It was probably Montesquieu who coined the proto-hacker motto “the best is the mortal enemy of the good”. He was talking about compromises in drafting national constitutions for nascent democracies, of course, but I’ll admit that I do hear his voice when I’m in get-it-done mode and start cutting corners on a project. A working […]
This week, the hackerverse was full of “vibe coding”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. […]
Earlier this year, I bought one of those K40-style laser machines that was listed at a ridiculously low price, and it arrived broken. Well, let me qualify that: the laser tube and the power supply work perfectly, but that’s about the best you can say about it. On first power-up, it made a horrible noise, […]
Is a bicycle like a motorcycle? Of course, the answer is it is and it isn’t. Saying something is “like” something else presupposes a lot of hidden assumptions. In the category “things with two wheels,” we have a winner. In the category “things that require gasoline,” not so much. We’ve noticed before that news stories […]
We ran a story about a wall-mounted plotter bot this week, Mural. It’s a simple, but very well implemented, take on a theme that we’ve seen over and over again in various forms. Two lines, or in this case timing belts, hang the bot on a wall, and two motors drive it around. Maybe a […]
to everything that plagues this world beset by the Unspeakable Horror that is the C programming language. As the latest entry to pledge its fealty at the altar of the Church of the Holy Memory Safety, TrapC promises to fix C, while also lambasting Rust for allowing that terrible unsafe keyword. Of course, since this […]
In our wider community we are all familiar with the idea of open source software. Many of us run it as our everyday tools, a lot of us release our work under an open source licence, and we have a pretty good idea of the merits of one such document over another. A piece of […]
We get it. We also watched Star Trek and thought how cool it would be to talk to our computer. From Kirk setting a self-destruct sequence, to Scotty talking into a mouse, or Picard ordering Earl Grey, we intuitively know that talking to a computer is better than typing, right? Well, computers talking back and […]
Any statement regarding the potential benefits and/or hazards of AI tends to be automatically very divisive and controversial as the world tries to figure out what the technology means to them, and how to make the most money off it in the process. Either meaning Artificial Inference or Artificial Intelligence depending on who you ask, […]