I should've been more clear. Sure, I started my Linux days on 2.0.36, which booted by floppy, on a Pentium 2. But what I want is some semblance of a distro, with tools and a way to do things, not just rolling my own technically-bootable kernel.
we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those easily and thus can do it too.
I've flown without ID twice. Once because I lost my ID, once to prove to a friend that it could be done. This fee will fail for the same reason that flying without ID works at all - the law is quite clear on it.
My brother did this once and if you print your boarding pass before arriving you don't have to check in (obviously this is for a domestic flight with no checked bags). The TSA will question you and swab everything in your suitcase though.
You just tell them "Don't have one". Then they (most likely a second TSA agent so you don't hold up the line) run a quick interview to try and establish who the heck you are, and if you can be trusted to be let onto a plane.
Do not have one. Asked for my name, if i had any proof of it (i had a few credit cards in my name) lots of other questions. very thorough pat down. disassembled by bag slowly. took 40 min.
The (implicit) rules of the game require the number to be finite. The reason for this is not that infinity is not obviously "the largest" but that the game of "write infinity in the smallest number of {resource}" is trivial and uninteresting. (At least for any even remotely sensible encoding scheme. Malbolge[1] experts may chime up as to how easy it is to write infinity in that language.) So if you like, pretend we played that game already and we've moved on to this one. "Write infinity" is at best a warmup for this game.
(I'm not going to put up another reply for this, but the several people posting "ah, I will cleverly just declare 'the biggest number someone else encodes + 1'" are just posting infinity too. The argument is somewhat longer, but not that difficult.)
It isn’t actually infinite since it can only do a finite number of iterations per second (though it would be large!), and there are only a finite number of seconds in the universe (near as we can tell).
This game assumes the computations run to completion on systems that will never run out of resources. No one in this universe will ever compute Ackerman's Number, BB(6), or the final answer given in the post. Computations that never complete are infinite.
If you are playing this game and can't produce a number that doesn't fit in this universe you are probably better suited playing something else. That's just table stakes. If it even qualifies as that. "Inscribe every subatomic particle in the universe with a 9 every planck instant of the universe until the heat death of the universe" doesn't even get off the starting line in games like this.
Another general comment: It feels like a lot of people are really flailing around here, and need to understand this is a game. It has rules. If you change the rules, you are playing a different game. There is nothing wrong with playing a different game. It is just a different game. The game is not immutably written in the structure of the universe, or a mathematical truth, it is a human choice. And there isn't necessarily a "why" to the rules any more than there's a "why" to why the bishop moves as it does in chess. You can, in fact, change that rule. There are thousands of such variants. It's just that you're playing a different game than chess at that point. If you don't want to play the author's game, then that's fine, but it doesn't change the game itself. And proposing different solutions is equivalent to saying that you can win a chess game by just flipping over the board and yelling "I win". You can do that. Perhaps you've even won some game. But whatever game you just won, it isn't chess.
Maybe not as big before the processor dies. The numbers that are talked about are unimaginably large, far larger than the number of atoms in the visible universe.
>Very importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any “input” into this routine. It doesn’t pop anything from the stack, nor does it care about any register values passed into it. Which can only mean that the result of this routine is completely constant!
This is not necessarily a fair assumption (though it worked this time). It could be some sort of a rolling code, where the reply is not constant but changes, and remains verifiable. Example: garge door openers have no input from the garage, but the sent signal differs every button click, and the garage can verify its correctness
i did not say replay was impossible. i said the statement in the article was overly broad, which it is. If it said "a single result could be hard-coded", it would be fine. but it said the function is constant, which it need not be.
But even that need not be true. here is how you could design that dongle to require no persistent state on RX and still not allow simple replay.
> One can no longer know whether such a repository was “vibe” coded by a non-technical person who has never written a single line of code, or an experienced developer, who may or may not have used LLM assistance
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