qsera

>How do they talk about themselves?

"You are a Large Language Model" in (system?) prompt would do the trick..

If I remember correctly QBasic even allowed configuring and controlling serial/parallel ports. Just imagine what a guy could do with that if he was bold enough to poke wires into a parallel port....

Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...

> you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.

If I remember correctly, there were even sample programs included in this documentation.

Only if you are a government contractor...

We inhabit the same spacetime, but we could be seeing different things.

In India, I think we still had BASIC taught in schools and private coaching centers in 95-98.

>you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books...

QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..

The author, as a kid, believed computers where like a genie that could manifest anything they ask for. It seems to be a case of wishful thinking of a kid.

But it seems that he is falling for the LLM hype the same way. We all have the kid version of ourselves hiding somewhere within our grown versions, it seems...

>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..

Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?

For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...

In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...

May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..

> occasionally we brainstorm.

Seriously, how do you brainstorm with an entity that would 180 if pushed a bit..How can you take anything it say at face value?

> I can just always have the ideal architecture.

Now you have what you think is the ideal architecture. Since you didn't implement it, you didn't discover it was not the ideal one mid way into the implementation.

May be it is too complicated, but you wouldn't know, because LLM is doing the implementation. If you did implement it yourself, you might have spotted a critical point that might simplify the whole thing...

Get a load of this. You can have only consciousness and still have a sensation of a full universe.

Tell me again how Consciousness is an illusion..

>Yours or mine?

Ours. Or every ones..We can easily accept that we inhabit the same spacetime. Why is it hard to imagine the same for consciousness?

> space maybe an illusion..

space is an illusion...The only thing that is absolute is consciousness, on top of which all illusions stand.

>Regarding your examples: PSET corresponds to `ctx.fillRect(x, y, 1, 1)` on a canvas, reading a pixel corresponds to `ctx.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1)`.

What is a `ctx` and why do I need that? These are all hacks. Graphics programming in bolted on HTML in the form of canvas. It is a horrible platform for doing fun graphics programming when compared to qbasic.

>For delays, you define "sleep" (one line) and write "await sleep(500)" inside a loop, just like with "SLEEP" in QBASIC.

Kindly provide the code for this sleep function and tell me how a beginner who is trying draw some graphics on screen is supposed to figure that.