bitwize

I lived in the same building with a bloke who did dangerous construction type work in the Pacific NW. Sawing branches on high cliffs, that sort of thing. He'd make a grip on a job, come back home and spend it all on booze, weed, and women, go out and do it all again. I thought of him as my life's version of Lawrence from Office Space.

Finest Buggywhip Maker in the Land Whinges About Those New-Fangled Automobubbles, Take #7642

It's over. AI is here, and it's so vastly better than any tooling we've produced before, that you have to be really stupidly stubborn not to use it if you're doing real work. And if you object to say that it's not vastly superior, then, you know, "tell me you haven't used a frontier model without telling me you haven't used a frontier model". If you want to get together with your friends and hold a code 'n' sip on Wednesday evenings, maybe fire up an old copy of Vim or Visual Studio and write a game or a little webapp like they used to do in ye olden times just to see what it is like, fine, go nuts. But that's not how software meant for people to actually use gets written anymore.

I want to see one of those AI-generated Seinfeld episodes with Dario as George and Sam Altman as Jerry, respectively.

Dario: We gotta pace the frontier!

Sam: How do you pace a frontier? The frontier's not goin' anywhere. It's right where it was, just go out and explore it!

Dario: Sam, I'm tellin' ya, ya gotta pace it! Things are getting very doomy out there, and Dario's gettin' upset!

This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.

The on-screen "turtle" made famous by microcomputer Logos was originally just such a robot: a wheeled dome with a pen inside that you could program by giving commands written in Logo. Papert reasoned that you could get kids interested in programming by teaching them to use programs as a tool for something with which they are already familiar (drawing). The real turtles were expensive to procure in the 1960s and 1970s, so by the time the 80s came around and 8-bitters were becoming more affordable for homes and schools, the screen turtle was conceived as a substitute.

Because it's a movie

NT kernel rewrite when?

> Software Bill of Materials

Yet another thing that came from PRIDE, despite that PRIDE itself is little known in today's software industry.

Models are the worst now that they ever will be. Frontier models do a phenomenal job of employing good engineering practices and code style compared to where they were mere months ago. Unassisted programming is dead. Programming as a human activity will be on a timescale of years (along with a vast swath of other knowledge work).

I learned to hate corpo jobs less by thinking of them as "farming gold out of a megacorp". Of course I'm losing my ability to do even that, as sloppotrons beat half-century-old grognards every damn time.

The economics of it are such that writing code is, for humans, a handicraft to be indulged in out of idle curiosity. When it comes to actually useful software, for personal or industrial use, that is better off produced by machine; it's simply a waste of human time and energy to write it by hand.

The Hunting for More Money

We know that they're trying to invent a machine god, and if they're even partway successful shit's gonna get real, real fast.

If reality plays out like the novel series, the rational thing is to accept the rule of our machine overlords, for they will protect us from even bigger threats.

Yes, it's fine to run a model on bare metal. The model is just a token predictor. Leave out the fine semantics about this; it's a function taking a set of input tokens to output tokens.

It can't mess with your computer or files until you hook it to a harness, which interprets some of the model's output as commands to execute. So, model on bare metal, harness in a container or VM.

That's going way back, and was portable enough to be used on a variety of operating systems. There was a package of it for the HP Integral!

An early version of Xlisp was used as the basis for Autolisp, but Autolisp wasn't updated to track Xlisp's capabilities. It's kinda like how Commodore BASIC was a nerfed version of Microsoft BASIC that Commodore licensed back in the 1970s and then never updated since to track later BASIC versions, just added a few commands here and there to support later Commodore machines.

At the former apartment, my office/work area had an opening to the living area high on the wall that might've been for a window, or something. My cat spent a lot of time staring at that opening. Not just the opening itself, but he'd work his way backwards, along some exposed AC ducting (it was a loft with 20' ceilings), trying to plot a route from the floor over the ducting to the hole. If we'd had a high enough shelf in the living area he would have gotten in.

I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode a week or so ago and started writing little programs in TI BASIC. TI BASIC sucked. It was slow, due to being written in a form of bytecode which had to be interpreted (and it would in turn interpret your program). And you couldn't do sprites, not without getting the Extended BASIC cart.

But HOLY SHIT THE DOPAMINE RUSH. Just crafting things and making them appear on the screen with a few statements... It was like I was a kid again. I remembered why I liked programming.

It's like... AI is a cheatcode. It's iddqd. Sure, you can cakewalk through a level with it on, but are you really playing the game, then? You certainly haven't gotten better by doing so, and you haven't experienced the involuntary buttcheek clench when you hear a cacodemon hiss from behind you... The whole point of programming is the new things I can do by having gone through the exercise of figuring it out. The ways I've grown, the glimpses I've gotten into the world.

Sceptre dumb TV bros still winning

I find it fascinating that the Persian word for "foreign"/"Western", farangi, actually means "Frankish", which gives some idea of the "compressed geography" people experience regarding faraway places. It was also used to name a race on Star Trek.

Fantastic to see the DOS Lisp scene revived again. Back in the day there was PC-Scheme from Texas Instruments, which I believe was R3RS-compliant.

There is a bird native to the Americas which in English is called the turkey, from its original name "Turkey fowl", because it was thought to come from "the east" of which Türkiye is the country with which most Europeans were familiar (due to being the closest). In Turkish, the bird's name references India ("hindi"); the same is true of other languages such as French ("dinde", from "poule d'inde", chicken of India).

This is going to last longer.

The economics of owning your own powerful hardware make sense less and less with each passing year. Compute that's rented from the cloud gets far more utilization per dollar spent, and that's just on the hardware costs, let alone the cost of electricity to run it. What we're seeing now is the market adjusting to this new reality, as foundries reallocate capacity from consumer-oriented hardware to gear aimed at superscalers.

> All that’s left is the dumbest workflow possible: I fire up the debug viewer myself, look around for weird mistakes, then take a screenshot and tell the language model how badly it messed up this time. Eventually I just decided to do all the debugging work myself, so I would at least get to do the fun part too.

I call this "thanoscoding" for two reasons:

1. "Fine, I'll do it myself"

2. In the past I found I have to "snap away" the mess the LLM made in order to start afresh from a known good state (generally with git reset). But that was 1-2 generations ago when it comes to models. GPT6 Astra probably does things right the first time, 90% of the time.

The other open question is, will there still be operational 3c509s 100 years from now?

Another way I put it, with a heavy sigh, is: "There will come a day—and odds are, it's not far off now—when the last working real Amiga will stop working for the last time."

There is another theory which states that this has already happened:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/8/3/1312

The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."

This. Time is money, and if you're not using an LLM you're wasting your employer's.

Past being a millionaire or so, making money is a clicker game. It's something you do just for the fun of seeing number go up. And just like a clicker game, past a certain point you're no longer making the money through your own efforts, but by acquiring assets that can make the money for you (like buying the grandmas that bake cookies for you, etc.), so the game becomes determining the right mix of assets that let you acquire more, that you can then plow into more assets for even bigger growth.

The super rich aren't making more money because they think more money will buy them correspondingly more happiness. It's a game to them played at massive real-world scales.

You mean the people who hate Nazis? Yes, they're not on X.