First pane has a supervisor, a plumber, and a robot, with the supervisor pointing to the robot.

Next pane is the robot watching the plumber work.

Next pane is the plumber watching the robot work.

Final pane is the robot with a bloody wrench standing over the dead plumber.

When it comes to back office business programming, there’s just a lot of code tasked with copying a litany of bits of data from one structure to another.

Whether it’s copying a web form into a database, or converting Their JSON to Your JSON, it’s a lot of detail that does not abstract well. It’s all shapes and sizes and formats, and it almost always has to be enumerated in excruciating detail and, typically, twice.

Sure, there’s logic and whatnot involved, but it, too, is specific to some subdomain of the larger system and it, too, does not abstract well. Not in the large context of the overall system.

Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, at 10,000 feet look almost identical. They’re almost literally the same thing with the sign flipped. But in practice, they don’t share code well. You end up with two similar systems, but not similar enough where sharing is actually worthwhile.

At best they can leverage a common API to the GL.

Turns out a lot of languages can manifest a decent level of abstraction. But even then, folks push back.

Consider the love/hate relationship with ORMs. Or the annotation driven markup in Java programs and the underlying “magic” that they enable. Like scribing mystic runes onto things.

Those are both very powerful, yet folks experience that and toss their hands in the air and throw out the baby with the bath water and jump into something “magic free” like Go.

Just because you can use something like CL to “make your own magic”, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Doesn’t mean it scales. Doesn’t mean it communicates well to others. AI or no.

It’s not the AIs world yet. We already know that if the AIs want a better language suited to AI efficiency, they’ll come up with their own. I’ve already seen crass examples of “code only an AI could love”. Completely impenetrable, at least to me. May as well have represented it as a color image and collection of RGB values. Opaque to me, but the AI could “read” it.

There is much more to programming and systems than token density, and AI is still getting cheaper by the day, so less reason to even pre-optimize for it anyway.

Each time I've tried to get some Web UI going with the AIs, they all look terrible. They may work, but, they're terrible. I know they're terrible. I can't really express why they're terrible, just that I don't like them. So, I cannot really explain to the AI why they're bad so they can fix it.

Its just a blindness of mine that I've had forever.

There was one "gallows humor" story of an obviously fatal bicycle accident. As paramedics, they could not declare the victim dead. They had to have authorization from the hospital.

The hospital insisted they send the EKG data back.

They said "Ok", and rather than going through the effort of connecting up the victim, they just stuck the leads to the truck and said "here it comes".

Then they got the OK to declare there at the scene.

The work seemed to suit him, he enjoyed it. I'd hang out with him at his base of operations (he was a private paramedic in LA County).

Then, one day, he quit.

He quit, and didn't renew his certification.

And he won't talk about it, and, boy, yea, did he have some stories.

But something got to him.

However, it feels like one to the User. Having to get constantly prompted to grant permissions they don't even necessarily understand to random programs.

There's been chatter about how system like iOS are not "document based", they're app based. Many apps do not present their data as "files", users don't know where their data resides, just that the app knows and that's their window.

I don't know where an application on MacOS can "save their files" if they don't have "Full Disk Access". I don't know if they get some directory "for free" that they can use much like iOS does.

Then, of course, there's the Apple Document model where data auto saves to Somewhere. You have versioned files you can work with. But until you actually "save" the file to "the disk", its living in some unannounced space. My TextEdit app has dozens of "Untitled-XX" files that are...somewhere.

And its great! There's a peace of just having "stacks of stuff" that you can leave "unmanaged". "Where would you like to save your work?" "Oh, great, cognitive load just exploded as need to think about the minutia of data organization, when, mostly I just "don't want to lose this".

But, the constant prompting is exhausting, to me. Again, I have to "think about it". I need to question everything, when I really just want to Get Stuff Done.

And, in time, we become blind to these prompts. "ok, Ok, OK!! GO ALREADY! JUST WORK!!".

Exhausting.

They clearly feel it’s cheaper/faster to get this working than to try and create a new mach 3+ aircraft.

With 25 years of new tech maybe they can push it even faster.

I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.

But there was an article or map or something talking about the placement of towns, I think, back east (or the south, or Virginia).

Simply, the towns were placed within a days travel of each other. And the communities they served were, effectively, about a 1/3rd days travel in radius. That's how far folks would go to get into town, and being a day apart facilitated long range travel instead of camping in the wilderness.

