dwh452

Isn't the internet a social network? Get a website. put vacation photos up. no ads. use AI to add chat, messaging, blogging, discussion forums, and a web ring. why do things like facebook/myspace exist at all?

There are lots of positives that have resulted from using AI in software engineering. (1) No more long repetitive text editing sessions. I.e. changing namespaces or replacing deprecated APIs with the "correct" ones. AI will make nearly perfect text modifications with ease. (2) No more bike-shedding code reviewers nitpicking over every tiny coding decision. I.e, "you should use std::format instead of std::stringstream". AI will match the existing set of nitpicks so you don't have to. (3) Average Joe's and Jane's can craft applications by just talking to the computer. This might inject a freshness to the current state of software. Currently, we are all forced to use the same bloated applications like Word, Excel, Jira, and Photoshop. We are currently forced to deal with the same set of monopolistic SW companies. Now average folk can solve problems and avoid dealing with Microsoft for a spreadsheet program.

The mechanistic view gets weirder if you imagine all the states of the system being written down on a giant tape. Not just the "current" state but all the past and future states. What makes this tape not alive or conscious?

in the old days the brand name was also the company name. now brand names mean nothing.

looking left or right is a rotation not a pivot.

i wonder why planes are designed this way?

What's sad is how difficult it is to write software today. In the old days your dad could buy a C64 and cobble together an application. It should be vastly easier to do the same kind of thing with vastly better building blocks today. Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?

How were pinball machines built without a programmable computer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg I think the arcade industry was already comfortable dealing with complexity to make the mechanical games. The Rube Goldberg nature of the early video games probably weren't that much of a jump in effort/engineering.

This sounds like the advice to prefer the variable name 'ii' over 'i' because you can easily search for it. I loath such advice because it causes the code to become ugly. Similarly, there are 'YODA Conditions' which make code hard to comprehend which solves an insignificant error that is easily caught with tooling. The problem with advice like these is you will encounter deranged developers that become obsessive about such things and make the code base ugly trying to implement dozens of style rules. Code should look good. Making a piece of text look good for other humans to comprehend I consider to be job #1 or #2 for a good developer.

Here's a kick-starter kit that does what you're asking for: https://www.stgeotronics.com/open-dsky I built one and loved it, I wrote my own Arduino C code to drive the device: https://github.com/kjs452/KennysOpenDSKY

Maybe we need 'programmable visuals' instead of 'visual programming'? Why can't I write a simple one hundred line text file and produce a nice architectural diagram?

I'm curious how the Turing machines can resemble problems which take input? BB(n) is defined as a n-state Turing machine that starts off with an empty tape. Collatz(n) is how many steps are taken before it terminates when starting with input 'n'.

Does this mean a BB(6) machine which resembles Collatz is testing all possible values as part of it program and not part of anything on the tape (since the tape start out empty)?

Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.

The best thing I have done for making my notes usable is to have a simple grep script that runs anywhere and searches all the notes files I have. My script is case insensitive and matches lines that contains all the strings you searched on.

I haven't seen anything new in this space and I just finished a project using a markdown format I invented called Tagged{Text}. I'm happy to present it here for your consideration.

In creating my blog and static site I started using Markdown but couldn't get around the limitations. So I invented a simple file format for tagging text into a tree like structure. It has a formatting style modeled after LaTeX. It has served me well (two websites and two blogs).

I call it an "agnostic markdown format" because no tags are defined ahead of time. The user defines everything and writes python filters to generate the output from the tags. I have lots of python code to parse and generate HTML. It has a macro processor, calculator, git date, and other useful tags.

Here is an article about Tagged{Text}: https://etcutmp.com/taggedtext.html Another website built using this format: https://etcutmp.com/evolve5 Source Code: https://github.com/kjs452/tagged_text Source Code for the second website: https://github.com/kjs452/Evolve5Help

The main python file is: taggedtext.py (the parser). All the other python code are filters to generate or transform the tagged text tree into something else. For example, tt_macros.tt implements the DEFINE{} tag.

I was the original author. Heh, heh -- I'm still alive. I just glanced at the code and it looks like a wonderful rewrite. I couldn't see any of my original gross code. Not only that, they massively added to the functionality. It's really a totally new thing. I just had to chime in here to thank raf for seeing something cool in the original and making a great piece of software. -- Ken

Next year autonomous consumers with No One at home