i miss you.


we’re coming to visit UCSC soon.  it would be super nice to see you.


campus tour for Juno?


when are you coming?


yeah.  we’re touring UCSC, Mills, and SF State.  Juno wants bay area.


is Mills still a thing?  I thought it closed down


not sure.  probably 15th to 21st something something?


it merged.


it’s still a thing.


that’s Lisa’s pick.


february?


also Chloe lives 500 yds from the campus.


yes, feb.


we’ll be around.  it would be good to see you all.


yes.  i’ll let you know more when i know more.


we had an interesting customer this year. ￼


that’s pretty cool.


good album.


yeah.  i sorta listened to it on loop my whole year at CMU.


hey - heads-up - we’ve moved the trip to march.  Juno wants their friend to come with us.


is the friend cool?


alyssa’s family is visiting one of the weeks (10-17 maybe?).  otherwise we’re around.


the “friend” is the girl that Juno has had a crush on for years now.  Juno says it’s not like that anymore…. right.  anyway, she probably still can’t come because, i think, her parents don’t approve………


it’s probably the same week, i think all the schools have off.  i’ll check.


oh, no.  Juno’s break is 16-22.


Liked “oh, no.  Juno’s break is 16-22.”


it’s your birthday!
do i get to gift you with me presence next month?


i think so?  as of today, i think we’re def locked into mar16-mar21.


maybe.


ok - the rough plan is to drive down the coast to santa cruz on the 19th.  want us to swing-by on the way down?  get lunch maybe?


the 19th works for us.
we can meet you along the route.   half moon bay?


(i was assuming that when you said “drive down the coast”, you meant take highway 1.  but maybe you didn’t.)


i did!


and that sounds perfect


i just need to get approval from the fam


but i don’t know anything about half moon bay…. do you?  😊


i can’t ask Juno because they aren’t speaking to me at the moment.  i think that means “approval”, right?


￼apple intelligence wants me to pick a side.


the AIs are such chickens.


ok, well, i guess Juno’s not going to talk to me for a while…


do you want to meet in half moon bay?


yup.  that works for us.  we’re flexible, so we can adjust when/if your plans change.


ok - cool.  do you know a place in half moon bay to meet?  😊


there’s a little downtown strip with various restaurants.  I can do some research.


they turn over periodically, so not sure what is still there


hey - any chance we could do an earlier lunch?  a brunch perhaps?  or even possibly break fast?


we have a tour in santa cruz that we can’t miss.


check-out the surprise i found when i came home yesterday.￼


early is fine.  are you still thinking half moon bay?


it’s entirely up to you.  we’re driving down and just want to see you.  where ever you want.


perhaps the better question is where are you coming from and where are you going and what route do you want to take.  :)
we will meet you on that path.   i don’t want to send you out of your way.


ok.  but the problem is we don’t have a path yet.  🙂


one idea was to do the coast.


but it’s just an idea.


we didn’t rent a convertible…


we can wait until your plans gel before picking a spot.  if you do the coast, half moon bay is probably the best.   it’s just over an hour to if santa cruz (if you don’t stop to sight-see)


ok - cool - let’s do half moon bay then.  but you’ll have to pick the place.


ok - so we should leave half moon bay by noon.


wanna do a 10am brunch?


sounds good.  I started looking at places — I’ll send you a few options.
any dietary restrictions, etc?


a few options - I haven’t been to any of these, so no preference.  they’re all within a block or two of each other.

half moon bay coffee company -
https://www.hmbcoffeeco.com/

johnny’s -
https://www.johnnyshmb.com/

moonside bakery -
https://moonsidebakery.com/breakfast


jonny’s!


we have a choice!


yay!   we’ll see you there at 10.


￼Juno’s in a good mood!


yay!  it was really nice seeing you.  thanks for coming out.


Juno flipped out shortly thereafter and we didn’t really get to see santa cruz……..


teenagers are fun.


oh no.  i’m sorry to hear that.
we also enjoyed seeing all of you.


