Fits on a Floppy – A Manifesto for Small Software

Posted by msephton 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by bentley 2 days ago

OpenBSD still maintains a floppy disk installer: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.8/amd64/ (floppy78.img)

It’s a healthy constraint but requires careful judgment. Making the installer fit on the floppy is easy if you just leave out a bunch of drivers that exist on the CD and USB installers. It takes discipline to make things fit by trimming bloated code in the kernel and removing vestigial features.

Comment by xp84 2 days ago

For the complete opposite of this, go into the Storage settings on iOS and get a load of the bloated-ass apps there. Not counting the caches or data, mind you:

709MB (!): Gmail 319MB: YouTube 526MB: Instagram 381MB: Reddit 408MB: LinkedIn 529MB: the companion app for my car 463MB: PayPal

The list goes on and on. Most of these are either web content viewers, or they serve a single simple purpose.

Comment by wvbdmp 2 days ago

Adobe Acrobat Reader: 586 MB

Adobe DNG Converter: 1,670 MB

These are just the Windows setup files. God knows how what they extract and download…

Comment by msephton 2 days ago

OP and author here. I looked at one photo retouch app on my Mac: it was 1GB, and 500MB of that was a web view framework (browser). My equivalent is 777 KB!

Comment by suprjami 3 days ago

Some time ago I helped Jeff Olson open source his wonderful 1990s roguelike Alphaman:

https://github.com/superjamie/alphaman-src

It's full of optimisations to keep the code small, such as QBasic calling into C routines, as Jeff also wanted the source to all fit on one floppy disk.

Comment by msephton 2 days ago

Fantastic! Now I'm off to check my source code files (I'm the author of the manifesto)

Comment by wvbdmp 2 days ago

I was holding an external USB floppy drive the other day and the form factor, the tactile experience and the satisfying ejection mechanism got me fantasizing about a floppy jukebox with one song per disk. I’m sure it would be dope, but even for a regular 3 minute track you would have to seriously destroy your audio quality to fit into 1.44 MB. Those things are tiny! The best you could do would probably be some metadata that plays the song from elsewhere, but that’s lame and now you’re moving from being storage-constrained to leaving it 99% empty…

Comment by RyanVail 2 days ago

Actually with Opus you can compress a three minute song to 1.44 MB without it sounding absolutely terrible. I definitely don't have the best ear for music, but when I compared a three minute song I compressed with Opus at ~67kbit/s with the original, I couldn't tell the difference.

Comment by throawayonthe 2 days ago

yep, 64+ Kb/s opus should sound fine on most hardware to most people :D

https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings

https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Opus

Comment by invalidOrTaken 2 days ago

If you're a Clojurist like me, Janet (https://github.com/janet-lang/janet) seems to be aimed at this.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by Bolwin 2 days ago

AI written/edited front page.

A passion project and you can't even trust yourself to write the front page.

Made me lose interest.

Comment by msephton 2 days ago

Ah, so certain, and so wrong.

(Author here) All 19 edits to the file floppy.md over the past few months are in my local git repo, and all the people who proof-read different versions of it would be happy to attest. The site is statically generated from templates and content created by me.

The manifesto is written in my attempt at the same style as others I've read, like the one for Small Games (as in scope, not file size): https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/196592155732860525...

Comment by Bolwin 2 days ago

The small games manifesto has no LLM tells.

If yours really is fully handwritten, then you've been reading so much AI writing you're mimicking a lot of its patterns, which is sad to see.

Comment by msephton 2 days ago

So you're now not so certain. That's progress, I guess. You seem to want to tell me what I've been doing and how I've been doing it, which is a bit odd.

Comment by Splizard 2 days ago

Maybe you could look at using some AI assistance to provide some real 'useful' feedback to the OP about what made you lose interest, as your false confidence in some opaque 'AI-detection' heuristic is lazy and only harms individuals who are trying to find effective ways to share information.

Comment by Bolwin 2 days ago

The AI tells are quite literally what made me lose interest. They help me filter out dozens of AI slop posts daily so I'll be keeping them thanks. They're lazy by design. You can generate a good looking post in 30s, I can't afford to spend 5 mins reading each one on its merits.