zellyn

6 ms·

1.
by zellyn 17d ago
I remember reading Project Gutenberg email updates from Michael S. Hart in the mid to late 90s that were famously formatted like this. It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
2.
by zellyn 23d ago
Disclaimer: I work at an AI lab [edit: but speak for myself :-)] The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are
3.
by zellyn 1mo ago
re: the control points having areas where the curve is unresponsive. IIUC, whereas the control points of a Bezier have direct meaning, this is an attempt at a sensible/usable mapping of synthetic control points to the curve? Which pres
4.
by zellyn 1mo ago
Yeah, I found hundreds surprising (although not on reflection).
5.
by zellyn 1mo ago
The one that comes to mind is how big your hash maps have to get before all the clever algorithms beat linear scan, and it's surprisingly large on modern computers: linear memory access is _very_ predictable. The Roc and Zig folks prob
6.
by zellyn 1mo ago
Anyone know if they’re using the native camera resolution for the zoomed part or doing sensor fusion to get better quality than either alone?
7.
by zellyn 1mo ago
Drone defense? :-)
8.
by zellyn 1mo ago
I always think of Russ Cox’s blog posts as canonical here: https://research.swtch.com/qart
9.
by zellyn 2mo ago
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 to hide it within the bounds of a function. So while Lisp may
10.
by zellyn 2mo ago
I find it endlessly fun that one of the best environments for playing with befunge is written for the zmachine.
11.
by zellyn 2mo ago
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
12.
by zellyn 2mo ago
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 _less_ clear so they can show ads for "similar con
13.
by zellyn 2mo ago
https://archive.org/details/MECC_A157_v11_4amCrack
14.
by zellyn 2mo ago
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 out ahead. Also, using it as a schema doesn’t totally suck.
15.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 win you can get by replacing hardware with so
16.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 nicer in places.
17.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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
18.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 wasm is disabled.
19.
by zellyn 3mo ago
Came here to say this. How can you write an entire article about Chesterton’s Fence without mentioning Chesterton’s Fence?!
20.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 Linux box in my laundry room over WiFi, on residential interne
21.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 things: probabilities about the way the software will feel
22.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 class on YouTube, but for those interested, I did at least pu
23.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 realizing how bad that was even by the late 90s! I think I stil
24.
by zellyn 3mo ago
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 for them to be able to call, but only if you pay the subscr
25.
by zellyn 4mo ago
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 that had assembly listings, and fold-out circuit-board dia
26.
by zellyn 4mo ago
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 (reading it and learning about unix systems an
27.
by zellyn 5mo ago
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 predictions. [Edit: serves me right for not reading tfa. My point
28.
by zellyn 5mo ago
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 bracelet a little smaller
29.
by zellyn 5mo ago
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 :-)
30.
by zellyn 5mo ago
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 researched articles by people who have talked to NASA engineers

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