The towns were basically small towns designed to serve those local communities. Cities formed on the intersections of such roads to support more trade and traffic.

I don't recall if it talked about towns along rivers where transit might be faster.

But it was an interesting article with a map of actual towns.

Consider:

  (defun split-line (line)
    (remove-if #'(lambda (word) (string= word ""))
               (split-sequence:split-sequence #\Space line)))

  .defun split-line .line,
    .remove-if #'.lambda .word, .string= word "",,
               .split-sequence:split-sequence #\Space line,,,

With experience, the parens vanish. The parens being large and common take control of the conversation more than they should.

  10 PRINT "FRED IS A GEEK"
  20 GOTO 10

Undaunted, Fred took a look around, found the power button, and turned the machine off. Yes, that power button next to the "DO NOT TURN OFF" sign.

As the monitor and LEDs faded to black, the giggling stopped and my friend and I stood aghast at Fred's treachery.

Fred left, and we were tasked with restarting the machine, getting to the monitor, keying in the hex code of the cassette loader, and reloading BASIC from cassette.

Got it to work on our second try!

But my favorite early 3D game was Total Annihilation. Which is not a 3D game. It's a 2D game with a 3D rendering engine. Classic RTS isometric POV, but all of the benefits of a 3D engine (arbitrary model rotations, movement dynamics, rockets flying through the air, shrapnel...oh, the shrapnel).

Similarly with Warcraft III, another RTS done with a 3D engine. Its gift was the interstitial cinematics done with the engine for story telling purposes.

In both these cases, 3D added immensely to an ostensibly 2D experience. I also imagine once they got things sorted out, it made things much easier for the level and scenario designers to be able to just put Objects into their flat-with-some-terrain 3D worlds.

I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.

A primary bit of tech that came out of the purchase was the core DB engine. They reworked this into what became the Jet engine. The Jet engine was the core of Access.

Access was in many ways a next generation of FoxPro. They both went after the same niche of desktop and file server DB applications. But FoxPro carried the legacy of its dBase roots, FoxBase was basically “better dBase”, but had to appeal to and be familiar to dBase developers.

Access had no heritage like that to hold it back, and was a better citizen in the VB/Office/OLE/COM world. It was also more SQL first even though it kept things like DBF files as first class citizens.

It's not as portable as Swing, as it has some platform specific binary components to it. But it works fine on mainstream platforms. For me Swing portability is not worth giving up the FX model.

Just be aware that if you happen to bundle in the Web view component, you're basically adding WebKit to your distribution. I did this with a small project because I wanted to have a "help" screen with Markdown -> HTML. Easy, but "expensive". It simply adds a big chunk (10-20Mb) to your distribution.

(Now I have a very crude Markdown renderer for this task, which is a 100 lines code, and I'm working on a better one -- but I have yet to pull the trigger on the latest FX with its new Rich Text component, which could change everything.)

One hot tip with cross platform FX, however. Embed your fonts. The font suite is not common across the distributions, and the CSS does not honor the font fall back (i.e. if not XXX font, then YYY font), so if the runtime doesn't have your specific font, it collapses to the System font. So, embedding the fonts you use helps a lot with cross platform stability. Plenty of free fonts, I have not had a real problem with this. But it can be one of those O.o moments when you test on other platforms and encounter it the first time.

Can honestly say that was one of the best trades I’ve ever done. I didn’t buy another computer for 3 more years.

The process they used was simple, but brutal.

How do you all GIFT music these days?

My brother recently sent me a new album for my birthday. Very kind. But, it's on vinyl. And I don't have a player.

But it just reinforces thoughts I had before. I had wanted to gift him some music too, but, how? He has a phone. He has a computer. He's not particularly tech savvy. I know I can't ship him a CD, he has nothing that can rip it.

I know you buy an album on Amazon, they let you download the MP3s right away. But, how do I even gift that? Can you even download MP3 to an iPhone? From someplace not Apple? I honestly have no idea.

And it just highlights, to me, the entire (seemingly) difficulty of gifting music today.

Me, I still buy CDs and rip them.

Folks talking about how 32G is not enough for local use, but then there's been work like this to empower it.

My hope is that the new 32G M6 will be "useful" locally, possibly because of work like this.