I'm pretty sure the Apple dev who was tasked with securing the older hardware "tally lamps" is on HN somewhere -- I seem to remember him posting about it. (is it you?)

I used to know a guy, about 15 years ago, who made his money exclusively through buying up laptops and hacking the tally lamp code (to stop it activating) one-by-one and selling the code directly to 3LAs. It was really good money.

Does Safari use less RAM because it shares some parts with the rest of the OS? (e.g. in the same way Edge probably uses a bit less because half of its components are already idling on the OS)

I have one of these (it's my only Mac), but it only has 2GB of RAM, so it's kinda rough. I tried Mint on it, but IIRC it might not have the GPU drivers? I just bought it a new SSD which helped a bit.

The issue is that the algorithm is only half the story. The implementation (e.g. bytecode) is the other.

I've been trying to find ways to make the original graphics renderer of the CGA version of Elite faster as there have been dozens of little optimizations found over the decades since it was written.

I was buoyed by a video of Super Mario 64/Zelda optimizations where it was pointed out that sometimes an approx calculation of a trig value can be quicker than a table lookup depending on the architecture.

Based on that I had conversations with LLMs over what fast trig algorithms there are, but for 8088 you are cooked most of the time on implementing them at speed.

The issue for Claude is that Anthropic don't have an imagen that I know of, so the only tool available for the LLM to draw something is to start doing vector stuff in CSS, which is very hard for it (see the pelicans).

Gemini, ChatGPT or Grok would find this a lot easier as they could gen an image inline, although IP restrictions might bite you. Even Grok wants to lecture on IP these days, but at least it's fairly trivial to jailbreak.