My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.
I used Borland Turbo Pascal in 1984. It was amazing to work with something so fast on a PC that was really so slow. No IDE/Compiler since then matched the speed. Today's code is massively more sophisticated and complex, so there is no way to match that performance today despite the speed of computers today.
I got a windows 95 66MHz Pentium machine with 16MB ram at a yard sale in 2002. Visual Studio 5 Enterprise worked plenty fast on that with features I still miss (or which don’t perform as well) in modern environments.
Came here to share this mandatory link on this subject, Dadgm's Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than:
https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
I used Turbo Pascal 2 as late as 1991, if not later, because that was the version we had. It was really fast on a 386 40 MHz or whatever exact type of PC we had then. A bit limiting perhaps that it only came with a library for CGA graphics, but on the other hand it made everything simpler and it was good for learning.
A few years ago I wanted to run my old Turbo Pascal games and decided to port to Free Pascal. Sadly Free Pascal turned out to only ship with the graphics library introduced in Turbo Pascal 4, but on the other hand I got a few hours of fun figuring out how to implement the Turbo Pascal 1-3 graphics API using inclined assembler to draw CGA graphics, and then my games worked (not very fun games to be honest; more fun to implement that API).
Neat. I have an original copy of Numerical Recipes in Pascal.
I used to have a copy of a Turbo Pascal graphics book with a blue-purple Porsche (not pg's hah) on the cover that included code for a raytracer. It would take about a minute to render one line at 320x200x256 colors, depending on the number of scene objects and light sources.
totally. so strange that that was the fastest, most flowy dev experience i've ever had. been chasing that ever since. though i must say rails, vite, react fast refresh, etc. are pretty nice in that regard.
I make an unusual kind of art, but I haven't tried selling it, as you need a stable of interested people, and I can only post it in one place at the moment (a Facebook interest group on tiling, Instagram is overrun with AI, you can't start a new profile without lots of existing supporters). I've considered opening a gallery in my local area just to sell my art (5 million people in the metro, and barely a real commercial art gallery). My overhead would be just me and a location. The idea of selling art for tens or hundreds of thousands seems nuts.
I do see that there are too many galleries in places, selling too many artists, to too many people, with massive overhead (in the story, the gallery had $100k+ a month in expenses). Also, it's hard to make something new that is still saleable, almost every kind of art is basically something people did 50 or even 100 years ago; I look at art people are selling all the time, and most is not anything different. The best stuff is from people that hardly anyone knows, who like me just make something different because they want to.
I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit. I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there. Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries). Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!
I have heard, and believe: successful galleries are a location thing. People with deep pockets will pick up a piece by anyone in Aspen, Colorado, and probably not look twice if they (somehow) saw a Koons in a Topeka gallery.
Gallery owners are taste makers like stock brokers used to be before people could just point and click directly.
They put you into a good piece of artwork at a good price, build a raport, look after their good clients, perform well over time and take a couple of points on the way in and out
Many local businesses in my neighborhood (there are very very few chains) post art for sale from community artists and the chamber of commerce for the neighborhood sponsors art walks. In that situation you don’t even need the overhead of the gallery. Local shops, bars, and restaurants are the gallery.
What do you think the market is for this kind of digital art? Do you see this style of work attracting an audience elsewhere? How much is it selling for?
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
I didn't want to criticize, but since you've already opened the door: these are interesting to me as sheer sensory stimulation, but the problem that might dissuade a lot of people is that there's no structure to most of the pieces (save for the ones that are based on distorting an existing image). Without structure there's no narrative, and no reason for someone to become interested in any given piece beyond, as I said, sensory stimulation. On that note, most the color palettes are very tasteful; if coldcode is picking them algorithmically, that's pretty impressive.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
I have no idea how it works, but if you sold/licensed/created your art to fabric patterns, theres almost certainly a small market there. Clicking through your site (others are right, you could present your work better), I see plenty of “I’d buy a decently priced cool shirt of that pattern”. Sample size of one and all.
You’re much better off selling shirts. The markup on custom printed fabrics isn’t great, and there are plenty of professional fabric pattern designers out there which companies that commission fabric hire as-needed.
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
Take this as a additional point of reference: I don't have formal education in art and not an artist, but I find your work interesting enough that I would stop at a store to look at and probably buy something (printed and fabric) if I can afford to (especially the cover art on the home page).
