Viewing profile — ianbicking

Looking at the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the difference in what "persistent" models do, it seems reasonable. Like: is this a solvable problem? How much work does the model t…

I used Oberon [1] in school, and it had a bunch of funky UI ideas. One I liked it if you clicked on the scrollbar then it would scroll that position to the top. Like if you click t…

I remember in San José and maybe other Costa Rican cities with a street number system where even/odd were used for the cardinal directions. Calles (streets) run N/S, Avenidas (aven…

I genuinely expect to see some of this when agentic AI is added to customer support systems. That is, we'll see the AI manipulate the company's systems in order to satisfy the cust…

Maintaining human understanding in the face of fast progress is a big unsolved problem. If you are worried about there being nothing left when LLMs tear their way through a topic t…

When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon

I've been doing something similar to this in a personal claude code frontend, though not particularly "magical". I'm mostly using my system to make comments on long AI-generated do…

In a sense they do use their own language; they program in tokenized source, not ASCII source. And maybe that's just a form of syntactic sugar, like replacing >= with ≥ but x100. O…

The knowledge machine question is fascinating ("Imagine you had access to a machine embodying all the collective knowledge of your ancestors. What would you ask it?") – it truly do…

I haven't really kept up with what Midjourney has been doing the past year or two. While I liked the stylistic aspects of Midjourney, being able to use image examples to maintain s…

I've been working on a LLM fiction writing workflow and associated tools. It's built on agentic coding tools with lots of structure, guidance, prompting, and critique. Almost all o…

I've come around to feeling that if I'm going to make an experimental development tool, I need to make it in service of building something specific. Maybe something playful... if I…

It does however work just fine if you ask it for grammar help or whatever, then apply those edits. And for pretty much the rest of the content too: if you have the AI generate feed…

I think there might be a pattern across education with a strong ideology (Montessori, Waldorf, Classical education, etc) that they aren't very good at recognizing when the ideology…

I have wanted to do experiments with a receipt printer hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, with some simple controls... but every time I look up the cost of the printer I balk. It's proba…

I think it can be a false comfort to think of LLMs being trained to the center of the bell curve. I think it's closer to true that there's no real "average" (just like there isn't …

I remembered hearing a podcast about a startup robotics company doing the same thing; a little search and they actually have a comparison page between their product and HP's: https…

I think a big part of it is not so much that they aren't capable of being a dungeon master, but they are constitutionally unfit due to their agreeability. The biggest improvement t…

I think the player freedom and simulation elements of a text adventure are mostly an illusion. I don't think a typical text adventure has more degrees of freedom than a point-and-c…

Oh, I got confused at first, I think it's writing the story out in Chinese on purpose as a kind of hidden state...? Clever approach. I can't tell what the background color shifts r…

I did give it a try, but no luck; qb64 seems to only run the code by compiling it via C++, and that failed on my system. (And I don't have the determination to try to find out why.…

Anyone got it running on a Mac? It says to use DOSBox, but that doesn't work for me. (Sure would be nice if this could run on the web...)

Text adventures and AI-driven interactions are surprisingly different I've found... https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure – still not sure what the right fus…

I'm doing some experiments in LLM (historical) fiction writing. I feel like we can get pretty good writing out of an LLM (especially Sonnet) with enough prompting, reasoning, and g…

Alan Kay described [1] what he considers the first object oriented system, made in the 60s by an unknown programmer. It was a tape-based storage system, where the "format" of the t…