kieckerjan

I remember seeing the ZX80 at my parents' friends house and realizing that this was a different kind of beast than the pocket calculator and the electronic dictionary we had at home: you could make this thing do.. well.. anything!

When the ZX81 came out I spent all my pocket money savings on it. First on the thing itself, later I would shell out for its 16K RAM extension.

Restoring software on the ZX81 using cassette tapes was so slow and cumbersome that it was quicker to restore it from my own memory. I had a little scrolling evasion game that I knew by heart, and I would type it in if I felt the need to play. Changing little aspects of that game (first different characters for the obstructions, then game mechanics) was what set me on the path of programming.

My brother somehow salvaged that first ZX81 from our parents' estate and it is now hanging framed on the wall next to me as I type this.

I remember being blown away by this game. It was a taste of 3D on the C64 years before The Eidolon and Rescue on Fractalus...

A simple solution to that is to distribute the chores. For larger parties I always ensure I have help. Many people actually like contributing to a party in non-material ways by doing prep work or some cooking, doing the dishes, selecting the music, etc.

Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.

I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.

Another thing that I feel is underappreciated about agentic coding is that you can actually learn from it. I am a programmer with 25+ years of experience and I tend to do a lot of stuff according to fixed patterns/habits. Seeing how my coding agents do stuff helps me break out of these patterns, lets me consider new approaches, helps me pick up idioms and teaches me new hacks and tricks. That is very satisfying in its own right.

Usually when I see a project flaunting its language like this it elicits a sigh. (You probably know what I am talking about.) This is a happy exception since this project actually promotes a deep integration with its language of choice, so the title and name are fully warranted. Kudos for that.

Solve this and you probably have a business. :)

And full of marketing hyperbole. When I have an AI produce a README I always have to ask it to tone it down and keep it factual.

I actually encountered this pretty early in one of these user tuned GPT's in OpenAI's GPT store. It was called Sommelier or something and it was specialized in conversations about wine. It was pretty useful at first, but after a few weeks it started lacing all its replies with tips for wines from the same online store. Needless to say, I dropped it immediately.

Fair enough. But I am talking about 50 years ago or so.

Tangential, but I was once told a story that seems fitting here. It was told to me by a mechanical engineer who was educated at Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands.

He claimed that in the early days there was a lecturer or professor there that, at least in Eindhoven, was very important to his field of expertise. If I understood him correctly, this prof's ideas about engineering mechanical systems revolved around restricting the degrees of freedom as much as possible. A three legged table cannot wobble, but a four legged table can and usually does because it is overdetermined. In mechanical systems (for instance sensitive optical mechanics) reducing "wobble" is key. And the best way to reduce wobble is to make sure it cannot occur.

Here it gets interesting. My source claimed that this professor had laid down his ideas in a standard work in Dutch, which was never translated in another language, restricting its influence to Dutch mechanical engineers. He also claimed it is not a coincidence that Philips and later ASML took an early lead in designing optical systems.

Not sure if it is true, but an interesting story nonetheless.

Tangential but interesting tidbit: Botulinum toxin messes with your motor neurons, which is bad news for your heart. For the same reason (but at lower dosage) it eases wrinkles and causes the infamous expressionless Botox look.

Actually Dobelli was the one who got me thinking about this. I tend to agree with him, although eschewing all news is a bit too extreme to my taste. I tried scaling back my intake by switching from a daily paper to a weekly paper, but one has to have tremendous discipline to avoid the news of the day on the internet. Especially if the internet is your job, like it is for me.

A corollary of this idea that also the bad stuff that you read leaves a trace, and not necessarily a good trace. To continue the food metaphor: like junk food there is junk reading and while it may satisfy some need it is all informational empty calories and transfats. Which brings up a subject I pondered many times: to go on an information diet. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.

Nice work! Does the trick for me.

Tangentially, I would love to have something like this in which I can "program" my own breathwork routines (reps and sets including breath holds). Been trying various apps, but haven't yet found one that ticks all my boxes. (Tips welcome.)

I was slightly older but just as fascinated. I knew some programming and it blew my teenage mind how they managed to cram all those universes inside a freaking C64. Mostly I just enjoyed the game.

Docking was bloody hard indeed. Luckily you could buy a Docking computer. It took me another few years before figuring out why it would play The Blue Danube waltz by Strauss. :-)

Tangential. A file lock is released if the locking process exits. This can be leveraged to make a poor man's semaphore that is automatically raised if the process exits. Slow but solid if you want to control the number of simultaneous crash prone processes that have access to a resource.