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
The site is slow so I can't see it. I'm 68, eat well, lost 20 pounds, work out twice a week. Everything is working fine. But I live in a place surrounded by people in walkers, wheelchairs, or using canes. Some of them have had strokes or accidents making improvement hard, but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging. You don't ordinarily wind up with a walker at a single point; it often starts many years or even decades earlier when you failed to keep in decent physical shape. I almost started too late (last couple of years), I can see how easy it is to not notice your physical being slowly going down. But assuming no major injury or disease, you can improve your body at almost any age, a little at a time, and avoid or at least postpone physical aging for quite a while.
I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.
I am still getting older, but I am in better shape than I was before I retired. The last time I felt as fit was when I was still playing basketball 30+ years ago.
Don't wait, it's easier to do a little for decades than wait until it's almost too late.
I didn't realize this until a couple of years ago (in my 40s) but boy did it alter my perspective on life. And I've heard what you're saying here from a couple other people in their 60s too. When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
But as you age your biology will force a choice upon you, one option is you spend progressively more time maintaining your health, in which case it drops off MUCH less than you'd expect. Or you can neglect that maintenance, in which case your quality of life WILL drop off in a big way due to health problems.
That's what it is, it's a choice, one you don't get to opt out of, but there is a path where you're in remarkably good shape for less effort than you would probably assume... for most people even just 2-3 hours a week of moderate exercise at the gym is probably a game changer.
I'm a little worried about the health of younger people today, because I read the statistics about obesity, blood pressure, ED and so on all going up for them. I'm also occasionally taking 20-30 minute walks with people in their 20s, who want to take a car, they're exhausted at the end of it, and they can't keep up with me. I get it, I was like that a couple years ago before I started hitting the gym, but really, at 25, you can't handle under a half hour of brisk walking? Oof, habits sure have changed.
> When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
I can't stress this enough. So many of my peers have complained about back pain and other physical ailments, as if it was an unavoidable part of turning 30.
No, it didn't just suddenly appear the moment you turned 30, it's the symptom of accumulated damage from a sedentary lifestyle.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get a lot of them into fitness, and they're doing much better now
I am around 30 and at least still I feel same as 20. Although I try to walk at least 30 min per day but the city I live in Asia is really shit for walking so it ends up being through shopping malls or some park.
Also I have been taking metformin (daily) and rapamycin (weekly) since like age 24 not sure they have helped but it's easy to buy here so I am giving it a try. I also use sunscreen if I go out during the midday which I rarely do in the tropics..
Reminds me of a guy I knew when I was growing up. At the time he was in his 80s. Walked miles every day, he was in great shape. Still died before 90, so it did not buy him notable longevity, but he was mentally sharp and physically capable up to very near the end. That sounds way better than slowly turning into a vegetable over the last 20 years of your life.
That's fair. In my family and wider circle of friends, most people live into their 90s, so I have a biased view that expects this to be pretty routine.
This is linked to the superb concept of Senescence [1].
In 'Exercised', the author goes to great lengths to show how, in some societies, people don't turn into 'vegetables' because they're active and engaged. They just… die eventually, without an awful decay into death.
My dad is in his mid-70s now, and still swims 3-5 miles a week in the ocean currents and waves. He’s so active and so healthy, I literally have a hard time imagining what he’ll be like when he’s feeble.
15 years ago, we went for a hike at elevation and he actually kicked my ass despite being around 35 years older than me. Crazy stuff. That alone was enough to kick my ass into gear. Now I do sprints and lifting, and I actually enjoy it now that my goal is just “do something for health” rather than “reach a half-ton total across my big-3” or something like that.
My grandma is 90 and still lives alone, walks around her neighborhood daily, and swims in a community pool outside her back door. She attributes it (I think rightfully) to a lot of walking and activity throughout her life.
Probably some good genes too (her brother is 100, her sister just passed at 104)
Aging is such an interesting topic that I find myself thinking about it almost every day but more of from the scientific point of view, like what is going wrong and why is the rate of aging so different in the animal kingdom. There are mammals that can live super long compared to ones in the same species and even same sizes, like some birds I remember 50+ while other do less than 10 years. Then there's something like naked molerat etc, the greenland whale hundreds of years lifespan..
Even between people, like Queen Elizabeth lived relatively long and her mother I think also, if you look at pictures throughout her life she always looked younger than her age IMO. And when she died it was very quick not like drawn out years that many have to endure, many long lived people actually pass very quickly..