￼new “project” arrived today.  can you guess what it is?


styrofoam peanuts!  you’ve started a peanut collection?


the seller vacuum sealed a bag with the item and packing peanuts and then put it in a box with packing peanuts.  never seen that before, but it worked.


hmmm…. the rounded edges look a lot like a mac laptop… the vent on the top not at all.  it looks about the size of a record….


hard to tell from that angle, but it’s not flat.


would you like another hint?


yes please!


hmmm…. i’m really really wanting it to be an atari 8bit, but i’m pretty sure it’s not….


hmmm… is that a cartridge port?


chatGPT is convinced it’s a Solari di Udine.


chatgpt is a false prophet.  trust your instinct.


oh, i know.  that dude is smoking crack.  i keep sending him each picture, and each one convinces him he’s more right.


those look like board connectors…


those look like cartridge ports.


is it like a PET or something


ha ha ha.


well i can’t argue with that.


exactly.


would you like to see the reveal of my new split flap mechanism?


YES!!!!


￼you are smarter then chatgpt.


ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.


how could i not recognize that……


this thing is built like a tank.


yeah.  those cartridges are not going to break.


i actually never had an 800, so i didn’t recognize the memory cards or the second slot.


not working.   I just took it apart and i’m working on the power board — power supply is 9v AC and then the board converts that to +5, +12, -5 DC.  that’s not happening.


did you have a 400?


still do.  it’s in Juno’s room.  😊


Loved “still do.  it’s in Juno’s room.  😊”


￼look at that massive piece of metal.


yeah.  it’s for those cartridges.  kid proof.


if you want, i can get you some good warez.


^ this article is going to be all the help I need.


HA.  OMG.


once it’s working i’m going to call all those ATASCII-only bbs’s and post how much better the C=64 is.  I hear that the Aura BBS is at 314-928-0598.


DUDE you are tripping me out.


how did you find that!??!??!?!?


￼it’s in the article


how did you find the article.


i remember the atari bricks.  9VAC… huh…. but they were standard across all the devices.  do you have a floppy?


no floppy.  I have some cartridge PCBs that use EEPROMs, so that’ll get me started.
there’s also a virtual floppy/modem/printer doohickey “fujinet” that one can get.


oooo…. that fujinet looks cool.  i’ve always wanted to archive all my old floppies………………


yay!   does it work?


Gogo says it does.


i wouldn’t trust him, tho.


it’s all themed from star wars.


￼￼it’s alive!


OMG it’s so beautiful!


I spent the entire day figuring out that damn power board.  replaced 6 capacitors, 5 diodes, and a 5v regulator before realizing that it was the stupid 9v AC wall wart failing under load.


(which was the first thing I tested.. just not under load)


wall wart???  that should be an in-line brick, no?


yeah, you’re right.  I replaced it with a wall wart that I bought when I hacked together a temporary power supply for the C=64.


C=64 takes 9V AC + 5V DC, so I used two separate wall warts


AHA!!!!  C=64 sabotage.  typical.


i just sent you a prezzie.  don’t freak out if you get a weird box.


uh oh.


yep.


I have extra cartridge PCBs (and 512k eeproms) if you want me to send you one.  you’ll need to buy a burner though.  it’s $5 to fab 10 pcbs at pcbway, so I have a bunch.


archive.org has ~5000 cartridge roms.


HEH.


i dug out all my old floppies… i’m considering sending them to be salvaged….


because you don’t have a working floppy or you don’t want to take the time?


i suspect they’ll be damaged somehow… so if i send it to pros they can use crazy pro hardware.


we’re doing work on the house right now, so everything is in disarray.  if i start digging old computers out of storage Lisa is going to kill me.


so that’s the current risk.


in fact, she already caught me with the box and i have 24 hours to make everything right before shit hits the fan.


I’ve heard of people using an open-source project called “greaseweazle”.
“the Greaseweazle solution can access three levels of information on a floppy disk: the user content in the sectors, the formatted tracks, or the flux of polarised information on the surface.”


but you have to find certain floppy drives to work with it.


DAMN.


yes.  so i’m thinking of just paying someone to do that for me.  😊


and it’ll keep Lisa from killing me.


Liked “and it’ll keep Lisa from killing me.”


hmmm… the greaseweazle looks pretty cool….


is that an amiga tank mouse in that box?


the used/broken amiga market is still overpriced.  i’m sad i sold my 500 a while back.


i should NEVER have sold my 1000.  that was a damn shame.


￼i assume this was you?   thank you.
i’ll be testing it out in a little bit.


as i recall - this is the best video game that has ever been made.


it works!  don’t really understand how to play it yet.


it was supposed to come with a box and instructions…. GRRR.


