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The reason the payoff isn't visible yet is because outside of software engineering, it isn't systematized nor integrated into workflows. But believe me, people are using it and increasing their free time. I was at an HOA meeting in Reno. The board president works for a major US cable provider doing "contract approvals and negotiations", whatever that means. This last year, he said he's cut his 8 hour days down to a few hours using Claude (pretty sure he is just using the web chat interface). Employees of the property management firm are using it too -- our representative at the meeting said it had been a lifesaver for her in recent months. We haven't seen the full benefit from their end but they are also in a state of constant turmoil as a company so it's a wash. A tennis partner of mine who is the regional (entire west coast) manager for an automotive company's extended warranty program has also been able to use it to cut down time-consuming documentation and the firm encourages it; but again, no direct integration into her workflow, she is just winging it with ChatGPT online.

I still have my Passmo card from my very first visit to Japan in 2008. I went back in 2018 and it still worked and had a balance. I used it as recently as 2025. Pretty cool!

This doesn’t seem to work when the harness feeds images and asks the agent to do things in the real world. It fails to devise ways to keep track of its progress and fails to utilize its tools effectively.

The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.

I get it -- I don't have time for anything but short retro games these days!

Yup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.

Cool articles :) I got into emulation in the late 90s and eventually wrote both an NES and Genesis emulator. I always appreciated how cleanly organized Sega’s systems were, at least superficially considering the memory and register layouts.

You should take a look at Sega’s arcade systems, which were very cool, especially the Model 1, 2, and 3. Supermodel, an open source Model 3 emulator I co-wrote, and MAME have good emulation of Model 3 and 2, respectively, these days. Absolutely fascinating rendering architecture. It was early modern 3D when things were still weird and custom, before the industry standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D.

I think they should chuck the STL and start over. I left C++ for a while and spent a lot of time in C# and Swift. Going back to C++ is painful because the interfaces feel very non-uniform and cumbersome.

I also think that named parameters would go a long way toward improving the language.

Lastly, explore some way to make possible a breaking change with "old C++".

In practice SDL is used to abstract away the system-dependent parts required to set up OpenGL.

Slowly then suddenly. Movements in the frontline are gradual until one side is exhausted and collapses. With Trump’s ludicrous “peace” plan, Ukraine would be barred access to US weapons, the size of its military restricted, and Russia would simply rearm and try again.

And despite how things have fared in Ukraine thus far, the Baltics are a much softer target. If Ukraine does end up falling to the Russians, it’ll be used as a springboard by the Russians, potentially supported by Ukrainians disillusioned with the West’s betrayal. It would certainly not be the first time that Russia has annexed Ukraine and mobilized its people against Russia’s foes.

The idea that the size of Ukraine and the distance to Russia’s border through Ukraine diminishes the Russian threat. For two reasons:

1. Russia aims to either capture Ukraine outright or exert influence over it, which puts eastern EU states at grave risk. Note that Belarus, a Russian vassal, already borders the EU and was used by the Russians to launch the Ukraine invasion.

2. Russia already borders — and menaces - the EU in the Baltics.

Given the pained debate here by Western Europeans over the semantics of “Europe” and Ukraine’s relationship therewith, it’s very unlikely NATO would act and that’s precisely what the Russians would bet on.

What an absurd argument. If Ukraine falls, the Russians will marshal Ukrainian manpower and resources against the EU.

Ukrainians voted to align themselves more closely with the EU and are now effectively a march. Ukraine is very much within the sphere of EU concern.

Unix is a legacy mess. The sooner we rid ourselves of this scourge, the better.

Posted from a productive Windows workstation.