If I wasn't in software dev, I think I would be in this field.
>but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging
Thank you for saying this. A depressingly large proportion of people are seemingly resigned to the fact that once you hit 40-50, you'll inevitably turn into an achy tub of lard and it's rapidly and irreversibly downhill from there.
Barring injuries that are truly irreversible (e.g. severe damage to joints/cartilage), with the correct diet and fitness regime, it's entirely possible to remain lean (≤20% bodyfat) and muscular (≥80th percentile in strength standards [0]) well into what most consider "old age." So many people have no idea just how poorly they eat or how inactive and physically weak they are, and consider the result to just be a normal part of life.
>I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.
Thanks for saying this too. So much cognitive decline is due to inactivity of the mind. My mom was whip smart until she retired in her mid-60s to a life of idle leisure, and her mental faculties noticeably deteriorated within a few months. Thankfully, she noticed this and deliberately re-engaged with more intense intellectual pursuits (including consulting part-time in the professional field that she loved), and the improvement was night-and-day.
I've noticed that the difference between 30 and 40 isn't the level of performance I have, but how quickly performance drops when I stop exercising. In my 30s, I could just not go to the gym for months, and I'd be fine. Now, if I don't go for a few weeks, stuff starts aching.
This is very true, which is why consistency is so key. I think the reason so many people perceive their health falling off in their 40s is that this is when the cumulative weight of increasing life responsibilities (kids, career advancement, caring for elder relatives, etc.) really hits hard, making it more and more difficult to find time/energy for regular exercise.
True. But you can also be smart about it, and it doesn't have to be something that takes your whole afternoon. 15 minutes of home exercise instead of media scrolling, and at the end of the week, it is 1:45, at the end of the month 7:45 that you've done something.
Or just a simple door frame exercise bar where you do a pushup or two now and then. These small things add up.
Or to go with friends to play football or my friend started to run, they made a Sunday morning running group. To end with what you've begun, regularity is the key.
I've managed to build a significant amount of muscle mass just from doing stretchy-band PT exercises to deal with shoulder pain. 10-15 minutes nearly every day makes a big difference. I've also started developing some serious leg muscles just from walking up and down stairs in my 2-story house (+basement) and around my mildly hilly neighborhood.
I drive as little as possible; I went on a 1200 mile road trip last weekend and I'm still paying for so much sitting.
My grandma is 90 and seems like she hasn't aged at all since I was a child. She is still fit and independent. She eats whatever she wants. She went to the doctor for a checkup and told him that she eats cake and pastries almost every day and asked if that was alright; the doctor looked at her test results and literally told her "Mrs... You can eat as much sugar as you want."
It's kind of funny that she is the longest living of all my grandparents because she was the least neurotic about her health to the point of negligence.
She would constantly bake rich chocolate cakes and thick hot drinking chocolate for herself and grandchildren and when she cooked pasta, she would put ketchup + mayonnaise on top. All the recipes she knows are quick/easy and supposedly unhealthy. She literally doesn't know how to make a salad. I've never seen her eat a salad.
This is a bit like the "my grandad smoked a pack a day and it never hurt him" anecdotes where, yes, they're remarkable because it killed all the others who tried it !
For smoking, it is also important to check what happened to people living under the same roof (or in the same multifamily complex even) due to their likely frequent inhalation of secondhand smoke.
I'm turning 60 later this month - biggest thing I've recently done on the wellbeing front is getting a dog - suddenly I'm walking 10km every day (on average) and talking to a lot more people - I had no idea how sociable dog walking is!
Could it be survivorship bias? You'll only ever inhabit your own body. You don't know what it's like to be someone else. Some people are built different.
In only a very few cases with specific degenerative diseases.
For the other 99.9% of us, the number of studies showing the difference made by exercise, healthy eating, not smoking or drinking alcohol are too numerous to mention.
Ignore the information about exercise at your peril. You can probably use motivated reasoning to convince yourself you are right to remain in your chair and your growing list of ailments have nothing to do with your lack of exercise, and you may even remain convinced until you die. That will not change the opportunity you miss to enjoy decades of better health and life.
To grossly oversimplify it, our bodies literally evolved over billions of years to exercise and rest, eat so we are alternately storing excess energy as fat and removing energy from fat stores, and only eating sugars, alcohols, and inhaling smoke as extremely occasional events. I it stupid to assume switching the routine to sitting most of the time, only storing energy as fat and rarely if ever depleting those stores, and frequently consuming sugar alcohol and smoke would make no difference.
