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Category Archives: Technology

Don’t Create the Torment Nexus

Sunday, August 13, 2023

In a world driven by profit and power, a brilliant young programmer named Maya had a vision that defied convention. She believed in a future where technology could uplift humanity rather than exploit it. With a heart full of ideals, she embarked on a journey to create an artificial intelligence system that she named the […]

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The “Promise” of “Easier” Programming

Saturday, July 29, 2023

So yesterday, Thomas Fuchs said on Mastodon: The LLM thing and people believing it will replace people reminds me so much of the “visual programming” hype in the 80s/90s, when companies promised that everyone could write complex applications with a few clicks and drawing on the screen. Turns out, no, you can’t. I had to […]

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“Astroturfing” Is Fraud, Prosecute It

Friday, June 16, 2023

I read something tonight about how some telecom lobbies were sending automated “public comments” to regulators as if they were actual individuals represented by the government the regulatory agencies belonged to, and are starting to switch to LLM-generated text to try to evade detection. How is that not fraud? (Wire fraud if electronic, mail fraud […]

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Lisa Source Code: Clascal Evolution

Sunday, February 5, 2023

Here’s another interesting thing I’ve learned about Clascal and Object Pascal: It went through exactly the same evolution from combining object allocation & initialization to separating them that Objective-C did a decade later! In early 1983 Clascal, classes were expected to implement a New method as a function returning that type, taking zero or more […]

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Lisa Source Code: Understanding Clascal

Saturday, February 4, 2023

On January 19, Apple and the Computer History Museum released the source code to the Lisa Office System 7/7 version 3.1, including both the complete Office System application suite and the Lisa operating system. (The main components not released were the Workshop environment and its tooling, including the Edit application and the Pascal, COBOL, BASIC, […]

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Mastodon URIs, not URLs

Sunday, November 20, 2022

One of the annoying things about Mastodon is that it’s tough to share Mastodon links and have them open in your favorite app instead of in a web browser. This is due to the lack of a shared scheme or a shared server—which makes sense for a distributed/federated system, but doesn’t help its usability. One […]

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The Web Sucks Now

Saturday, August 6, 2022

Web pages should be blazing fast on *25 year old* machines, modulo a little lag from more serious crypto. Like, I should be able to build *1998 Mozilla* against a modern SSL stack on my Silicon Graphics O2, and browsing the web should be nearly as fast as it was using Netscape Navigator 4 on […]

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Lucky Dozen

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Today is my twelfth anniversary in Developer Tools at Apple! Still love it, too!

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Raspberry Pi vs SPARCstation 20: Fight!

Saturday, December 26, 2015

A couple weeks back, I tweeted the following: Turns out a Raspberry Pi now is about 6 times as fast as a SPARCstation 20 was 20 years ago. And a Pi 2 is more like 15 times as fast. I was a little low in my numbers, too — they’re more like 7 times and […]

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SBCL test failures on ARM

Saturday, August 15, 2015

For hacking/prototyping/fun purposes I have a few embedded systems laying around. For example, I have a couple of Raspberry Pi systems, one of the original Raspberry Pi model B boards and one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 model B boards. And on everything, I have the latest Steel Bank Common Lisp building. On my […]

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