Like I remember a good friend picking me up from my childhood home, yet I didn’t even know that person until I’d long moved out (many years) from that place.

I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.

I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.

It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.

I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507465

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I wonder if what we call discipline (and the resulting skill that we call talent) is really just insanely strong and aligned interest.

Though having said that, from the studies I’ve come across it seems like LLMs tend to generate more verbose code but perform better over the long-term when the code is maintained and not allowed to sprawl all over the place.

I’m mainly using AI for tools development and in that context I often wonder if I’ve just developed a career-long habit of over-abstracting. Like, the tools work without all the fuss I might have put in at the beginning and you just iterate and evolve as you go.

For anyone that hasn’t seen it but is interested in the topic, this series is HIGHLY worth a watch:

“NO CGI” is really just INVISIBLE CGI - 1 https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo

Recently replaced the internal USB boot drive with a small NVMe USB enclosure; using a 90-degree USB connector and using a dremel to sand away an opening for the cable to come out so I could mount the enclosure externally.

Like I’m already giving up two full drives for redundancy (which saved my ass - I recently had two drives fail on me in quick succession — both SSDs from what looks like an identical batch) but then the advice is kinda saying I need to keep at least another drive worth of space free for the pool to perform well and not crap itself. That hurts with current prices for sure.

Cloud models still feel ‘magic’, like you send a request off and get something back, like it’s something ‘special’. I used to joke that ChatGPT might be some kind of mechanical turk underneath.

Watching a model run local on your own machine hits different — you realise that yes, it IS just a computer program. Which for me actually makes me appreciate the leap we’ve made MORE, not less. From an information-theoretic point of view, LLMs really are something special.

The fact that they are just programs, that I’ve now experienced first-hand that they’re just programs, makes all those questions around consciousness and intelligence much more interesting.

Isn’t there a saying about there being no stupid questions, only stupid answers or something?

My internal model is/was “if the scan wasn’t set up / can’t detect the thing, why would the statement be present at all?”.

That implicit assumption is really subtle.