I could regale you with pages of personal experience (fmr intl-class athlete, trained and sedentary for periods of life and observed results) and data, but those are easy enough to find. All I can do is encourage you to change your POV, and start exercising well
You will find the 'built different' is how you build your own body —— weight lifting isn't called "body building" for nothing —— it (along with running and stretching) really does rebuild your body over the course of months.
I run 4 days a week (4km per day), fast for two days (72 hours total) do two gym strength workouts, one sauna session, and two Zumba classes. I also do cold showers daily. Floating once a week, facial ferment therapy once a week.
And still, I feel like hell today (and it is only Friday morning)
I used to run half a marathon every Thursday in a fasted (36 hours) state, but now I can't, I became weak and frail. Aging gets us all!
Yes and: Maintain your balance. Get tested (assessed). Do the exercises. (For anyone who hasn't heard.)
My mom and her bf were hard core. Swimming, biking, running, the works.
They served as one of the hosts for BBC's program Are You Fitter Than a Pensioner? [2010] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tyr5n My mom was 70 at the time. Spoiler: The seniors smoked the youths.
Alas, as with so many: falls -> injury -> idleness -> decline.
Some balance stuff can't be helped. Mom's bf got spells of vertigo; apparently the little balancing sensor bone inside the ear gets loose with age.
Your mom's boyfriend probably already knows this, but just in case: I once suffered from loose crystals in my inner ear (probably due to stress and burnout) and had such bad vertigo that I thought I was going to die. There are exercises that move the crystals back to where they belong, where they get absorbed and metabolized again. It's called Epley maneuver, and while it can be extremely uncomfortable and should preferably be done under supervision (some people throw up when doing it) it solves the issue quickly and pretty much permanently.
I've heard of people who lived months or years even before figuring this out.
To be realistic, lots of times a simulation would have to capture the feeling of having 6x to 7x the fairly mature adult experience compared to the same person at 30 years old.
And the accompanying multiple of confidence and proven ability to go with it.
Plus a much bigger multiple of both, compared to your younger self at under 30.
You really can do most of the same things after 60, and with maturity it's easy to accept how the big difference is that you wont be doing them as many additional decades into the future.
It's so interesting to see how much of a commodity charting/graphing has become. When we started building Deltagraph in late 1988, what we made become a kind of standard since we targeted Postscript and Illustrator output, and included almost every kind of chart we could find with ridiculous options for everything, so people used it world wide, especially if targeting print. In the mid-90's, it was sold by the publisher (we just did the dev), and it spent the next 25 years at various owners before dying during the pandemic, all still based on the original source code (C) I started. I can't imagine how bad the code looked by then...
And yet it's still not sufficiently commoditized and widespread. The majority of the working force is using proprietary solutions that are out of date - Tableau, JMP in HW engineering, SAS and Excel
I once worked a contract at a public University, and the first thing I noticed was their SSO implementation. You logged into a single page, and then it called the other applications with a GET putting the username and password in the clear in the URL. Facepalm.
I once worked at a company in the Healthcare space that acquired a small company for $10 million. When the deal closed and they showed us the Patient Portal, the first thing I noticed was no HTTPS. At all. Just plain HTTP everywhere.
>The model may output text only. Try asking for image outputs explicitly (e.g. "generate an image", "provide images as you go along", "update the image").
>The model may stop generating partway through. Try again or try a different prompt.
I only make art designed to be printed on 10-12 color large format inkjet printers. Making plotter art is not inherently better or worse that printing, it's just a different type of art. I love what people do with plotters, but I just prefer doing printed versions, since what I make is often not possible with a plotter, as I deal in pixels (up to 200+ megapixels), and plotters deal in vectors. It's like Photoshop vs Illustrator, the don't compete as much as specialize in different things. https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
Yup! Both epson and canon have some great printers for high quality printing at home. First Man Photography on YouTube has videos on the topic that I enjoyed.
The surprise for me was that paper quality makes much of the difference.
Agreed 100%. It all comes down to the artists intentions, and plotters have many limitations. My hope for this article was to expose people to other options.
I had a shirt from a piece made at Printful, but it's way too small (even at XXXL) for a normal person. It is cool to see though. I wish I could find a tailor who actually makes dress shirts, and have the fabic made at Spoonflower.
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