iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Trying to 'educate the kids' (and other defensive moves, such as regulation and censorship) is like trying to save frogs from boiling by feeding them some ice cream. They're still in the pot.

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 10h

I'm a bit fed up with people calling for us to defend ourselves against cognitive attacks, when we embrace platforms that incentivise manipulation and misinformation. China doesn't need to lift a finger when it is profitable to rile up an angry mob with lies and misdirection.

210

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 11h

Tried lighting the fire today. Now everything stinks of smoke and we've had to have to doors and windows open so it's colder than when I started. Thanks for asking though.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 11h

I'm fed up with political parties in the West embracing performative cruelty to appease "the people". Your job as politicians is to make decisions from an informed position for social benefit. Not to chase the approval of that part of the population who are as dumb as rocks.

040

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 11h

Ah, I missed the bit about unlit tiles.

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 12h

I think this is right, but it won't let me move on?

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 14h

It's the weeeeekend folks - don't make me tap the sign.

040

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 23h

This is the continued tyranny of conformity. If we establish that anything outside of a very tightly defined "norm" is a valid target for oppression, censure or attack, then we can define any chosen enemy as "unclean" and the baying mob will descend on them. Have a great Friday!

050

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 23h

Honestly, we should get these wonderful people together, unionize them and then hold Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Tesla to ransom until they sort their shit out.

020

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 23h

You can probably register one in Estonia - they've moved almost all civil functions online, so you can set up there remarkably easily. But... don't do it. Play Store is not a place for one-man bands any more. They will grind you to dust with compliance busywork, and bury your app.

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 23h

If these people aren't held to account at some point, we have failed as a society.

120

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 23h

Pleased to have owned a Bertone designed and built car (the X1/9). A little bundle of joy. Sorry not to have owned a Stratos (or one of the rather intimidating kit car versions).

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It is nationalised - almost all of its money is from Government contracts and incentive schemes. It's just that Musk can pretend to be the founder and take out as much money as he wants. No big deal, right?

130

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

They're not "inevitable", but they're also not going to magically disappear. And as with patents, the large corporations see this as a way to compete with each other. They have very little incentive to protect their workers.

020

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

These are plagiarism machines - music, books, software, film - and there are some very, very big corporations who do not want them stopped. We need to think carefully who is going to defend the people who do the work, create, build - and what the new post-AI economy will look like.

120

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I remember enjoying the 68K ISA, but didn't work with it long enough for it to really sink in like Z80 did. Skipped right on to x86 and then C. It's a shame the 68K vanished quicker than the 8-bits. The Amiga crowd seem to be having a lot of fun with emulation though.

130

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I need to see if I can get that running with MicroBeast/VideoBeast - I don't fancy writing a full FS layer from scratch!

120

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I wanted to get Lua working for Agon, but there was no hope with that project. In retrospect, I'm glad I found out early.

140

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I went to a Fiat dealer to change a Fiat clutch, and ended up taking them to court (successfully) when it broke a second time two months later. No love for main dealers whatsoever.

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Welcome to dealer garages. They suck.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

So the 24 bit internal maths leaves you in the limbo of either a slow but compatible implementation, or a faster but incompatible alternative. It's a lot of ISA complexity for little return.

130

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There's an 8-bit C (which obviously has to jump through a few hoops to support 32 bit data types). Zilog's own C for the eZ80 went down the weird route of having 24 bit data types (from memory) which makes it wildly incompatible with most third party libraries.

230

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There are some people who've been told they're the smartest person in the room for most of their lives.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

On MicroBeast I've got very used to large address spaces through paging, so I don't miss internal 24 bit representations on a 16 bit (address space) Z80. But internally, 32 bit is just necessary if you need a basically compatible and performant C implementation.

130

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It was an interesting device to get your head around, but 24 bits was a weird not-quite-useful-enough architectural decision that made it hard to really embrace for me. It also made the C implementation weirder than it needed to be.

230

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm still convinced they could have done something with the ISA - there's so much tooling around and half decent code to borrow from. But there really was no interest in developing new technology and the eZ80 was treated as a dead end. The C compiler is shocking.

