feintruled

The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was fatal.

The intention was good, but the Akiko chip was functionally almost useless. It was soon surpassed by CPU chunky to planar algorithms. I don't think it was ever even used in any serious way by any released games (though it might have been used to help with FMV).

I was impressed to see Irish was included, but it soon became clear it's all LLM generated. That's not enough to write it off on its own (ChatGPT can be surprisingly good when explaining Irish sentences) but I spotted so many mistakes in the demo questions alone I can't imagine this is going to help anyone learn anything.

I would start to enumerate the mistakes, but it's not even worth it. It's really terrible. Can't sugar coat it at all, sorry.

Interesting article, though is there really much new there? Also it discounts the alternative hypothesis of some bright spark acquiring wolf pups and doing it purposefully because that would take 'weeks'. Weeks, you say?

Surely some enterprising hunter-gatherer had sufficient time on their hands. I can't help but think strutting around with a feared predator at your beck and call would have been the ultimate status symbol, and once you saw it would have to be the must have accessory for the self-respecting hunter. Aficionados would no doubt breed their stock amongst themselves to save the hassle of having to abduct more wolf cubs, which would naturally tend to the more suited specimens (friendliness being one trait as you don't want them eating the kids). Once it was realised what an incredible force multiplier they are in hunting and their utility in defence, any time investment would pay for itself many times over.

I find this no less as unlikely as thinking humans would let wolves help themselves to their excess food. Fascinating subject all round, no matter the reason. I hope they can figure out more.

Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.

And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".

I dunno, man. You get to work for months to completion on a deeply fulfilling project, get well compensated, and then the plug gets pulled before it goes to production? That's living the software engineering dream!

Jokes aside, the article resonated with me (before the LLM vibes got overpowering) as I am learning Irish as my own personal challenge, which as a minority language is similarly derided by some as useless (there is essentialy no Irish speaker that does not also speak English) but which I have found tremendously intellectually invigorating and the most pumped I have been for a project in a long while. So it rang true for me before half way through a distinct "linkedin parable" nature started to come to fore. So alas I rather doubt the author is learning Sumerian at all. Cynical perhaps.

Some missing context (pun intended) is that Augment code has recently switched to a per-token instead of per-message pricing model. This hasn't gone down particularly well, but that's another story. But it may well be that users drop back to older models in the expectation it will use less tokens.

Personally, I stopped using GPT-5 as it would just be tool call after tool call without ever stopping to tell you what the hell it was doing. Sonnet 4.5 much better in this regard. Albeit it's too verbose for the new token based world ('let me just summarise that in a report')

I was wondering if it was a way to 'flaunt' his avoidance of LLMs. Could be in future genuine human conversation will be so rare that we will seize upon mistakes and typos like finding a shiny jewel in mud.

(But then I saw he used the formation - 'Honestly?' which made me think he WAS using LLMs!)

Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?

Inspired by the recent post to describe relativity in words of 4 letters or less, I asked ChatGPT to do it for other things like Gravity. It couldn't help but throw in a couple 5 letter words (usually plurals). Same with Claude. So this could be a good one?

I think any software engineer can identify with the feeling you get at the moment you do the first run of the solution you have implemented that you are 100% sure has to fix it only to find nothing has changed.

My father grew up in a somewhat rural Irish village and there was one farmer who would take his horse and cart to the pub (fairly anachronistic even in his day) in the knowledge that no matter how passed-out drunk he got the other patrons would load him into the cart and the horse would take him home. Take that, self-driving cars!

I read that as him trying to move his money to another bank that would allow him to make the transfer. His current bank suspected this and wouldn't let him even close his account. So they confiscated his money to prevent someone else supposedly stealing his money - pretty Kafkaesque I think

Memorably lampooned by Monty Python : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=666OKm08fRA

Again we are in the realms of speculation upon speculation, but Neanderthals didn't have sclera (whites of the eyes) which according to the co-operative eye hypothesis as regards to domesticated hunting dogs allows them to follow our gaze. It does seem odd that Neanderthals didn't try to domesticate them too - surely the first reaction on seeing humans and dogs bring down a mammoth or corral large deer would be 'got to get us some of that', but as sibling comments say we don't know much about them really.

