noufalibrahim

Can you draw such a clear line? I put out some thing to experiment with an idea and then iterate over it till i get a solution and then spend time trying to polish that for production use. Thinking and coding are very rarely two separate states for me.

We used to give presentations about the average life of pages on the internet before it 404ed. It was cited from a SciAm article which was offline at the time and the only way to get the stat was via. the mirror on the Wayback Machine.

I'm in the middle. I've been using Python since the early 2.x series.

The good parts are that the inbuilt data structures and their apis are efficient and clean enough to write code that's mostly readable. Most of the heavy lifting is done in hand tuned C and performance intensive external modules are also written in C. There are several good projects that are written using it and while it's not theoretically perfect, it's useful enough. Like Stroustrup said - there are 2 kinds of the languages, ones that everyone complains about and ones that no one uses.

The bad parts are that it's very easy to use. Almost in a Visual Basic "producing crap just takes a squeeze" kind of way. It opened up programming to a lot of people (the genesis of Python was in the CP4E project - where this was the aim). This resulted in a lot of bad patterns, inefficient code, badly written but popular libraries. Also, the indentation idiom and other restrictions resulted in a lot of convoluted APIs.There's also a lot of baggage from the pre multi-core CPU era (threading etc.).

I still think of it as a great glue language. If there are libraries that are fast and can run well, a good FFI or wrapper which Python can leverage will amplify the reach and usability of the library.

On the overall, a language that's older than the venerable Java which people are still using (and hence complaining about) speaks to its longevity. So, atleast by that definition, it is successful.

It's very nicely done. I snapped the seatbelt on and that dread of a long boring flight automatically hit me. :)

It's a beautiful house and I'm very happy for them.

My own memories of lan parties were much messier. People bringing their own assembled machines and running cables around the place to get this to work somehow, swapping cards etc.

On my machine, e is just a way to send things into Emacs.

    $ which e
    e () {
            snippet="(nkv-find-file-and-jump \"$1\")" 
            emacsclient --no-wait -e $snippet
    }

I have mixed feelings.

The barrier and time between idea and usable implementation is almost zero now. I don't have to imagine. I can just write something and see it work before making larger decisions. I really like this. Many of my ideas were abandoned because I needed to study some obscure library. Now, I can learn the parts that I find interesting and just have the AI chew through the grunt parts easily. That's the good.

I started coding with a line editor on a small Casio handheld "computer" and used to keep programs in my head. I more or less knew what happened on each line without seeing the line. With larger programs, I had a mental model of what was going on where and a big part of the input to that was the effort of writing everything by hand. That's gone. It's not really important as far as the output of usable programs is concerned but there's a certain feeling of satisfaction that came with digesting a larger codebase and having it surrender it's secrets to you that's missing.

I think the first instance of games being separated from the "engine" so that you could make the game and it would run on all platforms that the engine ran out without porting was Infocom's Z-machine. http://maher.filfre.net/if-book/if-4.htm

There was an interesting article which I read a long time. It's linked to from the post above called "How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine" published in 1980.

AGI, SCI, Scumm etc. were all larger and more capable versions of this.

I remember an old company called "Access software" that had something called "Realsound" with which they played really high quality audio on the PC speaker. Their games were things like Countdown, Martian Memorandum etc.

Yes but going really far down that path has given us sterilized UIs that have no character and no personality. Every website and app looks more or less the same. I, for one, enjoy a thriving baroque culture of weird interfaces with different levels of usability. Given the nature of the people who write these (usually for themselves or their teams), I'm sure usability was important and good atleast for their own audiences.

That physical books age and retain pieces of their history is one of my favourite things about them.

I found a used book that was given to someone when he graduated top of his class in the early 1900s. There was an inscription from the principal of his college, signed and with a seal from the college. I stood there gazing at it and couldn't help imagining how he finished reading it, left it here and there in his house and finally, after his time, in the attic of the ancestral home. It was later discovered by his daughter or granddaughter and then when they were cleaning up, sold to a second hand book seller rather than just destroyed.

Contrast that to a PDF which is just as crisp and clean as it was when it was created (and which could, become a format for which we don't have a reader anymore).

Mortimer Adler (of how to read a book fame) has notes on this https://socrates.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/rcunningham/2022-23...

MAny a times, the books I read don't have enough place to scribble so I keep a A5 half folded as a bookmark and write notes on that with page numbers. Once the book is over, I read through the points and try to reconstruct.

