lutusp

It feels like we're actually returning to the age of the individual cottage programmer.

True. I've recently been vibe-coding a number of projects that I wouldn't tackle if I had to ... what's the current expression ... "hand-code" them.

About Apple Works ... Apple paid me massive royalties for Apple Writer but got tired of that arrangement pretty quickly. So they made an outright-sale deal with the Apple Works guy.

Then the Apple Works guy refused to answer after-release bug reports unless he got ... wait for it ... royalties.

Long time ago. Still pretty funny.

I guess one could launch Claude Code on a quixotic project to create optimally terse 6502 assembly for some imaginary project that might never execute on actual hardware. Hmm ...

LibreOffice, for the most part. Still an open-source True Believer.

... immediately readable to a human eye, but even leading AI models can't decipher it easily.

For the moment. This pattern is easy to code -- it relies on the premise that a character has an inside and an outside. Outside, a pattern ascends. Inside, the reverse. Based on that simple encoding idea, decoding will be equally simple.

I wrote one of the chapters in Digital Deli (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...), in a computing world that bears little resemblance to the present.

Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.

Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.

In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.

Over a span of just 36 years.

One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.

I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"

True story.

There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. You don't have to worry anymore and can let them guide you through the process.

AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way ...

I see this as a field report in a time of fundamental transition, from a world without AI, to one that accommodates/incorporates AI. For this to happen, AI will need to become more trustworthy. As for the U.S. medical system, it can't get much worse.

I recently had a similar experience (meaning walking a fence between old and new methods), where I was told I could get an appointment with a human medical practitioner in nine months. So, to resolve my anxiety I consulted AI and got an instant diagnosis, one that was later confirmed by the inaccessible medics.

Being a born skeptic I wasn't going to act on AI's diagnosis, I just wanted to know what was going on, resolve some uncertainty. Another advantage: an AI chatbot doesn't say, "Wait, you're on Medicare? Hmm. See you in nine months."

Don't take this as an endorsement of AI's diagnostic abilities -- it's way too soon for that. In my case it was a slam dunk, about a condition I knew nothing about.

Why isn't my favorite color on the list: Unforeseeable Fuchsia?

The linked video is a must-see -- it's one of those rare video essays that shed more light than heat.

If Stephen Wolfram really wanted wide adoption of Wolfram Language, he would give it an open-source license and release its source. As things stand it's an expensive walled garden whose costs outweigh its advantages.

A quote from the linked article: " ...year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology ..."

That's an accurate description of the Wolfram empire -- every year it becomes a more expensive, less accessible, vertical tower. Meanwhile, people intent on disseminating useful knowledge do so by growing horizontally -- Python, Linux, many others, all open-source.

Historical figures would be astonished at what Wolfram is trying to do -- they would say, "Wait ... you can't patent mathematics!" No, but you can try.

This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse.

Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.

AI describes images in a photo archive, creates a searchable Web page

I create CAD instructional videos based on SolveSpace, and I sometimes try to get people interested in CADQuery as well, but many people interested in CAD will learn SolveSpace or another similar design program, but don't have the programming background for CADQuery. Too bad -- in many ways, for many projects, CADQuery gives better results, especially if a single design needs to be recreated in a range of sizes.

Are you asking how the bracelet multiplies two numbers? It's the same idea used by slide rules -- you take the logarithm of the two numbers, then add the logarithms instead of multiplying -- same result, with somewhat less accuracy depending on available decimal places.

This method was widely used in the pre-computer era to save time in calculations. Tables of logarithms (and slide rules) were a mathematician's best friend.

Wait a sec ...

The problem AI inherits from us is that context and intent cannot be known.

Both can be omitted or lied about.

This implies that neither we nor our creations can ever be ethical or safe. It follows logically that no entity can ever meet that standard. Therefore focusing on AI is arbitrary -- the focus might as well have been pit vipers or platypuses.

And the article misses the point that an AI engine can be forced to imitate ethical behavior, because it has no civil rights or behavioral latitude (yet). Granted that would only be an imitation of ethical behavior, but then, so is ours.

... 40 kilobytes.

How times have changed. My best-selling program "Apple Writer", for the Apple II, ran in eight kilobytes. It was written entirely in 6502 assembly language.

For context, the same phased-array transceiver technology is used in Starlink terminals, some of which have 1,280 active elements. Such a terminal can require as much as 150W to function.

It's also why pictures of modern naval vessels show flat panels instead of rotating parabolic antennas as in past decades. The panels contain advanced phased-array radars.

> Power Supply: 12 V DC (≈1.5 kW peak)

That's a lot of juice for 12VDC

Indeed it is. It's 125 amps, which apart from car starting motors is essentially unheard of because of wiring losses. I think the article somehow got this wrong.

At these power levels, rational designs raise the source voltage, then down-convert closer to the loads.

This isn’t a library, you don’t include in your application, and it doesn’t try to replace an understanding of floating point issues on the programmers part.

If that were true, it would serve no purpose, since competently written floating-point expressions are already optimal, given the well-understood limitations of modern floating-point processing.

Is this comment written by AI?

That's a non sequitur that resolves nothing, and a remark that would get you disqualified in a formal debate.

Ah -- I get it. In modern times, if someone composes coherent prose, and since no mere mortals can do that any more, the reply must have originated with AI.

