I recently watched the super bowl half time show and found it interesting that the bushes were used for any choreography. As someone who was previously participated in marching band I was waiting in anticipation for there to be a full stage performance of grass doing some crazy structures on the football field similar to the Black Eyed Peas halftime show.

Stop generating, start thinking, localghost

LLMs are trained (without our explicit consent) on all our shitty code, and we’ve taught them that that’s what they should be outputting. They are doomed to repeat humans’ mistakes, then be trained on the shitty reconstituted mistakes made by other LLMs in what’s (brilliantly) been called human centipede epistemology. We don’t write good enough code as humans to deserve something that writes the same stuff faster.

Attention Media ≠ Social Networks, Susam Pal

First came the infamous infinite scroll. I remember feeling uneasy the first time a web page no longer had a bottom. Logically, I knew very well that everything a browser displays is a virtual construct. There is no physical page. It is just pixels pretending to be one. Still, my brain had learned to treat web pages as objects with a beginning and an end. The sudden disappearance of that end disturbed my sense of ease.

I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color, Danny Spencer

Self-modifying code is a super-effective way to make code fast. But most modern developers don’t do this anymore, and there are good reasons: It’s difficult, rarely portable, and it’s hard to do it right without introducing serious security vulnerabilities. Modern developers are spoiled by an abundance of processing power, super-scalar processors that take optimal paths, and modern JIT (Just-In-Time) runtimes that generate code on the fly. But we’re on the Game Boy, baybeee, so we don’t have those options.

Twenty Five Years of Computing, Susam Pal

About a week later, the same friend came to my dorm room. He sat down with a grave look on his face and asked, ‘How did you know to do that? How did it occur to you to jump to the reset vector?’ I must have said something like, ‘It just occurred to me. I remembered that detail from the lecture and wanted to try it out.’ He then said, ‘I want to be able to think like that. I come top of the class every semester, but I don’t think the way you do. I would never have thought of taking a small detail like that and testing it myself.’ I replied that I was just curious to see whether what we had learnt actually worked in practice. He responded, ‘And that’s exactly it. It would never occur to me to try something like that. I feel disappointed that I keep coming top of the class, yet I am not curious in the same way you are. I’ve decided I don’t want to top the class anymore. I just want to explore and experiment with what we learn, the way you do.’

That was all he said before getting up and heading back to his dorm room. I didn’t take it very seriously at the time. I couldn’t imagine why someone would willingly give up the accomplishment of coming first every year. But he kept his word. He never topped the class again. He still ranked highly, often within the top ten, but he kept his promise of never finishing first again. To this day, I feel a mix of embarrassment and pride whenever I recall that incident. With a single jump to the processor’s reset entry point, I had somehow inspired someone to step back from academic competition in order to have more fun with learning.