zellyn

Any suggestions on which of these are usable? justwatch.com used to be amazing, but it's increasingly getting enshittified: they seem to be intentionally making their presentation _less_ clear so they can show ads for "similar content available on…" :-(

https://archive.org/details/MECC_A157_v11_4amCrack

In my experience, during the phase where you scale up and move from interpreted to compiled code with microservices, someone inevitably benchmarks protobuf vs JSON, and protos come out ahead.

Also, using it as a schema doesn’t totally suck. There are others but proto is… fine.

I have lots of opinions, but don’t feel like spinning up to a full rant here :-)

For those who don't know, the Disk II Controller Card is considered by some to be the invention that best demonstrates Woz's genius.

It's also a great early example of the massive win you can get by replacing hardware with software (and "software" -- in the form of a state transition table encoded in a small ROM).

It's also one of the reasons there were so many fascinating and weird copy protections for Apple II software: since so much of the behavior was in software on the computer, it was malleable. (Since it uses the CPU for tight timing loops, the Apple II couldn't really do much else while using the disk.) The write-ups by 4am on IA are fun reading if you're into this kind of thing: https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am

There are some fun projects to record disks at the level of magnetic flux transitions. I'm mostly familiar with https://applesaucefdc.com by the amazing John Keoni Morris, which came with a new file format too, and some lovely UI software.

Strong +1 to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. One note: the main iOS app is a little wonky in places. I've been using Kyle Swarmer's "Puzzles Reloaded" app, which is a little nicer in places.

Heh. That's what I get for having a weird name and having been on the internet since like 1993… https://www.intheweights.com/p/zellyn

Ah, interesting. Yeah, I looked at Skulpt a bit, and it looks really nice, although not as compatible as pyiodide, especially for python3. I did consider using it as a fallback if wasm is disabled.

Came here to say this. How can you write an entire article about Chesterton’s Fence without mentioning Chesterton’s Fence?!

My kid was using trinket at school, and the fact that Python 2 was free but Python 3 was paid was so weird and annoying that I created trifling.org (disclaimer: hosted on a tiny Linux box in my laundry room over WiFi, on residential internet!)

It was the first thing I coded entirely with Claude, and absolutely blew me away. (Mostly, it turns out other people already did all the hard parts -- the inspiration was running across a reddit post where someone said they wired together pyiodide and the Ace editor in a few hundred lines of javascript).

This was my first experience of "if you know what you're doing, LLMs can build things well and incredibly quickly". I think MVP took one evening, and then two more rewrites pushed it out to a week or so. (One after I realized fully offline was a worthwhile idea, the second after I realized the backend could be a dumb key/value store with only prefix iteration.)

As mentioned, it's local-first: everything should work perfectly offline after loading it once. Saving is limited to my kid’s school domain at the moment, but it’s super simple to host: just compile the Go binary and put it behind Caddy or something.

Code (which I literally have not read) is at https://github.com/zellyn/trifling

[Edit: p.s. try the avatar editor!]

Oh stop being silly. Yes, the programming language is technically irrelevant in that they’re all Turing complete.

In reality, the programming language tells you all kinds of subtle things: probabilities about the way the software will feel to use, how stable it’s likely to be, how fast, what the author is likely to focus on.

I found one of the best jobs of my life in 2015 by asking “who’s doing interesting things in Atlanta in Go?” Not because I was uncompromisingly settled on Go, but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values.

So please stop pretending the whole gestalt of programming languages and their communities don’t deeply affect the resulting software.

(I say this with no unkindness intended, mostly to all of hackernews)

I once tried to fully analyze the amazing NTSC emulation used in OpenEmulator. I went down a rabbit hole that involved losing motivation several lessons in to a signal processing class on YouTube, but for those interested, I did at least pull quite a lot of it apart here: https://observablehq.com/@zellyn/apple-ii-ntsc-emulation-ope...

I also ported it to JavaScript (linked from above page)

I had that keyboard! I actually really like the piano-ish touch. I remember being sad though, when I realized they’d crammed all the sounds into I think 16MB (or was it 8?) and realizing how bad that was even by the late 90s! I think I still have mine in the garage somewhere… good times!

My kids (12-year-old boy, 7-year-old girl) recently got Tin Can phones, as did several of their friends, and absolutely love them.

One note: you can authorize regular phone numbers for them to be able to call, but only if you pay the subscription ($10/month I think? We didn't do this...)

I know I could build the same thing out of esp32's but it would be a big hassle, and I'd have to build one for all their friends too!

It's not just AI.

I grew up with borrowed ZX Spectrum manuals that detailed the Z80 assembly language, (a clone of) a Red Book that came with the (clone of a) Apple II computer that had assembly listings, and fold-out circuit-board diagrams for the whole computer. I taught myself C++ from the manual that came with Borland Turbo C++ and the Waite Group C book. I laughed out loud at footnotes in the Camel book, which I read from the start through to where it becomes a reference. I read Sedgewick's Algorithms cover to cover for fun when I found it in a local library as a teenager. I borrowed the ancient "build a flight simulator" book from a friend in high school.

I've bought books by Kleppmann, Julia Evans, and Hillel Wayne's in-progress book on proofs. I owned the gang of four design patterns book (although I won't pretend -- like everyone else -- to have done more than skim a few patterns!)

