Viewing profile — 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 …

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…

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 char…

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. …

> 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 ab…

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 …

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…

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 …

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 mult…

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…

> ... 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 fu…

>> 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 wir…

> 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, i…

> 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.…

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> 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,…

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 compi…

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