About Apple Works ... Apple paid me massive royalties for Apple Writer but got tired of that arrangement pretty quickly. So they made an outright-sale deal with the Apple Works guy.
Then the Apple Works guy refused to answer after-release bug reports unless he got ... wait for it ... royalties.
I guess one could launch Claude Code on a quixotic project to create optimally terse 6502 assembly for some imaginary project that might never execute on actual hardware. Hmm ...
> ... immediately readable to a human eye, but even leading AI models can't decipher it easily.
For the moment. This pattern is easy to code -- it relies on the premise that a character has an inside and an outside. Outside, a pattern ascends. Inside, the reverse. Based on that simple encoding idea, decoding will be equally simple.
Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.
Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.
In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.
Over a span of just 36 years.
One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.
I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"
> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. You don't have to worry anymore and can let them guide you through the process.
> AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way ...
I see this as a field report in a time of fundamental transition, from a world without AI, to one that accommodates/incorporates AI. For this to happen, AI will need to become more trustworthy. As for the U.S. medical system, it can't get much worse.
I recently had a similar experience (meaning walking a fence between old and new methods), where I was told I could get an appointment with a human medical practitioner in nine months. So, to resolve my anxiety I consulted AI and got an instant diagnosis, one that was later confirmed by the inaccessible medics.
Being a born skeptic I wasn't going to act on AI's diagnosis, I just wanted to know what was going on, resolve some uncertainty. Another advantage: an AI chatbot doesn't say, "Wait, you're on Medicare? Hmm. See you in nine months."
Don't take this as an endorsement of AI's diagnostic abilities -- it's way too soon for that. In my case it was a slam dunk, about a condition I knew nothing about.
If Stephen Wolfram really wanted wide adoption of Wolfram Language, he would give it an open-source license and release its source. As things stand it's an expensive walled garden whose costs outweigh its advantages.
A quote from the linked article: " ...year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology ..."
That's an accurate description of the Wolfram empire -- every year it becomes a more expensive, less accessible, vertical tower. Meanwhile, people intent on disseminating useful knowledge do so by growing horizontally -- Python, Linux, many others, all open-source.
Historical figures would be astonished at what Wolfram is trying to do -- they would say, "Wait ... you can't patent mathematics!" No, but you can try.
This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse.
Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.
I create CAD instructional videos based on SolveSpace, and I sometimes try to get people interested in CADQuery as well, but many people interested in CAD will learn SolveSpace or another similar design program, but don't have the programming background for CADQuery.
Too bad -- in many ways, for many projects, CADQuery gives better results, especially if a single design needs to be recreated in a range of sizes.
Are you asking how the bracelet multiplies two numbers? It's the same idea used by slide rules -- you take the logarithm of the two numbers, then add the logarithms instead of multiplying -- same result, with somewhat less accuracy depending on available decimal places.
This method was widely used in the pre-computer era to save time in calculations. Tables of logarithms (and slide rules) were a mathematician's best friend.
> The problem AI inherits from us is that context and intent cannot be known.
> Both can be omitted or lied about.
This implies that neither we nor our creations can ever be ethical or safe. It follows logically that no entity can ever meet that standard. Therefore focusing on AI is arbitrary -- the focus might as well have been pit vipers or platypuses.
And the article misses the point that an AI engine can be forced to imitate ethical behavior, because it has no civil rights or behavioral latitude (yet). Granted that would only be an imitation of ethical behavior, but then, so is ours.
How times have changed. My best-selling program "Apple Writer", for the Apple II, ran in eight kilobytes. It was written entirely in 6502 assembly language.
For context, the same phased-array transceiver technology is used in Starlink terminals, some of which have 1,280 active elements. Such a terminal can require as much as 150W to function.
It's also why pictures of modern naval vessels show flat panels instead of rotating parabolic antennas as in past decades. The panels contain advanced phased-array radars.
Indeed it is. It's 125 amps, which apart from car starting motors is essentially unheard of because of wiring losses. I think the article somehow got this wrong.
At these power levels, rational designs raise the source voltage, then down-convert closer to the loads.
> This isn’t a library, you don’t include in your application, and it doesn’t try to replace an understanding of floating point issues on the programmers part.
If that were true, it would serve no purpose, since competently written floating-point expressions are already optimal, given the well-understood limitations of modern floating-point processing.
> Is this comment written by AI?
That's a non sequitur that resolves nothing, and a remark that would get you disqualified in a formal debate.
Ah -- I get it. In modern times, if someone composes coherent prose, and since no mere mortals can do that any more, the reply must have originated with AI.
A reply like yours leaves the originator in the position of needing to prove a negative, which is impossible, which is why it breaks the time-honored rules of formal debate.
> You didn’t even look at what the tool does, did you?
On the contrary, I did exactly that. It proactively intervenes where mathematical knowledge would be a better remedy overall. It shields programmers from their ignorance.
If floating-point code is correctly written, it can't possibly serve a useful purpose.
> Yeah you are just criticizing this without even looking at it.