And yet.

For many, many years now every time I've wondered into a bookstore, and meandered over to the fondly-remembered computer books section with a sense of nostalgia, I've just been deeply disappointed and sad. If you're lucky, you'll find one or two books that look worth reading, and the rest is just the product of some giant publishing machine whose sole purpose seems to be to fleece unsuspecting neophytes of their money by pushing on them hastily written books on whatever the current fad is. Often when you look at the publication date and compare it to the release date of the software, it's obvious you couldn't write a _good_ book that fast.

And they're all huge. The C Programming Language, Javascript: the good parts, and The Go Programming Language are just about the only three examples I know of where concision was considered a virtue. Most are just fluffy as hell, which is offensive to the kind of mind that wants to learn a programming language.

Add to that the observation in the article that paper books for programming languages are inherently weird.

So yeah, nobody cracks open a programming book anymore, but there are lots of compelling reasons beside AI, reasons that make you grateful if AI can save you from having to wade through an ocean of dreck.

I can imagine a heavily curated shelf of programming books, and it would be a thing of beauty, a collection of potent fireworks shot into the dark of the unknown. But, like, who would go to Barnes and Noble or whatever and actually see it, and actually buy something?

Thanks, this just reminded me to order some Klein Bottles. I realized right after I hit "Finish" that I should have included in the note a big thank you for both the Cuckoo's Egg (reading it and learning about unix systems and teletypes and worms made me feel like I was part of some secret nerdy club in the early 90s… although tbh getting my parents to drop me off every month at the Chattanooga BBS get-together brunch was probably enough nerd cred for the rest of my life!) but also for making Klein bottles and using robots to fetch them and everything: it makes me happy just knowing that the kind-hearted, perhaps slightly off-kilter, counter-cultural nerdery that is part of what drew me into computing is still alive in the world!

As we learn how to train smarter models on less data, it’ll become more and more interesting to see whether models like this can invent post-1930 math, science, etc. and make predictions.

[Edit: serves me right for not reading tfa. My points are well-covered]

https://imgur.com/a/fssIujT

Happy to share source if you like, but it was nothing complicated: - ask aistudio.google.com to draw a bunch of dragons - trace one to svg - make the bracelet a little smaller

Thanks for this! It's really fun. My older kid now has a vanilla sliderule bracelet. The younger is getting a smaller bracelet of the same design, but with dragons on it :-)

And really well-reasoned arguments. And a decades-long sterling reputation for cantankerous but insightful contrarian takes. And references in the article to astonishingly well researched articles by people who have talked to NASA engineers and read non-public documentation. It’s like anyone can be taken seriously these days…

I was so sad when Google shelved their Sabre replacement. Could have run the whole industry.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the details. I see now that your article basically had all the information I needed to figure this out if I’d thought a bit harder!

Also, nice work: this makes the world just a little nicer!

Does SQLite not have a lemon parser generated for its SQL?

When I ported pikchr (also from the SQLite project) to Go, I first ported lemon, then the grammar, then supporting code.

I always meant to do the same for its SQL parser, but pikchr grammar is orders of magnitude simpler.

If you can incorporate Quamina or similar logic in there, you might be able to save even more… worth looking into, at least

I love this. Nice work!

It’s fun to look at your code samples, have absolutely no clue what any of it means, and think about just how many non-English-speaking programmers must have felt that way looking at our all-English programming languages.

Except lisp: that’s just inscrutable symbols like cond and cons and car and cadr and a bunch of parens! :-)

See also: https://wokwi.com (ESP32 equivalent)

[Edit] Which also does Arduino.

For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:

If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.

A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)

+1 yo wanting to see the cognition logo with contrast. It was set up as the target, but no payoff!

Lovely article, and the dynamic examples are :chefs-kiss:

Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.)

Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?

If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places

Thank you! I’ve always procrastinated tracking finances, but as a programmer who believes in reproducible builds, this just clicked.

I just downloaded a bunch of qfx and csv files, and got Claude Code to do this. Took an hour to create the whole system from nothing. Then of course I stayed up until 2am getting CC to create Python rules to categorize things better, and trying to figure out what BEENVERI on my bank statement means

(If you do this, make Claude generate fingerprints for each transaction so it’s easy to add individual overrides…)

Getting Claude to write a FastAPI backend to serve up a “Subscriptions” dashboard took about 3 minutes, plus another minute or two to add an svg bar graph and change ordering.

Crazy times.

trifling.org is an entire Python coding site, offline first (localstorage after first load), with docs, turtle graphics, canvas, and avatar editor, vibe coded from start to finish, with all conversations in the GitHub repo here: https://github.com/zellyn/trifling/tree/main/docs/sessions

This is going to destroy my home network, since I never moved it off the little Lenovo box sitting in my laundry room beside the Eero waypoint, but I’m out of town for three days, so

Granted, the seed of the idea was someone posting about how they wired pyiodide to Ace in 400 lines of JavaScript, so I can’t truly argue it’s non-trivial.

As a light troll to hackernews, only AI-written contributions are accepted

[Edit: the true inception of this project was my kid learning Python at school and trinket.io inexplicably putting Python 3 but not 2 behind the paywall. Alas, Securely will not let him and his classmates actually access it ]