nathell

For a glimpse into public toilets in Japan, do yourself a favour and watch ‘Perfect Days’.

> We have made something simple unnecessarily complicated.

Oh, but Markdown isn’t simple. Easy it is, certainly, but simple it isn’t because of one feature: being able to embed HTML. So the semantics of Markdown subsumes the semantics of HTML, which has a _huge_ spec.

What one’d like in many cases would be a Markdown-without-HTML-embedding. But that’s no longer Markdown.

How Perl was created:

‘Larry, throw the cat at the keyboard!’

MEEEOW!

‘What did it type?’

‘&}Ak'>v=4%Qe}9;’

‘OK, so let’s make this a syntax for hello world.’

Doesn’t feel LLM-y to me. If it is LLM-generated, the LLM must have been explicitly instructed to ignore sentence capitalization and invent a persona (‘i chose...’).

I love this. This is a fun hack, but the article also hearkens back to pre-LLM days when people were still interested in _code_.

Dunno about the original C64 (which is what this attempts to recreate), but the C64C used ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Book according to https://github.com/FeralChild64/MechBoard64-keycaps

And it has to weigh in under 1 MB and have sub-second compilation times.

In Heroes of Might & Magic 3, “several” means 5–9. 10–19 is “pack”, 20–49 is “lots”, 50–99 is “horde”, 100–249 is “throng”, 250–499 is “swarm”, 500–999 is “zounds…” and 1000+ is “legion”.

I suggest this post be renamed “A legion of vulnerabilities has been discovered…”

Reminds me of a C64C that, as of 2016, was used in production in a car workshop in Poland:

https://www.neoteo.com/en/a-commodore-64-stands-the-test-of-...

Ah, yeah, POKE 1,0 might plausibly have caused a hang. Sorry!

POKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).

I got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly.

To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.

Happy birthday, C64!

But this way, you can handle door spam by greylisting the bell and playing it only when it is pressed by a motivated enough person; say, 5 times or more. For an average of 1 cloud service per press.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/276/

No thanks, I’m Polish already.

No it’s not, it’s a testimony to how broken the Internet is.

There’s a perfectly valid and simple way to comply with the EU policies, including GDPR, and not impose annoying popups on your users: just don’t set cookies (if you need to have a login, you can ask for permissions at login time) and don’t collect personal data. That a lot of sites elect not to do that is an indication of how they treat the user, not of the brokenness of EU law.

I’ve found it helpful to ask LLMs specific questions about your knowledge gaps, or ask for concrete worked examples that illustrate the ideas you’re learning about.

In [0], I ask: „When applying Hidden Markov Models to POS tagging in NLP, what do the latent states and observations usually represent?” I then follow up with some specific questions and requests for walkthrough. You can’t see it from this conversations, but I have Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources open in separate pages, cross-reading, and I follow up with a handwritten toy implementation of a Viterbi-based POS tagger once my mental model crystallizes. This is very different from a 500-word summary of quantum physics, and I still had to put in effort (this is unescapable!), but I found the experience rewarding. Also note that this is relearning of a topic that was part of my uni curriculum but long forgotten.

In [1] and [2], I’m learning Spanish by reading García Lorca’s poems. Here again I’m going through the texts with a dictionary, and augmenting my learning with what a dictionary won’t tell me: given the usage of a word or phrase in this specific poem, is it something that could occur in everyday speech, or is it poetical?

[0]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a743bc7-d0dc-83eb-acc9-8f2faaffc4...

[1]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731be6-26bc-83eb-8d21-c965da5364...

[2]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731c01-5604-83eb-a5b8-cd1295d0ef...

I think the ideas worth pursuing still require substantial time and motivation, even with LLMs. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked sloppy artifact that nobody will ever use or study, for a net negative benefit to humanity.

I guess HABIT was the expected one here.

Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.

Nice! A couple weeks ago I made a handwritten REPL for the reMarkable 2 [0] – this could serve as a better base as it apparently sidesteps xochitl.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374552

Another recent Clojure dialect written in Go: [0], HN discussion: [1]

[0]: https://github.com/nooga/let-go

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076815