I use a mechanical pencil myself since I like the teeth and my handwriting is better when I use it. Also, ability to erase (not for cleanliness but more to avoid wastage of space) is useful.

This reminded me of an old DOS game I used to play called Castle Adventure. I'd almost forgotten about it. Apparently, the original programmer was just 14 when he made it and the source was stolen and sold by some other companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Adventure

Can't argue there. The first time I visited the US, I bought expensive calligraphy paper. I brought it back home to India and saved it for when I would be "Good enough" and practiced on cheap copier stock.

Fast forward a few years, I gingerly took out the pad and pulled out a sheet. I didn't do it right and tore the sheet down the middle and had to take fresh one. Then I dropped my pen while writing (since I was so "careful" with the paper) and had ink droplets fall onto the sheet. Finally, when I put pen to the paper, I found that it had absorbed moisture from the air and the the ink bled into the paper ruining everything.

You remind me of Nigel Tufnel of the Spinal Tap rockumentary fame and his guitar collection. The clip on Youtube is a must watch if you're not seen it.

I'm probably missing something here but if I have to worry about getting an expensive watch that calls it "Submariner" wet of all things, at the very least, it's badly named.

I did this with my first (and only Macbook) in 2014. Did it with a pocket file.

I never thought about blogging about it though. Perhaps something to consider.

I was building an in-house infra management platform (including a self hosted AI agent) for companies in a segment that's very careful about its internal IP.

I spoke to the CTO of a well funded company who was spending a few millions on AWS infrastructure per year with budget overshoots etc. I pitched the product to him with all the details and he understood it but at the end of the day, his response was that he'd rather pay AWS for the convenience rather than manage this by himself.

Surely I can't be the only one who misread the heading and clicked expecting to see DOOM implemented using just HTML DOM. :-/

A lisp interpreter with text editing primitives.

There are many things you can do to get it out of your family's life. No phones in the bedroom, No phones after X O'clock, Open conversations about social media with your kids, Unite with them in the fight against social media, block social media from your phones (use only a computer). My own poison of choice was twitter but thankfully, it's become X and I've become ex-twitter more or less. It's liberating. I also vibe coded some software to keep me off these things on my work computer so that's been good too.

Ah. This is something I'm not familiar with. This is the Pen Hospital I was referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2a_yKeCS7M

I don't know if that's the same. There's another here called Kim and Co. which makes ebonite pens without fillers. They became popular via. social media and a lot of people ordered pens from them. Perhaps that's the one you're referring to?

That's an exaggeration. Things are not as repairable as they used to be and people are not as thrifty as they used to be. However, I do think the culture of repairing things is strong and mostly financially motivated.

I'm glad fountain pens came up here. There's a shop a few hours away from where I stay in an old town in India called the "Pen Hospital". It was a thriving business in the 60s when my father went to college. Lots of people came there mostly to repair fountain pens. He's mostly just a stationery store right now but if you take a fountain pen there for repair, he does it for free just as a nod to the tradition I guess.

Probably not but it's hard to really pin this down. On the one hand, China's rise has in the recent past has been phenomenal but that kind of rapid cleanup has always been accompanied by repression and destruction of political rivals. So. perhaps a bit of both.

I wonder how much of this is informed opinion vs. reflexive kickback due to a threat to ones livelihood.

I've had success with Aider from October of 2025 (from my git logs). I have to differ from the general sentiment over here. The tools and models are good enough to make a change in the way work is done. Of course, Big Tech. will move fast and make mistakes but this is qualitatively different from other recent hypes (e.g. crypto/NFT). It has had genuine impact on people and their lives and a lot of simpler jobs with larger teams have been replaced by these models and one operator.

I was creating a scene by scene remake of a cutscene from an old DOS game. The sprite sheet had several sprites which were cycled (e.g. a horse with it's head down and up). The engine would cycle through these regularly to create some "liveliness" in the background. It was tedious and I didn't want to figure out which sprites belonged at which pixel location.

I recorded a video of the relevant part of the cutscene using dosbox and then split it into numbered frames using ffmpeg. Then I gave that + the spritesheet to Claude Code and asked it to figure it out and tell me which ones are at what position. I should probably have deduped it but in any case, it churned through the whole thing and got one or two out of 15 or 16 sprites right. The rest, it just dropped into random places. YMMV

Yes I know but it's not always that straightforward and my muscle memory from western hands interferes.