Viewing profile — zellyn

Drone defense? :-)

I always think of Russ Cox’s blog posts as canonical here: https://research.swtch.com/qart

When I learned (Common) Lisp at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1995, we were encouraged to make as many functions as possible purely functional, and if mutation was needed, to try t…

I find it endlessly fun that one of the best environments for playing with befunge is written for the zmachine.

I thought it would be fun to do a modern reimplementation of LambdaMoo, but someone already did it in Rust! https://github.com/timbran-project/moor

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 …

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…

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 …

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 nice…

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 …

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 Li…

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…

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 c…

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 rea…

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…

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 tha…

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 (…

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 predi…

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 br…

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 res…

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