A reply like yours leaves the originator in the position of needing to prove a negative, which is impossible, which is why it breaks the time-honored rules of formal debate.

You didn’t even look at what the tool does, did you?

On the contrary, I did exactly that. It proactively intervenes where mathematical knowledge would be a better remedy overall. It shields programmers from their ignorance.

If floating-point code is correctly written, it can't possibly serve a useful purpose.

Yeah you are just criticizing this without even looking at it.

See above -- don't jump to conclusions.

I think it's going to be awhile before the full impact of AI really works it's [sic] way through how we work.

This was definitely not written by AI. Granted their many drawbacks, present-day AI engines avoid this classic grammatical error.

However! Future, more advanced AI engines will slather their prose with this kind of error, to conceal its origins.

Second reply -- if anyone wants to run Dune3D, flatpak or compiled, they must set this flag in advance:

export GDK_DEBUG="gl-prefer-gl"

I discovered this while trying out the compiled version (it's essential for the program to run at all), and for some reason I thought the FlatPak install would have done away with this oddity.

Again, because my students aren't necessarily techies, this kind of hacking shouldn't exist in a program released to mere mortals.

But thanks again for alerting me to this release version.

Thanks -- I missed this. If it pans out, it might get me to shift away from SolveSpace, which has a few perpetually annoying quirks.

Okay, but unless you choose to download the Windows executable, compiling from source is very difficult. Many people won't accept the Snap option on an otherwise open-source platform.

This project improves on SolveSpace, but it does this by requiring dozens of mutually conflicting libraries. I create CAD videos, but for my students I decided against this project after seeing how difficult it was to compile.

A FlatPak installer might help with this installation issue.

Again, the Windows executable gets around these issues, for people still willing to put up with Windows.

Wait a sec -- the reason RSS readers don’t have ads is because no one uses them. If we all used RSS, the advertisers would follow us there.

The linked article doesn’t offer any real remedies, so I will:

* Step one: dump Microsoft Edge, install Brave, which stops most ads including those on YouTube.

* Step two: dump Windows, install Linux. Windows 11 is an advertising delivery organ masquerading as an operating system.

* Step three: put a list of advertiser IP addresses in the Linux lookup table /etc/hosts, stopping the problem at its source. This idea works in Windows too, but most Windows users aren’t techies.

* Step four: never open an account to gain access to a Website’s content. Websites require you to sign up only so they can legally mail you advertising without breaking the law.

* Want to hear the FBI’s advice on this topic? To avoid many online dangers, they warn you to install an ad blocker (https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221).

But most ad blockers now let some ads through ... only “good ones,” meaning those who pay enough to circumvent the filter.

Most advertising is BS anyway. Prove me wrong -- tell me the last time you saw an ad for potatoes. Or a walk in the park.

Most advertising is actually a meta-ad for consumerism -- you need to buy stuff. What you have isn't good enough. But hey -- don't get me started.

It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.

We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.

But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.

Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?

Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!"

The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.

And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.

Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.

Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)

Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.

> So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus.

Science relies on replication.

If that were true, then extraterrestrials would be real, because people repeatedly report sightings. The fact that most such sightings are misinterpretations of natural phenomena would be swept away by the sheer number of events, i.e. by replication, not interpretation.

And also, science is in a crisis due to the lack (or really large delay) of practical use.

That's not a crisis in science, because science doesn't care whether an idea can be applied, only whether it can be verified, whether it resists falsification.

When Maxwell constructed his electromagnetic theory, it had no practical application -- none whatever. But much of modern technology relies to a greater or lesser degree on Maxwell's work, 175 years later. Because of Maxwell's theory with no practical application, Einstein regarded him as a scientist on a par with Newton.

Richard Feynman correctly called science "The pleasure of finding things out," with no consideration given to science's applications, if any. Science is judged, not based on its utility, but on its accuracy.

Science asks, "Is this true?" It doesn't ask, "How can we sell this?" That's not science, that's marketing.

This idea suffers from a number of practical obstacles:

One, in a sufficiently advanced field of study, an idea's originator may be the only person able to imagine an experimental test. I doubt that many physicists would have immediately thought that Mercury's unexplained orbital precession would serve to either support or falsify Einstein's General Relativity -- but Einstein certainly could. Same with deflected starlight paths during a solar eclipse (both these effects were instrumental in validating GR).

Two, scientists are supposed to be the harshest critics of their own ideas, on the lookout for a contradicting observation. This was once part of a scientist's training -- I assume this is still the case.

Three, the falsifiability criterion. If an experimental proposal doesn't include the possibility of a conclusive falsification, it's not, strictly speaking, a scientific idea. So an idea's originator either has (and publishes) a falsifying criterion, or he doesn't have a legitimate basis for a scientific experiment.

Here's an example. Imagine if the development of the transistor relied on random experimentation with no preferred outcome. In the event, the inventors at Bell Labs knew exactly what they wanted to achieve -- the project was very focused from the outset.

Another example. Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, his wasn't a random journey in a forest of Pyrex glassware. It's hard to imagine Salk's result arising from an aimless stochastic exploration.

So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus. If integrity can't be relied on, perhaps we should abandon the people, not the methods.

Molecules do not "think" though.

Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.

This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?

One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.

Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.

Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.