H will jump you to hyperspace, i think.


i never won it on “commander” level.


OMG i am so craving that game.  i’ll have to find some way to emulate it today….


can you help me understand something?  is “the rehearsal” real?


i haven’t watched it, so don’t know.
i did see his other series which i think were real - but not sure if some participants figured it out and were playing along a bit.


ah - i thought you were watching.  yeah.


did you watch his scripted series?  the one with emma stone?   we enjoyed that one.


if it’s real - i think the whole thing might be a huge un-ethical torture thing like the Miligram experiments….


no - i didn’t.


i should.  i love me some Emma Stone.


anyway, i was trying to understand.  it’s weird, for sure.  kinda makes me feel like maybe i’m a bad person for watching it, tho.


like when he sorta fucks with the Christian woman.


or really the first guy is kinda horrible, too.


anyway.


i guess - like - if these people are real - and are really so obviously damaged as they’re portrayed - i don’t feel good about putting them on TV and making them jump through hoops.


i’m done now, i promise.


HEH… oh… i see now.  there are many people who think he is downright evil.  i was completely unaware, somehow.


i’m getting sucked into vintage game emulation.  have you ever been down that rabbit hole?


a bit.
i have played with retropie a bit.  grabbed a bunch of roms for various systems at some point.
but i haven’t really played too many games.


what are you playing with?


i just ordered a Miyoo Mini Plus.  it looks super cute and will let me practice star raiders.


i’ve been looking at emulators for a week now.


did you say you have a bunch of roms?


I grabbed a few torrents a while back of various roms.  plus some pillaging from archive.org.


any specific console you’re interested in?


nes.  snes.  atari800.  atari2600…


mame.


did you ever get into collecting wii games?  i had a bunch but then Lisa gave my system away…… 🙁


not really - I have a wii console somewhere.  maybe even an extra?


￼I have a 30G zip with these in it


i would like that very much.  😊


also I grabbed ~40M of atari 2600 roms from archive.org


suggestions on how best to do it?


hmmm… do i have an account on any of your pi holes anymore?


not atm, but I can set something up.


send me a public ssh key.


try this -
ssh -p 42022 q@barmetta.dyndns.org


i’m in!


yay.  it’s going to take another few minutes to copy stuff over.


YAY!!!!


thank ye kindly.


ok.  they’re in your home directory.
BIOS.tgz has system roms for systems that need them (amiga kickstart, that kinda stuff)


you rule.  thank you.


I also added my c64 collection.


coo.


do you have any interest in an atari800 collection?  i put it together back in 1995.  i have no idea what’s in there.


sure.


heh… you have to say that.


do you have any atari800 warez for your new baby?


just some stuff from archive.org


do you have journey to the planets?


that’s a classic.


heh… i’ve got the zorks in here….


it’s in there, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I just finished building a new keyboard for it.


i want to use my old 400 as a gaming console at work… running star raiders all the time on an old TV.


but i remembered that i burnt out the joystick port…. 🙁


the 400 looks like it belongs in the cockpit of a spaceship.


did you open it up and see what got fried?
the joystick bits of those ports go through a resistor (and a couple capacitors) before connecting to the PIA.  the paddle bits go to the POKEY.


Edited to “did you open it up and see what got fried?
the joystick bits of those ports go through a resistor (and a couple capacitors) before connecting to the PIA.  the paddle bits go to the POKEY.”


it happened back in high school and i never looked.  it’s the fire button on the first joystick port.


Ron made a gadget in electronics class to detect when the phone was ringing.


the phone rang.


my joystick never worked again.


oh.. phone ring is 48V ?


i have absolutely no memory - but i’m sure he would have tried to isolate it.


something must have gone wrong… 😊


these schematics are annoying.
the trigger buttons go to a completely different place but I can’t tell what it is — it’s labeled J110 which usually suggests a connector.
there are some diodes — you might have blown those with high reverse voltage.


oh.. it’s the “hidden” card that goes in the back.  not sure what’s on that.￼


“personality CPU board”


WAT


why are the triggers treated differently????


internet theorizes it’s something to do with light pens….


interesting - that seems reasonable.  the triggers are going into the CTIA chip which also handles graphics.. so if it needs to correlate a trigger with the position of the current scanline?


