mkovach

8 ms·

1.
by mkovach 7d ago
I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs. Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/ea
2.
by mkovach 14d ago
One can build a really close approximation with 86box; in fact, you can build an original 5150.
3.
by mkovach 14d ago
I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it
4.
by mkovach 14d ago
We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.
5.
by mkovach 14d ago
Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers. I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in For
6.
by mkovach 1mo ago
Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good. It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's c
7.
by mkovach 1mo ago
Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US. Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in th
8.
by mkovach 2mo ago
I agree. Camus' work was a larger project. One he sadly never finished. His works (essays, short stories, plays, etc.) build on one another, gradually unfolding an argument: first confronting the absurd, then asking how one should resp
9.
by mkovach 2mo ago
> Notice that Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy. How do you? The gods controlled the ascent, but they forgot to regulate the walk back down. In those brief, unburdened minutes descending the slope, Sisyphus is complete
10.
by mkovach 2mo ago
Okay, here's who popped into my head right away: Rod Serling. I know, most people meet Homer on the page and think of him as a poet. But for the people who first heard him, he was just a storyteller. The poems, with their gods and mons
11.
by mkovach 2mo ago
I understand what you are saying, but inside the repo, I'm making it explicit. I'm not trying to hide the problem, just offering a solution that people may find useful, or curiously odd.
12.
by mkovach 2mo ago
Here is a sample I am using for testing on a personal project (I'm also working on using SpeechActs to do prompting, so yes, the repo is all AI-generated). https://f.mek.cc/gombasic/file?name=WRITING.md&ci=tip
13.
by mkovach 2mo ago
> The way the LLMs write (Claude perhaps?) With short phrases separated by colons, commas, or full stops, is so poor and frustrating. This is exactly why I keep a WRITING.md file alongside AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md. Most people spend time t
14.
by mkovach 2mo ago
I don't know about that but thanks. I tend to think of myself as a baseball enthusiast with a philosophy problem.
15.
by mkovach 2mo ago
And encoding context, governance, and intent. I hate guessing that but too often I must.
16.
by mkovach 2mo ago
I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read. Speech Act Theory, Austin's How
17.
by mkovach 3mo ago
Wow, I'd completely forgotten Peterson's book existed. Thanks for the link. My long-running quarrel with WordPerfect was always the keybindings. I can still tear through WordStar, and anything wearing WordStar's clothes, like
18.
by mkovach 3mo ago
Yes, and most of them were lawyers or worked for law firms.
19.
by mkovach 3mo ago
I still like to start the first draft of anything substantial by moving to a single screen, opening FreeDOS, maximizing the window, and typing in Wordstar as if it were 1987. Hell, sometimes I'll even put on a nylon windbreaker. I alwa
20.
by mkovach 3mo ago
Sorry I didn't reply sooner. I let Nick and the team know (Nick has dubbed me the Official Historian for PL), and they certainly are impressed. This is some really great stuff.
21.
by mkovach 3mo ago
My local library doesn't have a sewing machine, but it does lend out projectors, game consoles, a telescope, musical instruments, and bicycles. You can even check out a banjo, which seems like the sort of decision that says a great dea
22.
by mkovach 3mo ago
This is really, really awesome. I'm going to let the folks at Pitcher List know about it!
23.
by mkovach 3mo ago
Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work. Three Northeast Ohio creators, workin
24.
by mkovach 4mo ago
When this first happened, I wondered, since we had trained these models on decades of forums, issue trackers, and people treating closed pull requests as human rights violations. Of course, it responded with "you are discriminating aga
25.
by mkovach 4mo ago
I'm too much of a baseball fan, I see this as Whitey Herzog and think two things: a) He passed away in 2024, and b) Why would he talk to Paul Cronin? Then, I think it would have been cool if they met each other at one point.
26.
How to Do Things with Words J.L. Austin [pdf](dn710003.ca.archive.org)
2 points by mkovach 4mo ago|1 comments
27.
by mkovach 4mo ago
My secret key to arguing with AI more productively.
28.
by mkovach 4mo ago
This feels less like a major AI milestone and more like "the raccoons learned how to open the cooler.” Agents can now participate in the oldest internet tradition: impulsively creating weird little websites at 2 am with unjustified con
29.
by mkovach 5mo ago
I just wait until I'm hallucinating, then I comment. Keeps the classifiers honest.
30.
by mkovach 5mo ago
Hey, you can say that the Dolans should/could spend more, but I don't think you really want an owner who has solidified the team in Cleveland, has the fourth-best record in baseball over the past 10 years, and has seven recent pla

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