WillAdams

Fundamentally, poverty is a lack of energy, so this is potentially absolutely transformative.

A further consideration is that roughly 50 percent of the cost of traditional energy sources is transmission, so balcony solar is far more efficient on that basis.

It also enabled nxhosting, which was magical --- allowed one to do remote control over dial-up (so long as one didn't manipulate too large a pixel image).

I really wish Display GhostScript had gotten traction w/ the GNUstep folks.

On comp.sys.next.advocacy Mike Paquette talked about how he might not have stayed at Apple after the NeXT acquisition if he'd realized that that first decade was going to be a re-tread of his first decade at NeXT (writing Quartz vice writing Display PostScript) which I think really understates how important that code is.

An Uncle of mine, who paid to have electric run up to his mountaintop home at the insistence of his wife would have loved that sort of self-sufficient install --- he always complained that after running that wire he suddenly had neighbors, when before, there weren't any.

Any possibility that these will also support the Apple Pencil?

It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:

https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html

(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:

https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history

which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)

Same, although these days, all-too-often one learns of this when one sees a garage sale notice that the shop is being sold (picked up some pretty nice tools thus).

Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.

That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

BeOS was also hampered by promising more than they delivered --- I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS user's group meeting when I asked how the presenter's slides were printed (at that time, BeOS didn't have printer drivers, a marked contrast to NeXT's use of PostScript for both display and printing and even having a rasterizer which had them adding a clause in later OS versions limiting the DPI for output --- folks were buying NeXT computers and using them to drive imagesetters, bypassing the normal PS license expense).

Yeah, that said, it's just magical for me to (sometimes) lay out all of my devices and work from a sketched note on my phone (Note 10+), refer to a reference book on my Kindle Scribe, and work on a project on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360.

Some folks claimed that one of the reasons the Newton got axed was that it was the subject of a highly successful battlefield test by the Marine Corps and that doing that was a way to not be a Defense Contractor.

Two notable instances:

- first iPod prototype --- Steve Jobs dropped it into an aquarium and when bubbles rose up noted, "there's space inside, it can be smaller". https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-threw-ipod-protot...

- iDVD --- he drew a button on a whiteboard and announced, "Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make." https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/how-steve-jobs-1-design-...

I'd like to think that the current behaviour of the Apple Font pallet where when collapsed into a single bar grew out of a suggestion made after discussions on comp.sys.mac.advocacy --- but he was justifiably proud when he showed it off to one visitor (per a link I can no longer find, or which is no longer up, or behind a paywall)

One will still be missing:

- pop-up/vertical main menu

- PANTONE colour library

- Display PostScript

I actually used similar machines running NeXT/OPENSTEP, Mac OS, and Windows shortly after graduation and the performance was smoother and more consistent in NeXTstep 3.3, though I will admit OPENSTEP 4.2 felt just a tad more sluggish, but it was far and away the more useful and capable machine, even when running the same software (e.g., Altsys Virtuoso vice Aldus Freehand, or FrameMaker or WordPerfect).

Probably helped that the Cube had 52MB RAM, the Mac 8MB, and the Windows 12MB.

I'm a corporate shill these days, so it's mostly on our official file-sharing site:

https://cutrocket.com/u/WillAdams

(and mostly wood/bamboo)

A bit stalled because I've been working on:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

Though I will note that I got into small-scale and inexpensive CNC because I couldn't figure out how to fit a Bridgeport that was being sold locally for less than scrap value in working condition into my basement.

I've been debating getting a lathe or making a Gingery Lathe or going the 3D print route:

https://www.printables.com/model/1048400-open-lathe-v1

I should have remembered to note that I am _not_ that Will Adams.

This was clear on usenet con comp.sys.next.* since I had an aol.com address.

That said, Millenium Notebook was one of my favourite apps.

The high water mark of my computer usage was my final year of college when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable note-taking/sketching device and connected it to a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet.

I was very hopeful when Rhapsody was announced, but quite disappointed by Mac OS X Public Beta managed to slow my PowerMac G4/400MHz at my day job down to almost the same speed as my 25MHz NeXT Cube (always was bummed I couldn't manage to justify a Turbo 33MHz machine). It took the better part of a decade for things to catch up, though my favourite version was Snow Leopard.

Still quite disappointed that MacWorld couldn't be bothered to print my letter calling out David Pogue for claiming that Steve Jobs was using an IBM ThinkPad running Windows (it of course had OPENSTEP installed, being one of the few models on the supported hardware list).

Really enjoyed using Altsys Virtuoso 2.0 and programming in Display PostScript and seeing the results on-screen in real-time --- it was more-or-less ported to Windows and Mac OS as FreeHand v4 (and a version of it was announced/advertised for Windows NT, not sure if it ever shipped) --- still resort to Macromedia Freehand when I have something which warrants having a nice pen tool/complex Bézier curve manipulation.

Glenn Reid's TouchType.app was just magical for textual logo design, and was a great example of how tightly focused small apps could be on that platform --- poste.app was simultaneously an app and a service and worth looking up for folks interested in such. Mac users should be sure to check out Services such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordservice/id899972312?mt=12

And of course, Doom was fun even in 2-bit greyscale --- that's where it was originally developed and what the map editor ran on: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Lots of information at:

https://nextworldarchive.com/

but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/

I think we're looking at two different sides of the same coin.

The thing is, increased efficiency doesn't always yield a larger market in the short term.

There are only so many copies of a book listing television stations and demographics for marketing purposes which the market will bear as in this specific instance.

It takes a while for the displaced workers to get retrained and find other jobs which allows them to produce/consume more.

