this, from Sun Microelectronics back in the 1990's.
We purchased an Ultra-10 motherboard with 250 MHz Ultrasparc II in 1998/1999, fitted it out with compatible third party SVGA, Ethernet and SCSI adapters and ran Solaris on it. Was our production LDAP, Mail and database server for a small ISP for many years.
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
> You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
So you don't think the complete lack of connectivity (video, networking, and storage) is going to be a problem for a normal person? There is absolutely no comparison with a Raspberry Pi. It has all those things and great software support. That Sparc platform is for a satellite!
But yes, you are correct, it's much easier to get a SPARC license.
With good input (prompts, specs...) LLMs can generate code that is often correct, faster than a human could generate equivalent code. Even when there are bugs, it is still "useful" from purely a time savings perspective. If you don't like the results, you can iterate rapidly.
Yes, you can use it to generate crap. I find Claude especially bad at writing like a normal person.
LLMs are not being promoted as "this can help write code faster/better/cheaper" (for the sake of argument presuming that they really can), they're being promoted as "Cortana" (. And their underlying economics are likewise premised on "Cortana" (for a huge amount of money). Which is going to be a disaster if/when they don't deliver.
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