systemBuilder

Strangely, estrogen bathes the male brain in the womb to remove connections and make it masculine. To think of it as "the female hormone" is to misunderstand physiology.

She changed the ending of Star Wars IV : A New Hope.

She decided that Han Solo should return to save Luke at the last minute when Darth Vader was closing in for the kill. This absolutely MADE THE MOVIE end wonderfully, and made Harrison Ford return for two more movies, enabling the series to continue! Without her, George Lucas would have been another failed scifi director ...

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Google now wants $30,000 a month for customsearch (minimum charge), up from 1c per search or thereabouts in January 2026...

This article is about FAFO for MAGA loyalists in the USA. Well, MAGA has FA'd with US-European relations. Now they get to FO where it takes us (i.e. over the waterfall, isolating the USA from everything good in the world.)

$3 a day, $100/mo to run your own github actions (which is a programming language based atop json ... sheesh). Ugh!!

Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer Science is the parent field of mathematics.

Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms.

Computer Science is all other algorithms!

OMG you lived my dream. In 1976 I was 14 years old and started programming for the first time on the PLATO SYSTEM (university of illinois), the first computer with plasma screens, 1000 terminals, SOCIAL NETWORKS, MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR (it was called airfight was the name back then), the FIRST DUNGEON GAME (pedit5 / dnd). As I mowed lawns I dreamed of buying an HP-25 or SR-52 calculator or maybe an IMSAI 8080 computer of my own so badly! I eventually taught PLATO how to simulate a pocket football game, and wrote BASIC programs using a toy interpreter but they didn't have a way to store programs when your session was finished! :-(

In high school (late 1970s) I inherited (from my deceased father), a white book with red/yellow titling as "The Basic Programming Language" (the lettering on the front appeared to be in IBM check-writing font). In the appendix were about 10 basic programs including one in particular that would produce a meaningless technical report of arbitray length! I read the book, learned basic, and typed in a few of the programs (I had access to the UIUC CSL Dec-20 system). What a great time to be alive!

I am aware that the first STAR TREK game was written in Basic, using 10x10 quadrants and maybe a 10x10 quadrant universe. I eventually wrote an enhanced version of this called "Swords and Sorcery" but using a fantasy theme, not a space theme ...

I was so enamored with the BASIC programming language that a couple of years later I wrote a miniature interpreter on the PLATO system, at first trying to do a primitive BASIC language, but later I settled on doing a forth interpreter because RPN was so much easier to execute ...

Thank you, Dr. Kurtz. Your project helped make my youth a never ending joy of discovering new things! :-) :-)

Red States are the biggest leaches off the federal government. Out of the top-10 states that take in more subsidies than they pay out in taxes, only 2 are blue states, 8 are red states! The Red States never learn because the social welfare programs from the Democrats coddle them ...

It makes Linux more robust. Since Microsoft is the king of vulnerability, making Linux more robust is NOT in their best interest. I actually think Microsoft did a GOOD THING. This should create a mad scramble to tighten up security at all those lackadaisical distros!

The difficulty in learning a language is proportional to the SQUARE of the number of BNF rules! Let that sink in. When last I looked, C had 120 rules and C++ had 250. C++ was already out of control and has a bunch of really stupid features that nobody with any intelligence uses for anything other than showing off (and let me tell you - there are A LOT of showoffs at Google!) Anyway, that's why C++ is 4x harder to learn than C ... I call it ... "Don's Law".

When I was in high school I learned about BNF and so i wrote a program that let you type in BNF rules and then it would run a recognizer on an arbitrary string to decide if the string met the BNF rules. I don't know if I could write that again, but it was a definite eye-opener and I learned a ton from that project ...

I had been programming profesionally for 3 years (since age 15) when I took "SICP" at MIT in 1980 (we used LISP; Scheme would come a few years later). The course is designed to appeal to the ego of the professors who teach it, and it is designed to mold MIT students into AI researchers which is the whole point of the MIT curriculum - -

1. They taught a bunch of extremely advanced concepts like infinite lists of prime numbers where the 'CAR' and 'CDR' functions could be used to iterate down the list, which calculates the next prime number on-demand.

2. At the end of the course, they made the horrific mistake of encouraging students how to write their programs in LISP and then embed the LISP code into other languages, such as Algol, which produces the most extreme spaghetti code in the history of mankind!

The problem with SICP is that it teaches many advanced language concepts but the students are unprepared to absorb them and haven't ever struggled with the types of problems these advanced concepts are meant to solve! It's like showing a peasant farmer how to drive a modern combine before they've ever tried ploughing their field with a horse plough! I can pretty safely say, as a systems programmer, I have used exactly zero of the concepts taught in SICP back in 1980.

But most importantly, when professors teach SICP, they can feel good about themselves because they get the misguided impression that they are teaching something that grows their student's capabilities as a programmer and when talking to other professors teaching introductory computer science, the SICP professsors can say, "look at this cool shit my students did - i bet your students wish they could write shit as cool as this!" - end of story.

Incidentally, I never went to class and got an "A" in the class. It was annoying to have to take this remedial brainwashing class after already taking 2 other CS classes (including introduction to programming and assembly language programming) at the University of Illinois.