mkovach

> The only minor problems I've had is Gemini went through a phase where it was using semi-colons improperly in if statements, which is something everybody messes up with Pascal, so forgivable, I'm sure if I was using an agent rather than the web interface it would have figured it out from compiler errors right away.

Thank heavens, I wasn't the only person who's seen that. I thought I was the one hallucinating! The Gemini agent did that for a bit, too.

Generally, for Free Pascal and Lazarus, I have had my best luck scaffolding the ideas I want, then letting the agent move forward with them. But yes, the main frontier models are getting pretty good at Pascal. I'm planning to try DeepSeek and a lot of open models soon, but I think they'll return good results too.

Ahh, the ideas Perl let me inflict on the web before 2000.

Most of them were terrible. Many were insecure. Nearly all were written in total obfuscation, because who wrote Perl so other people could read it?

It was terrible.

It was glorious.

Drew Curtis figured this out in 2007 and even wrote a book about it.

J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer.

Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.

A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.

And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.

I spent six months programming on VOS after a gig on a VAX. Yes, I'll be outside telling the kids to get off my lawn as soon as I find my reading glasses and have a nap.

VOS was intuitive and did what I needed. Nothing flashy. Just useful. I miss that sometimes. Give me a tool that works; if it also happens to be great, lovely.

I didn't work much with the Stratus hardware, but reading about it was fascinating. I wish I remembered more of it.

I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs.

Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.

Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.

But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.

One can build a really close approximation with 86box; in fact, you can build an original 5150.

I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend.

My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.

We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.

Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.

I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.

Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.

I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.

That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.

Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good.

It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.

Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.

Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.

The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.

There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.

I agree. Camus' work was a larger project. One he sadly never finished.

His works (essays, short stories, plays, etc.) build on one another, gradually unfolding an argument: first confronting the absurd, then asking how one should respond to it, and later exploring what it means to live and act in spite of it.