Before he went analogue, Stephenson wrote In The Beginning Was The Command Line, a wonderful discussion of the benefits of text-based editors and the late, lamented BeOS.
And that reminded me of this fantastic adventure in writing a graphics driver for BeOS.
]]>It seems, though, that, using the robots well is causing problems for the model providers: using them effectively is costing too much.
Last week Microsoft stopped accepting signups for personal plans, added usage limits, and basically telegraphed that their “premium request” model was on its way out. Not surprising when a good developer can dump a sophisticated prompt into the Copilot CLI, burn hundreds of thousands of tokens, and only use a handful of premium requests.
Update: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing, an article in which Microsoft note that it costs a lot more to run GitHub Copilot now so you’ll need to pay more but also the price hasn’t changed.
Anthropic also seemed to be thinking about changing their model, A/B testing a pricing page that excluded their most popular plan.
Meanwhile people are experimenting with ways to reduce token usage. Prompting like a caveman shows promise. Learning Chinese doesn’t seem to be worth it. The most 5D chess suggestion: hire junior developers to do the menial tasks. Honestly, it’s enough to get on board with Milton’s plan at this point.
Let’s talk about something that’s actually cool: two people broke the two hour mark for the marathon in London today. Two people! Sabastian Sawe finished in 1:59:30 ahead of Yomif Kejelcha who finished in 1:59:41. Two hours has only been broken in carefully created conditions so to see it smashed by two people in the same race is unexpected to say the least.
If you want to read more about the two-hour marathon mark and the science that goes into pushing human athletic endeavours, Alex Hutchinson’s Endure is a great source.
]]>Here’s a YouTube clip of the Super Jumbo in action
Here’s the boombox battle from Do The Right Thing that made the system famous.
Of course there’s a wiki devoted to boomboxes. Super Jumbo entry.
]]>Victor frames the talk as a presentation in 1973 discussing all the different approaches to computing that were being explored at the time and the kinds of tools and languages that came out of them, almost all abandoned or left as curiosities: concepts like spatial representations, constraint-based systems, concurrent programming models, and direct manipulation and software like Smalltalk, Sketchpad and Planner.
It’s interesting to consider all the paths that computing didn’t go down - possibly for good reasons. But what did we lose along the path? What are we re-discovering now?
]]>The Seneca is the product of one industrial designer’s obsession to build the perfect keyboard. One that looks, sounds, and feels exactly how Ryan Norbauer wants a keyboard to be.
In this Friday Video Adam Savage visits Norbauer and they dive deep into space bar stabilisers. And by deep, I mean way further into the rabbit hole that you’d think possible. It’s a wonderful interview.
And I really want one of those keyboards.
]]>This week’s one is about Weezer’s Blue Album.
[On] the band’s first album [Rivers] Cuomo wove tales of unravelling mental health, absent fathers and romances never attempted, told through the lens of personal minutiae and pop cultural obsession.
Bonus link from the comments: a Spotify playlist of every song mentioned in the video.
]]>If you’re remotely interested in how modern programming is developing, including serious consideration of the bad bits, then Simon is a must-read.
]]>Astronomers were the first to notice, as Starlink streaks made a mess for ground based telescopes to peer through. But the next issue is metal polution, as re-entering satellites melt and mostly vapourize in the upper atmosphere. 45,000 Starlink 2 satellites would weigh 90,000 tonnes, and with a 10 year life (never mind the 3-5 year current lifespan) they’d be dumping nearly ten thousand tonnes of metal into the upper stratosphere every year, which is probably a Bad Thing and is rightly generating alarm among environmentalists and climate researchers.
However.
Dumping 9000 tons of metal into the upper atmosphere is a linear extrapolation from today’s situation, and does not reflect what’s ultimately going to happen. This is a transient phase—the gold rush, the railroad race—and not the steady state we’re going to end up in once the period of rapid expansion comes to an end.
Current favourite podcast: I’ve been enjoying Dr Katie Mack & John Green’s podcast about the history of the universe. They are three episodes in and have finally got to a timescale beyond the first few seconds. It’t fantastic. Here’s the trailer:
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