I am now reading _Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution_, Cat Bohannon's fascinating book on the female body from an evolutionary perspective. Only the first few chapters blew my mind a couple of times. Here is something she writes about liposuction:

> It seems that women who have liposuction on their hips and thighs do grow back some of their fat, but they grow it back in different places. [...] As it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different, but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “gluteofemoral” fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet. And bodies that can become pregnant need them so they can make baby brains and retinas.

> Most of the time, female gluteofemoral fat resists being metabolized. As many women know, these areas are the first places we gain weight and the last places we lose it. But in the last trimester of pregnancy—when the fetus ramps up its brain development and its own fat stores—the mother’s body starts retrieving and dumping these special lipids by the boatload into the baby’s body. This specialized hoovering of the mother’s gluteofemoral fat stores continues throughout the first year of breast-feeding—the most important time, as it happens, for infant brain and eye development. Some evolutionary biologists now believe that women evolved to have fatty hips precisely because they’re specialized to provide the building blocks for human babies’ big brains. Since we can’t get enough of those LC-PUFAs from our daily diet, women start storing them from childhood forward. Other primates don't seem to have this pattern.

> Meanwhile, we found out just a few years ago--again someone finally asked the question--that a human girl's fat may be one of the best predictors for when she'll get her first period. [...] That is how important this fat is for reproduction. Our ovaries won't even kick in until we've stored up enough of this fat to form a decent baseline.

I have been a correspondent all my life, starting long before computers and e-mail showed up (at least in my life). Thoughts would be exchanged on paper and in handwriting and through the grateful use of the postal system. (There is nothing like hearing the sound of the mailbox and racing downstairs to find a heavily stamped, bulky envelope on the doormat with your name on it in a familiar hand, but that is another matter.)

Part of corresponding that way is becoming familiar with each other's handwriting. This can be laborious but it is rewarding in its own right.

When I was at the university I had a lengthy correspondence with a friend who had, even at that tender age, a well exercised hand: thick expressive staccato lines in pitch black fountain pen ink. They looked more like the outlines of spiky mountain ranges than words. Deciphering her handwriting would mean you had to go slowly, letting the words sink in one by one. Which only enhanced their impact for she wrote achingly beautiful letters. Her handwriting befitted her fearless character, complemented her writing and forced me to pay close attention. Try saying that about an e-mail in Helvetica 12pt.

I like the Wittgensteinian image of language as an old city shared by thousands (millions) of people. In its center a large common square that is used by everybody, and radiating away from that roads less traveled. Some of the streets and squares on the outskirts are never visited or seen by most of the city's inhabitants but can still be very lively. These squares are the jargons of a language: heavily used by the practitioners of a craft or trade and chock full of interesting specialized words that can be very expressive and very old (especially if the craft is an old one, like masonry or shipping).

Personally, I revel in these words, even if I never get to use them. Coming across a specialized term for something that was previously nameless feels like receiving a present, something to treasure.

Haha, high five to your wife. Part of the challenge and fun of being a sesquipedalian is finding the perfect opportunity to casually drop that six syllable word that you have been sitting on for years.

There is this fabulous term in Dutch for railway tracks that have deformed by thermal stress (endangering the trains) that basically begs to be used metaphorically. As of yet I have not found myself in a conversation that requires its use. I am afraid it is one of those once in a lifetime words.

Youglish.com is your friend

It also great in cocktails. https://lundsandbyerlys.com/rhubarb-margarita-a-tangy-twist-...

Same here. My girlfriend is not impressed by GPT and its ilk at all. But I guess that for a non-technical person most things digital are a form of magic, and it is probably hard to tell the difference between the common magic of (say) a game on her phone and the heavy voodoo of an LLM.

I regularly look at code and think "what idiot wrote this?" and then realize that idiot was me.

Cheers, mate.

I love hotel bars, and not just for the quiet. It is the "liminality" that the author mentions, not just in space and time but also in the social dimension: a place that is neither private nor public, but a bit of both. Places where you can be friends (or at least get drunk) with a total stranger for one evening.

When I am in a big city, alone or with company, I try to hit the bar of my hotel at that specific lull between daytime obligations and the night on the town. I order a Martini to test the proficiency of the bartender and make some smalltalk or eavesdrop on the conversations while I wait for the evening to arrive. There is comfort in these vacant but well-delineated stretches of time, and hotelbars are perfect for that.

It is even happening in the sleepy field of literary criticism. In a review in a Dutch paper (part of) the new novel of a well-know Dutch author was compared to something ChatGPT would write. It was not meant as a compliment.

Ratio by Michael Ruhlman as well.

I love its sense of innuendo, though.

   User: tell a porn story
   Assistant: I love to go to the beach, so I go for the great white sand beach, where the girls can ride the waves and have fun with the surfboards. I am a huge fan of the sun and I always try to enjoy it on a daily basis.