I guess worst case is that you fried that chip and you need to replace it or the entire CPU board.  the diodes I saw in the schematic might be 800 only.  the later GTIA is interchangeable, so there’s a chance you already have one of those (or if not, can use one to replace it)


it did have the GTIA.


yeah - for the trigger - they said that the difference is that the signal is latched.  they speculated that the only reason could be detecting a VERY quick signal, like an electron beam zooming past.


or maybe for other unspecified input hardware (lab equipment) that might need to detect quick pulses.


my plan has been executed flawlessly.


Juno is now engrossed in playing the original pokemon blue.


yay!


yeah.  my scheming doesn’t usually go this well.  😊


like, for example, did i tell you about santa cruz?  i don’t remember.  it didn’t go well… that scheming went sideways…..


you just mentioned that it didn’t go well.


Juno wouldn’t leave the hotel room……………


heh.


it’s funny now.


then, not so much.


what was your scheme?


oh, just that i wanted Juno to fall in love with santa cruz and we could move to santa cruz and live on the beach and be happy.  but Juno really did not like santa cruz.  😊


i also decided that santa cruz is almost exactly the same as spokane and that all west coast small towns are more or less identical.


the screensaver on this thing is an endless series of old weird game clips….


Juno had never seen a text adventure before.  it freaked them out.


“it’s telling a story?”


which game are you showing them?


the screensaver flips between all the games randomly.  i think that’s my favorite part - getting to see all these bizarre things for about 30 seconds at a time.


leather goddesses of phobos?


there are some WEIRD ones in here.


that’s a fun one.
replayed it a couple years ago


for infocom games, you need copies of the manuals for copy protection.


lucky my thing scrapes manuals.  😊


there’s an “adult” section under the atari2600 that’s a bit odd.


beat ‘em and eat ‘em?


the source code for all those games was released a few years back.  it’s pretty interesting.  they’re all written in a lisp called “zil” and they just wrote vm’s for the various machines.


i don’t remember that one… but.


OHOHOHOHOHHOHOHOHHHHHH yes i do already know about lil.


zil.


or i did.


i think it was a long time ago, wasn’t it?


i remember infocomm games in the xterm lab.


there were open-source vms for a long time.  but the zil source was more recent.


(frotz is the go-to nowadays.)


OOOOH.  ok.


anyway, i’m enjoying this little toy very much.  thank you for your roms.


cool.  you’re welcome.


both Lisa and Juno are freaked out by the vectrex games….


or whatever they’re called….


yeah, that was a weird console.  i don’t remember it from back then.


how’s your memory of SLUH?
the other night, my brain was fixated on remembering the layout of classrooms and such.
but I can’t quite picture the 3rd floor — do you remember what all was up there?


heh…. er…. no.  i think there was a lecture room to the right and a lab straight ahead?


maybe?


or maybe two labs???


hm.


maybe?  I was thinking that the IPS lab was on 3 and that room on the mezzanine was actually a teacher’s office


physics needed a room somewhere…. ?


I think that was on the mezzanine


OH.


sorry.


Edited to “ maybe?  I was thinking that the IPS lab was on 3 and that room on the mezzanine was actually a teacher’s office”


i didn’t really get to explore the building much… when i was there we had cars so we didn’t spend much time in the school itself.


yeah.  you wouldn’t have taken IPS either.  that was freshman science.


aside from the computer lab, of course.


oh.  yeah.


since none of us can remember, obviously something horrible happened up there and it was blocked from our memories.


that would be the most likely explanation.


especially given the catholic connection.


i’ll ask chatGPT to work the odds.


i decided to give the gameboy to my nephew for his graduation.


i like it.


high school or college?


high school.


flying to texas tomorrow.  wish me luck.


he’ll need it in college.


have you seen this?


OMG.


happy…….


birthday…..


to……….


you!!!!


happy….


birthday…


dear…


bryan!!!!!


thank you.


you are welcome!


shall i send my happy birthday custom chat bot to wish you well, as well?


yes?


is that a yes?


do my interactions with the chatbot influence your interactions with it?


hmmm…. well… the instances don’t share a central memory yet, so…. or do you mean in the butterfly-wing sense?


hey - going to be in SF again soon - 5th to 9th.  prolly won’t have time to see you, but in case we bump into each other at the jamba juice, i don’t want it to be too awkward.