240

Reposted by Andy Toone

e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 07/10/2026

there's a lot going on right now, but the ability to buy elections in order to stay out of prison is on the ballot whether you realize it or not

172411718

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You know what? I saw that and thought it could be a load of fun. It's for six year olds, so silly Daleks, a magic Tardis and plenty of fun adventures could be a riot. Sure, a lot depends on the execution, but I'll happily watch a couple of episodes to see what they do with it.

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is your conscience speaking: BUY THE BITS! BUY THEM! BUY ALL THE BITS!

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We had a couple of very second hand valve tvs, so it's just about possible, looking at the timeline, but probably not. We only realised my Uncle's TV wasn't black and white when the snooker came on and it emerged he'd turned the colour down as far as he could because it "looked weird".

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm predicting the global recession hits shortly after, so... no rush.

020

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

In Europe as a whole, it seems people want only to pick winners. That means no early investment, no 'boring' background industry, no exploratory works and as little risk as possible. They want someone to demonstrate they're the next ARM - and then they'll be happy to invest.

010

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We've got biotech here in Cambridge, but that appears to be slightly accidental, and more linked to the University than to government choices.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Not sure that's true. Birmingham and Coventry had incredibly integrated industries in the 70s - exactly like Shenzhen has now. We actively dismantled it and notably did not replace it with equivalent networks in the knowledge based industries. Cambridge was the nearest (ARM) but was left to wither.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Even now, with the AI boom, the UK response is "We'll buy it all from America". Astonishing stupidity. The fact that our government is staffed largely by politics students, lawyers and accountants tells you exactly why.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The bottom line is the Chinese government prioritised skilled engineering, and Western governments decided we'd make all our money putting a nice sticker on the front and training accountants to run the business. Western governments see no value in domestic engineering talent of any sort.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And.. most importantly, the Chinese sample was better. They undertook more work and took care to ensure it met the design brief.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I've spoken to these guys whilst I was working on Zorkulator. A company in the UK would quote three months and £4000, and be utterly dismissive of a project. A company in China would get you samples in two weeks, for a quarter of the price and be ready to make MOQ runs of a few hundred units.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's not one technology, it's that you can literally cross the road and talk to the person who can do the part of the job you can't. And they can turn it round in half the time. The boring stuff as well as the 'cool' bits.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My FIL built a number of factories in China. The thing is they have the entire supply chain connected in manufacturing hubs. Want to build a thing? There's a guy who can design the PCB, another who can make the molds for the case, another who can do the graphics, the packaging, print work etc. etc.

210

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Global economic crash after the midterms, anyone?

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I think they've underestimated how much skilled engineering and manufacturing knowledge has left the EU. The 'cheap crap' is a natural consequence of a nation that has built enormous high quality manufacturing capabilities.

110

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Sigh. As an aside, I am quite surprised Musk hasn't volunteered the entire fleet of Teslas for this task. 4.5 million mobile camera stations patrolling the streets every day sounds like the perfect surveillance platform.

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm sorry, I can see you've been told off for your behaviour already, I'm not going to respond any further to your trolling.

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

People get frustrated when they think a series (like Marvel) can just invent an excuse to remove consequences. Lost took that to the most ridiculous extreme possible, which is why so many people criticise it.

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You need to understand the need for writers to establish in-world rules. Good writing sets up constraints and tells stories about those constraints - a life and death situation has zero stakes if you know that anyone can be resurrected, anyone can be saved.

100

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It also completely betrayed the audience. People guessed at the 'reason' in S1, the writers went to great lengths to deny it, only to confirm it in the ending. That meant the audience spent 6 seasons trying to decode the mystery, having been told it was all planned - only to find it meant nothing.

000

Andy Toone @lockfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The choices made in the final series of Lost (which directly contradicted the claims the writers made earlier on) meant that there was no in world logic that constrained any part of the story that we'd watched. Without a requirement for logic, there is no mystery, and no stakes in the outcome.

100