I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs.
Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.
Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.
But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.
Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
This thread prompted me to go and find out what my first computer was -- I have vague memories of it.
Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ).
I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it.
I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
Yep, it was a "pre-MSX" like a couple of other machines like the Spectravideo SV-328... My first computer was a Casio PB100 (with the 1.5KB extension, so much memory! :D ), then the Sony HB75 (an MSX).
My dad came home with a 2nd hand spectravideo sv-328 and it got me started as well. It had a book of basic programs that I could never really get working. A year or so later we got an Amiga 500 and I really learnt a lot about computers using that. I've been working a personal project that replaces the A500s 68k CPU with a FPGA.
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
> [...] I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend.
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good.
It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.
Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
I agree. Camus' work was a larger project. One he sadly never finished.
His works (essays, short stories, plays, etc.) build on one another, gradually unfolding an argument: first confronting the absurd, then asking how one should respond to it, and later exploring what it means to live and act in spite of it.
> Notice that Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy. How do you?
The gods controlled the ascent, but they forgot to regulate the walk back down. In those brief, unburdened minutes descending the slope, Sisyphus is completely outside their authority.
You can imagine him however you like, laughing at the absurdity of it, studying the mountain, or simply enjoying the breeze. It almost doesn't matter. The walk down belongs to him.
The gods imposed the sentence. Sisyphus decides what it means.
This is Camus' idea of the universe and how to rebel against it by owning and enjoying the small freedoms.
Personally, I believe how you see Sisyphus happy reflects how YOU would enjoy your small freedoms, and this shows how Camus often wanted people to do philosophy on their own.
Yeah, it's a question with a personal answer, not an absolute answer. My answer works for me, for now, and I enjoy learning what answers work for other people.
I wonder if Camus had his own answer to that question. Could Camus imagine Sisyphus happy?
I don't think rebellion or ownership are enough. Rebellion is meaningless when you're alone with nothing to rebel against, and ownership is not inherently positive.
Gods not regulating the decent is an interesting take. Can one learn to smile while falling?
I've never seen an unhappy astronaut on the ISS :P
fwiw, I largely agree with mkovach's interpretation because of the direct analogy to modern work culture. But I do admire your view as well, I get a lot of satisfaction from deep cleaning and maintaining things, and there's a commensurate amount of pride watching the item transform back into something clean again.
Okay, here's who popped into my head right away: Rod Serling. I know, most people meet Homer on the page and think of him as a poet. But for the people who first heard him, he was just a storyteller. The poems, with their gods and monsters and outrageous adventures, really just let him talk about the stuff everyone knew—human screw-ups, disappointments, all of it.
Serling did the same thing. The Twilight Zone wasn't actually about space aliens or killer ventriloquist dummies. That stuff was just window dressing. What he really wanted to tackle was prejudice, fear, the way we all go along with the group, greed, war, power—real-world ugliness, just in disguise. The science fiction wasn't the point. It let him slip tough questions past people's defenses.
And the timing mattered. Think about when Serling wrote. America right after World War II, everyone anxious about the Cold War, McCarthy running witch hunts, the civil rights fight heating up, and nobody sure what the new nuclear world would bring. Each week, millions of people sat down for the same shared story. If Homer gave the Greeks their way of thinking about their world, Serling did something like that for Americans finding their way through the 20th century.
I'd throw out another name, too. Vin Scully. Sounds weird until you remember that Homer was an oral storyteller first, long before school teachers made him homework.
What did Scully do for sixty-plus years? Storytelling. A Dodgers game wasn't just a game if he was on the mic. He wove this endless tapestry of history, jokes, heartbreaks, odd facts about players you'd never heard of, and by the third out you cared about all of them. He gave baseball this sense of belonging, like it was its own little world, with memories that mattered. And what is more American than baseball?
Honestly, that's the most Homer-like thing. Before Homer was something you read, he was a voice everyone leaned in to hear together. Scully did that, too—families, whole neighborhoods, strangers all listening to the same man at the same time, sharing a story as it happened.
We don't do that much anymore—share the same story, at the same time. We're pros at binging our own shows in private. Scully deserves a spot in this conversation, not just because baseball is some American Iliad, but because he did what Homer did first: he spun day-to-day events into a story everyone remembered together.
> The way the LLMs write (Claude perhaps?) With short phrases separated by colons, commas, or full stops, is so poor and frustrating.
This is exactly why I keep a WRITING.md file alongside AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md.
Most people spend time telling the model what to build, but very little time telling it how to write. LLMs are surprisingly good at following explicit style guidance if you bother to give it to them.
Mine includes conventions like avoiding unnecessary colons, em dashes, and sentence fragments masquerading as emphasis. Basically, AI-isms and any grammatical errors I tend to make. It also points to writers whose technical prose I admire. Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike are great examples: clear, conversational, and readable without trying to sound important. I've always tried to do two things with documentation: 1) Make it readable and 2) Make people want to read it. A WRITING.md file helps with both points.
If you're generating documentation regularly, it's worth having your agents reference a WRITING.md file. The improvement in readability is often much larger than any gain you'll get from switching to the latest model, and it can keep your documentation consistent between model switches.
Willing to share your writing.md somewhere? pastebin or the like? I'd love to take a look at how different people are doing this.
I disagree with the person below - I don't think its a wrongheaded goal in and of itself to get better ai generated writing. I read ai output half of my day, I may as well try and make it better for my own sake. Passing that onto other people is an entirely unrelated field of problems, and passing it off as stuff you authored yourself is just plagarism.
Here is a sample I am using for testing on a personal project (I'm also working on using SpeechActs to do prompting, so yes, the repo is all AI-generated).
And in many cases, like you, I spend a good amount of time reading AI documentation. I'm not "stealing" anything, just having a model generate words in a specific way. I'm just being precious in how I want things, without having to do it myself.
I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.
I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.
My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you mean?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)
Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.
Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.
But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.
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