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by coldnose 2152 days ago
Like that GAN that simulates Pac-Man, this is an exciting new level of inefficiency I couldn't even conceive of a couple decades ago.
2 comments

We need to go deeper! Soon we'll have a machine learning algorithm conjure Mac OS by calculating the next frame to display, taking into account user input, based on watching thousands of hours of normal Mac OS usage
That's brilliant. Gave me the funny thought that GPT-3 could solve one problem we used to argue about back in the day. What's the right order for loading extensions? I don't remember the details, but I do remember my old office would discuss it endlessly. The black magic and superstitions to keep the system going as long as possible before the inevitable crash. Maybe, 25+ years later, there could be a definitive answer.
A neural network is not so much a "definitive answer" as black magic and superstition - but digitized.
Surely there’s a statistical approach to answering that question, isn’t there?
I seem to remember a Cassidy & Greene program that would do all sorts of statistics to your extensions. I mainly used it to do a binary search to figure out which extension is causing the shareware app of the day to crash.
Conflict Catcher! By Jeff Robbin, who later wrote SoundJam MP, which was then bought by Apple and turned into iTunes, and he stayed at Apple for many years (may still be there even(
They also had one of the best classic Mac arcade games of all time.

Crystal Quest and it's sequel, Crystal Crazy

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5955-crystal-crazy

This was one of the only games I actually played in the Macs they had at elementary school (we spent most of our recess time on Napster...playing 12 different songs simultaneously in the same room, and nobody cared). I spent so long looking for this game, but I couldn't even figure it what to search for, because I didn't remember the title.
Prediction: Spinning beach ball (92% confidence)
On 8.1? More likely “System Error Type 11”.
Type 11 was really just an issue on PowerMacs, and this emulates a 68K Mac. (Type 11 was basically a catchall error for any native PPC exception)

</pointless historical nitpick>

Also I believe 7.6 updated error reporting to native PPC codes so that a lot of the time an application could just crash on its own without crashing the whole system. Not always, but yeah even without protected memory.
There was one release of System 7 where they advertised "Type 11 Errors are virtually eliminated!"

Imagine that being a selling point in an Apple product today...

Huh, TIL.

(I only ever used one real 68k Mac, and that was something donated to my school’s art department).

Guru meditation then? Oh, right CPU but wrong computer...
Weirdly I don't think there's a machine learning algorithm that can actually do this. pix2pix loses cohesiveness quickly, and GANs require mostly aligned input to make any sense of reality. BigGAN is the closest, yet even that doesn't seem to work very well for continuity.
You must like running Doom on Windows 95 inside Minecraft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960028