On the flip side, Nintendo hiring a couple hundred folks to make a game such as _Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword_ suddenly created $50 x 600,000 in value on the day it was released.

I drew up the markings in Macromedia Freehand MX, exported as an EPS, opened that in Fontforge, made it into a font, then used F-Engrave to V-carve them.

The fasteners were sourced from a local hardware store and modified w/ a hacksaw, a wire crimping tool which was just the right size to hold them, and a file.

The holes and outline were cut using a CNC following G-code output by MakerCAM (a fork of the Flash file PartKam).

That was a _long_ time ago, and the free software has gotten much better/easier, and these days I work for a company which makes integrated software for the CNC machines which we sell.

In the interest of full disclosure, my own project is in there as well (but nowhere near the top and it's a kind of obscure topic, so not likely to ever get there).

This was looked at pretty thoroughly in the novella:

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

(time for it to be reposted and discussed again since the author's untimely demise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759 )

An early project on my CNC machine was a basic set of inside/outside calipers:

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/locking-register-calipers-...

It would be interesting to see what would be involved in making the digital files which would allow re-creating each of these objects.

I've been trying to collect Literate Programs collected as books at:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

Note that ICC, a C compiler, is one:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/522102.Retargetable_C_Co...

Note that one can look through projects tagged as Literate Programming by using the topics view:

https://github.com/topics/literate-programming

might be there's something useful there.

The version of the documentation which I would very much like to see would be a Literate Programming version where all the code is explained from the ground up.

Apparently, this can actually assist the LLM:

https://silly.business/blog/we-should-revisit-literate-progr...

as discussed here previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747

The number of books being published has been steadily increasing for decades since computers became prevalent in typesetting --- is that not measurable?

Admittedly part of that is caused by the change in tax laws making it untenable for publishers to maintain a backlist.

A co-worker in a different program whose invoicing was much simpler and more straight-forward tried to automate this using OCR and Python and had a higher error rate and still had to set hand-written checks aside to handle manually.

I couldn't find an OCR system which was:

- free/affordable

- able to cope with arbitrary check sizes/hand-written checks and my occasional need to arrange multiple invoices in a stack with the check rotate 90 degrees so that all the numbers are visible

- which would capture the data from a scan in such a way that it could be easily used to rename the file

If you know of a system which is flexible enough to do this which is essentially free, let me know.

Yeah, the person who said that obviously never checked on book and magazine and newspaper typesetting --- cue old news stories about the last compositor at a given paper finally retiring after decades of the sinecures which the composition unions bargained for rather than participating, causing a loss of typographic skill and knowledge which resulted in the ghastly appearance of the "DTP revolution".

I once participated in a project where we worked up a database-driven typesetting system for a company whose annual publication had a staff of a dozen (3 managers (one of whom mostly did ad sales), 3 full-time compositors, 6 part-time) and when we put in the system they quit paying their expensive annual license for maintenance on the proprietary composition system, and fired two managers and 1 compositor and half the part-timers.

The staff was commensurately larger when they switched to the first electronic composition system they were using from the typesetter and paste-up they initially used.

When I tried to use CoPilot at my day job, I set up a prompt to process scans of checks and invoices (with the MICR account bar code line covered w/ a pen so that there was no PII), it would sort of work for 20 files at a time to write a .bat file command to rename the source image based on the content of the check and invoice --- this removed the need to open up scans in batches of 50, read the Invoice ID, save using that, then run a .bat file to rename them based on the balance of information in the database.

The thing is, the failure rate was quite high --- often only 15 (sometimes fewer) lines were returned, and after a while, Microsoft imposed a limit on uploading more files, even though I was deleting the conversations immediately and quitting CoPilot and re-starting (long sessions seemed to have a progressively worse failure rate).

Since then, access to CoPilot has been removed and we're waiting on a test program to finish. Kind of curious how many tokens this was using up (and if there's a model which could be run locally which would work well and quickly enough).

It was quite surprising some of the things folks did w/ Flash --- notably including a full-fledged 2.5D CAM tool:

https://github.com/Jack000/PartKAM

>As of late 2026, Amazon’s U.S. warehouse hourly pay generally ranges from about $18 to $22 for most roles.

That said, after a while, one can be surprisingly fast when picking --- on one occasion I walked up to a bin full of non-descript cardboard boxes, grabbed one, spun it in my hands for the six-sided box check and scanned it to verify it was the correct pick, and then was asked to explain how I had gotten that right by a trainer w/ a bunch of trainees--- it seemed like almost five minutes of explanation of minor differences in cardboard texture, box shape, construction and so forth to explain how it was that at first glance, that was the only correct choice.

I've always wondered if LLMs would arrive at a similar conclusion with on-going training as they are used.

>It needed to achieve the lifting limits recommended under the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health guidelines for human workers, which include repeatedly lifting 23-kg bins and reaching shelves 1.75 meters high. Digit is designed to perform tasks like these for 20 hours a day—something no human can do.

I think that rather underestimates what people can and have done (cue John Henry story).

I worked in an Amazon warehouse for two different stints:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...

and it was rather like a gym membership which I couldn't skip out on (glances at exercise equipment cluttering living space) and during which I could ponder life choices and consequences while wishing there was a soundtrack/music.

That said, this sort of thing, LLMs/AIs and data centers, and so forth feel like a perfect storm leading up to singularity (as envisioned by some optimistic science fiction authors) or something far worse, cue Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

One company whose site does get this is McMaster-Carr --- there used to be (maybe still is?) a great post on Quora about how the re-design for the site was realized and the very talented designer/architect who did it, but it's either gone, or I can't find it.