One of my favorite pastimes on my TRS-80 and TRS-80 color computer was to type in a simple basic program that would poke random values into random memory addresses and see how long it would take to crash or do something else.
Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.
Ha! I did that with the first machine I worked with. A TRS-80 Model III.
Not only was finding interesting memory locations fun, it generated interesting ideas for program features.
I found the address for the line length constant 64, used by the screen scrolling loop. I think the screen was 16 lines x 64 characters. By setting the scroll width to less than 64 I could protect the right side of the screen from scrolling.
So my first games had an area on the right for a non-scrolling title, author attribution, and game state info. It seemed to be a unique feature - I didn't come across any other programs that did that.
Some of my first programs were text adventures. Looking back, I should have put a short room description and usable object list on the right, updating in response to actions. That would have been a significant improvement over having to type "look" over and over, as was typical for those games.
Crazy times: 64x16x1 byte = a 1,024 bytes screen. Total memory was only 16k -> Today that is just a 64x64 rgba (4 x 8-bit channel) icon. But we always found a way to create our programs. I had a 4k RAM TRS-80 handheld and was able to create a tiny version of Zork on that, with a few starting and iconic rooms.
I've been a shortwave listener for over 30 years. I remember listening to Radio Israel when Saddam was sending scud missiles into Israel and the radio was directing people into shelters, real time.
One thing I'd like to see, especially if there is a concern for communication, is loosening the licensing restrictions that US shortwave stations cannot broadcast to the US. Back in the day when US station operators were interviewed they had to say that the were broadcasting to "Canada and Mexico", which was code for "to the US".
Whatever the waxing and waning that Smalltalk has had over the years, it's going to wane big time unless it can incorporate AI coding into their environments. Coding without it is going to seem ancient, soon.
I'm 63, retired in 2017 when I was 55. I now work on projects that interest me in languages that interest me. As a senior senior I'm excited by AI in my editor, it's automating the boring parts and I mainly just get to think of solutions.
I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.
As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.
Are all the CUDA tutorials geared towards AI or are there some, for example, like regular scientific computing? Airflow over wings and things that you used to see for high-performance computing would be fun to try.
The conventional wisdom around here is that Lisp (and Smalltalk) are looked upon so fondly because they were so far ahead of what else we had back then, both in terms of the language and development environments, but other languages have caught up over the years.
Do you think there is a modern non-Lisp language and environment that gives you something close to the productivity you had with Common Lisp back then?
Are there any implementations, of either Prolog or other declarative languages, that try to parallelize parts of their search, then have multiple cores or even a GPU take the problem to speed up solutions?
Here's the prompt I ended up with after several iterations of Claude trying to spit out Objective-C 2.0 code:
"This project must generate code that works with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, Xcode 2.5, and Objective-C 1.x. The Objective-C code generated MUST NOT have ARC, blocks, @property, @optional, @try, @synchronize, NSInteger, auto-layout, or modern features, NSCharacterSet doesn't have newlineCharacterSet. I know it's an old, obsolete version but I must use it.
Generate clean code with comments and debug logging to NSLog."
> Any reason Xcode 2 was chosen? Wouldn't have Xcode 3.2.6 on Snow Leopard but targeting OS X 10.4 and including ppc as an architecture also worked?
I forget exactly why I used Xcode 2.5, but I wanted to do it on Tiger since that OS was the one around the time Xbins started. It probably would've been a bit nicer working in Snow Leopard, but I just chose Tiger.
I asked Claude "As a developer writing for mac os x 10.4 tiger on Xcode 2, write me a hello world mac app with a button that outputs the string "hello world" to the console" and it seemed to produce correct results in Objective-C.
Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.
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