flopsamjetsam
Joined 4 years ago
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208
Submissions
149
Member since
Jan 17
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 days ago
Comment · 6 days ago
I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.
Comment · 12 days ago
https://codeberg.org/TechPaula/LT6502b
Specs:
* 65C02 running at 10MHz
* 46KByte of user RAM
* EhBASIC 22p2 with custom extensions
* eWOZMON
* Compact Flash for storage
* Built in battery (7400mAh currently)
* USB-PD Rechargable
* 10.1" Screen with 1024x600 and 256 colours
* WiFi Modem (based on this - https://github.com/dhansel/WifiModem)
* nanoSwinSID for sound (as well as beeps)
Comment · 23 days ago
Brings back to mind the old IBM 3270 terminal status line (everything old is new again :). Actually think this is quite a good idea.
Comment · 28 days ago
I'm reading this now, and can confirm it's very entertaining, and gave me more perspective on his life and achievements (coming from a CS background).
Comment · 29 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I sometimes use the AI prompt to do a similar thing: I'm struggling with a problem, or putting my ideas down in a coherent manner, so I write a prompt, and in doing so the idea crystallises for me. I've tried doing this just in a text editor, but there's something about having the next action be "submit this to X" that clicks my brain into higher gear.
I suppose it's very similar to drafting a letter or an email to someone.
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
My pet project in those days was writing a C++ X-Windows gui toolkit, and I took a lot of inspiration from Tk. Both design, and "how do I do this" from the source code were invaluable.
Didn't Cisco use Tcl in one of their IOSes? Found it: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/ios_tcl/co...
Comment · 1 month ago
Do you find it a big improvement over the tools you used previously?
Comment · 1 month ago
For CS students I agree. For non-CS students, who need programming as a way to use computers as a tool, I think they do need a solid understanding of what a computer does and what it's limitations are (and what it's capable of), but for their day jobs (once they graduate), they will most likely be getting AI to do everything for them. As long as they can reason about what's happening, to understand the results and to improve them, this seems likely to be the path in the future.
Comment · 1 month ago
Some unis have: https://programsandcourses.anu.edu.au/2027/course/COMP1730
This is an introductory programming course, designed for non-CS students e.g. engineers and scientists.
> Learning outcomes
> 2. Explain key concepts in AI-assisted programming, including Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting, problem decomposition, and top-down design.
> 3. Apply the workflow of AI-assisted programming and prompt-engineering techniques to guide and improve code generated by AI assistants.
This course used to be non-AI (last year), and they rewrote recently to incorporate AI tools, as they realised the writing's on the wall for non-programmers.
It must be quite challenging to write curriculum when the underlying technology (AI) is changing so quickly.
Comment · 1 month ago
So glad to see Filemaker is still alive! I had thought it had gone in one of Apple's software culls years ago.
Comment · 1 month ago
Caveat: I am not a researcher (yet), I am moving from coding into science via a new degree, and along the way I am helping troubleshoot bioinformatics pipelines for scientists.
I see a lot of reliance on containers to make code always available, and I have the same misgivings as you do. It'll work a few years into the future, but what happens once packages aren't compatible with each other/the base container is upgraded/etc.
I've already seen this with older bioinformatics code, which is on old repositories that aren't running anymore, or are very unreliable (but weren't at the time that the code was written). And I'm talking about code that's "only" 15 years old; people will be going to these papers for implementation details long after that point.
Zenodo seems like a good step in the right direction. It should be available as long as CERN is going, shouldn't it? And by that stage it should be "too big to fail".
Comment · 1 month ago
> Every result is instantly reproducible. When you read a paper claiming that a new drug reduces symptoms by 30%, you click a link and watch the exact analysis run in your browser. The data processing, statistical tests, and visualizations execute in seconds using the same environment the authors used—preserved perfectly through reproducible containers.
At least some journals have this as a stipulation e.g. https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/r...
Particularly the "data availability" and "Availability and peer review of computer code and algorithm".
However, in my limited experience, of trying to reproduce certain scRNA-seq processing pipelines, in practice it's never available as just a Github link. I can understand that some/many researcher's code is not in good shape, so I think it'll be quite a stretch to have this available.
I do think it's laudable though, to try and make it available. It would certainly have been very useful for me in the past.
Later on, my friend's older brother had a Spectrum. All the local magazines had photos of the games, and it was incredible to play them and see them "for real". The rubber keyboard with pre-programmed BASIC keywords, later on a full-sized keyboard and some kind of expansion pack (with disk drives I think?). And his older brother showing me how crazy the memory layout for graphics was. Good times.