Maybe you wanted to see the assembly code, and that's fine. But he took a potentially difficult problem, found tools to solve it and documented (to some degree) the process?
Man do I miss the N-series, I had so many good phones in that era.
I had most of the N range, and was particularly interested in music ones, N95 was love/hate because the music button/reverse slide was so slow sometimes, and generally it just wasn't as good as N91 for music listening with its proper headphone jack placement, and always accessible controls.
What kind of magic did that HDD have that it could be thrown around like a phone typically is without the issues we would see if we'd handled a laptop with HDD the same way?
I found the old drive that worked with my Canon camera. It's a Hitachi 2GB Microdrive from 2003. It says CF+ Type-II. So larger, with a CompactFlash interface, boring in comparison.
More history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive
I'm trying to remember the camera... Canon Powershot S1 IS maybe? It used a lot more battery running the microdrive.
I wonder what material they used for the platter. I once took apart a 1.8" drive, and got a big surprise when the platter suddenly shattered. I was expecting aluminum, not glass/ceramic substrate.
[0] I'm 99.9% sure it's not SSD/SRAM/Flash because I'm 99.9% sure it predates cheap [those] by years. But I'll have to dig it out and get the full USB/HDD info later to check.
was this necessary? could've said "Code written by LLM" or something
I may not have felt this way if the article had discussed this step in as much detail as the first steps - describing what was done by the agent rather than just that an agent was used and the results. It all felt a bit “then it drew the rest of the goddamn owl”.
I’m not sure though - part of the appeal of this kind of article for me is the description of the human emotions - the highs and lows of doing the task - and that would possibly still have felt missing.
Edit: Actually, now that I say that, there was a lot missing. How was the circuit designed, for example? How were components selected?
At least there's acknowledgement of limitations and it's not just hype. Overall a useful data point in terms of what's possible.
It's a bit like watching a 2 hour movie about a knight who'd been preparing to save his beloved princess from a dragon for 1h 59s, and then the screen fades to black, the narrator proclaims that the dragon is done, the knight marries the princess and they live happily ever after. Closing credits!
It is not an authentic display of pure skill