It's a bit of a fringe theory but there's a suggestion that the human 'alliance' with wolves gave us the edge over Neanderthals and other predators and ensured that it was us who ultimately survived as a species. It's a nice thought for a dog lover.

Brave new world, where our machines are sometimes wrong but by gum they are quick about it.

I had an idea like this for helping introverts with icebreaking small talk. Flash style cards for each person, with info on what you spoke about last time, and a pre-prepared opener for the next time you bump into them. With the card info being updated each time you meet them.

Thanks for the tip on ReadWise, that looks interesting!

Very cool. I've no idea if this is possible without rooting the Kindle, but I wonder would it be possible to highlight sections of text in a book and send it to something like this with a request to summarise/explain?

You are absolutely right of course, most day to day bugs we don't have either the inclination, time or knowledge to root cause much less fix, but I feel it's a comfort to know that you (or someone) could.

I wonder how we might design for such a system. I'd say as a starting point any action should be undo-able. Then you give it a go to see if it works, and if it didn't you can always get back. I've read this is good practice in any system, as a user can get inured to 'are you sure' dialogs and just click through them reflexively.

This is very cool. I wonder if we are going to have to get used to a new paradigm in software, where you have tools that are incredibly powerful and that you just accept that sometimes it 'gets it wrong'. There's no debugging, no root cause analysis, just a shrug of the shoulders and 'sometimes it gets it wrong mate, what're you gonna do?'. This is probably the mental model most laypeople have of software already I suspect but for software engineers it's somewhat of a shift. Bit of a deal with the devil, perhaps.

Heat pumps are culture wars now, believe it or not.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/net-zero/why-heat-pumps-wi...

DT article to illustrate, not necessarily to inform. The idea I believe being that heat pumps are part of a supposedly unnecessary and costly push to Net Zero driven by industry and shadowy interest groups but which are just another means of a) enforcing control and b) screwing money out of 'the little guy' and siphoning tax dollars off compliant governments. And thus one is able to wave away an article absolutely bursting with scientific detail and research as 'well, it's all a bit convenient, isn't it?'

I honestly despair.

Had to search for that video, I love things like this. I was not disappointed, so thanks for that. Really tickled me. Doesn't displace my favourite though: https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/6922546.bull-br...

ADOM was my go to on the Amiga. Loved that game so much!

You joke, but I can forsee issues. If he has the replies to a particular user, and he has a means of IDing that user, he could cause them a lot of hurt. They are getting intensely sexual replies back, they aren't getting that without supplying sexual prompting. Could also be used to out gay users.

Well this went places. The dev really 'ate his own dogfood' so to speak. I thought it was going to be a despairing look at how his companion AI was continuously turned to sleazy uses by a pervy userbase but that's pretty much what he was going for it seems. I have to say, I hated this part: "...gained a lot of Chinese users. I immediately realized the political risk: users could set Dolores’ background, personality, and attributes, which might lead to political issues. I quickly took Dolores off the shelves in China."

Just pre-emptorily censors himself to appease the Chinese government. They've done their job well.

Also it seems like he had full access to the replies via the voice generator, which sure isn't great from a privacy standpoint.

Yeah they really fluff the delivery of it though, basically give you the punchline first and then at the end reproduce a purposely bad retelling of it in full.

I didn't mention the morality of it. The statement was 'no one HAS to steal' so I was taking it as a statement that no-one will starve without stealing which must surely be a comment on the social safety net.

My three assumptions here are that some people are starving, stealing to eat is the canonical excusable crime, and that 'just get a job' is not a solution. If you disagree with any of those, then that's your opinion but we have nothing further to discuss as we start from a different premise.

You sure the social safety net is that good?