He would still have made use of the MS BASIC license, but the addition of the Simons' BASIC cartridge in the box from 1983 onward would have changed the lives of many hobby coders.
That doesn't make UncleSlacky incorrect. Tramiel was obsessed with reducing COGS and thus retail price, and bulldozed down anything standing in his way.
A more interesting possibility is the post-Tramiel Commodore including a ROM version of GEOS from 1986 onward, and selling it on cartridge form to existing customers.
Other possibilities:
* Launch Amiga 2000 and 500 in 1985 instead of 1000.
* Eschew Amiga completely, in favor of the Commodore 900 with Coherent. Instead of Amiga silicon, ship with a "VIC-III" for graphics and two SIDs for stereo 6-channel sound.
I have a copy of "Tiny" Pascal by Supersoft from 1979 on a cassette tape which was licensed to Tandy Corp and which would load onto a 16KB TRS-80 Model III and allow a bit of room for programming.
One of the great regrets of my life is that when I was doing so and when it would have mattered, I was unaware of the patch for this which would have allowed it to be saved as an executable to a TRS-DOS disk....
Except that wasn't possible. Languages like BASIC and Forth exist because they were the only kind of language implementable in 4K with no disk. Pascal in its smallest form (UCSD p-system) still needed disk overlays. The smallest C compilers were poly phase, needing storage for intermediate state.
Microsoft itself popularized BASIC on microcomputers with its 8080 BASIC, starting on the Altair and ported to everything with A, B, C, D, E, H, and L registers since.
Before then, however, BASIC was already popular on minicomputers as both an introductory language for beginners and a business language; the various "Business BASIC" dialects providing a small-business alternative to COBOL on mainframes with their features for decimal math and ISAM database access.
That's not a problem, though. You aren't owed attention for a theoretical idea, especially if you waste people's time with AI boilerplate text.
Those ideas will almost always be ignored if the author neglects their due diligence to test the idea and document real-world results. Influencers like Jeff Geerling and Tom Scott would be (rightfully!) hated if they published their video ideas in the form of an AI-generated outline.
Honestly, this has to just be rage bait.
You can't honestly not understand the difference between a car being in large parking lots and not being able to see if the door is locked or not by looking at it from the outside, compared to a laptop being in your office or on your lap and 0% of the time being in a pile of 500 other laptops.
* A new daily puzzle that is the same for everyone
* iCloud sync across devices
I'd love to hear what people think and how far you can get on today’s puzzle.
--
P.S. Here are the game rules:
Goal
* Destroy colored squares on a 7×7 grid using snakes made of same-colored circles. Your score is based on how many squares you destroy.
* Clearing all 49 squares is not required, and may not always be possible.
Board Setup
* Each cell contains one square and one circle, both randomly colored.
* There are 7 colors total, with each color appearing 7 times among squares and 7 times among circles.
Energy
* Energy is a shared pool for all snakes and is initially 0 units.
* Moving a snake costs 1 energy unit, regardless of how far you move it.
* You can form a snake to gain energy and spend it to move any snake on the board.
Forming Snakes
* Link 2 or more adjacent circles of the same color (orthogonal or diagonal) to form a snake.
* A snake with n circles has n – 1 links. Forming a snake immediately adds n – 1 energy units to your energy pool.
* Squares under a newly formed snake of the same color are destroyed immediately.
Moving Snakes
* Snakes move in a worm-like fashion (both orthogonal and diagonal steps are allowed), following a continuous path of isolated circles.
* Snakes cannot move onto cells occupied by other snakes.
Moving a snake can pass over isolated circles (circles not part of a snake). When this happens, each circle you pass over is teleported to the cell the snake just vacated.
Square Destruction
* When a snake finishes its move, it destroys any squares of its color under its final positions.
* Moving a snake past a matching square without stopping over it does not destroy the square.
Ending the Game
* The game ends automatically if all 49 squares are destroyed, or you can end it manually at any time by triple-tapping anywhere.
* Your score counts toward the global leaderboard regardless of whether you clear all squares.
I strongly doubt it. My AIs can generate infinite HN comments for me. I don’t do that because it isn’t interesting. But if the day arises where it is, I want that personalized content. Not something someone else copy pasted.
(I say this as someone who finds Moltbook fascinating and push myself to use AI more in my work and day-to-day life. The fact that it’s borderline trivial to figure out which HN comments are AI generated speaks to the motivation behind this guideline.)
Perhaps not. But if it reduces the junk right now, it's a good policy for right now. I'll take it, for now. If it needs revisited, then it should be revisited when circumstances change enough to warrant that.
> AI is a great equalizer when it comes to communication in English.
Good argument for it but I think 80/20 split applies here. It is likely that 80% of the time it is used to farm for upvotes and add noise.
> And despite what people say, the way you write is very much judged as an indication of your education and intelligence.
I have come across plenty of content and online interactions in English where English was the Author's 2nd or even 3rd language and I find that putting a small disclaimer about this fact is more than enough to bypass such judgement.
Edit for amichail, since I'm rate-limited at the moment: I don't want flawless English writing. I want real ideas from real people. If I wanted flawless English writing, I'd be reading The New Yorker, not HN.
Good point. There is a difference between using AI as a translator and using AI to write comments from scratch... Maybe the HN guide lines could reflect this.