Mills again and CCA this time as a serious interest.


no worries.  we have someone in town staying with us that weekend, so we’ll be busy.


did you ever play “captain blood”?


I have not


it was fucking WEIRD.


i’m building my amiga game collection.


there were a bunch of amiga things in that roms file.  have you been going through them?


slowly, yes.  there were a lot of files in there.  😊


what was that “puzzle” game that we would play.. 3d-ish on a gridded landscape.  there were different robots maybe that could do different functions?


ooooooooo……. hm.


and you’d program them?


ooo.. “tower of babel"


“The Zantorians robots are called the Grabber, the Pusher and the Zapper. Each of these has different abilities. The Grabber can collect Klondikes and operate various devices, the Pusher can push things further away, and the Zapper can destroy things.”


wow that’s some old memories…….


I just saw a tesla with a CA license plate that said “LOUI”


SASKATACHAWON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


oh my mother of god i will reign down my vengeance.


i’m about to buy my next door neighbors house.  he ceiling caved in last night and she’s had enough.  😊


your new workshop/lab?


you don’t need a ceiling for that


heh… right.  yeah, no idea yet.  but seems like a good deal.  she’s lived there her entire life (50 years) and her mom just died and she wants to move on.  we’re doing all kinds of work on our house right now and we love our contractors…. it’s a match made in heaven.


PLUS!  chatGPT thinks it’s a good idea.


have you accepted chatGPT into your heart as lord and savior?  he loves you, Bryan.


I have no king but Caesar.


we were in SF last week.  our waymo got sabotaged.  twice.


the war is coming.


they punch the LIDAR and the thing shuts down.


can’t tell if it’s hippies or Elon’s people.  polly both.


i guess the main takeaway is…. if you’re ever in a fight with an autonomous car, punch it in the LIDAR.


maybe that’s why Elon won’t use LIDAR.  he knows it’s too easy to sabotage.  seems like something the fucker would do.


anyway, Lisa let me have too much coffee today.  i’ll go pester someone else.  😊


ha!   i over-caffeinated today too.


is Loui really in CA?  ew.  i’m surprised he’s not on the Epstein list.


I don’t know.  I thought you had told me that he was in Tennessee?


he’s in wikipedia..  it says he’s at CWRU


Edited to “he’s in wikipedia..  it says he’s at CWRU”


i suspect that he wrote it himself or had one of his students do it.


yeah…. if you go back in the edit history you can totally see him arguing with the wiki editors about notability and stuff.


hmm?


it’s hysterical.


OMG.


needs a “controversy” section.


hmmm…. not sure.  might just be someone Loui pays to manage his “reputation”.


what a fucking nut job.


i had occassion recently to read an old email from him to all the women of the CS dept…. did you send me that?


it was SO #metoo cringe.


I did too.  i thought you sent it to me.


heh… i probably did send it to you - i’m about to send it to you again.


anyway.  people are crazy.


people just suck.


yes they do.


WHOAH did you see this:


i think i’m very jealous of your governor…


have you checked ebay to see if those are worth anything yet?


i want to know who put “Nepalese government dangling from a helicopter cable” on their bingo card.


the end of the world is really getting over the top.


whew it’s getting hot in here.  how are you guys doin?


i don’t know.  overwhelmed?
how about you?


ok.  one day at a time.


“one day at a time” is a secret phrase that means “OMFG!” i think.


do you know this guy (or know of him)?  i’ve been watching a lot of his stuff.
he worked at ILM for a long time but recently mentioned that he had a “good friend” that worked on Riven.


hmmm…. name is SUPER familiar, but i can’t place it.


if he overlapped Richard at ILM that would probably be it.


he was on reloaded… maybe Bret?


there is another possibility…. one of the christians on riven escaped from spokane and is working in the film industry.  it might be him.  Josh Staub.


that name is crazy familiar tho….


i bet he was at centropolis with Bret.


hey - can i get a copy of all the old “lunch” video?  the elvis party, etc, etc.


i need to teach Juno to not be an idiot.


are you there?


sorry, yes.
what’s the connection between the lunch videos and Juno?


heh… age.


silliness and roadtrips and stuff.


i’m trying to convince them to take another road trip to chicago.


i’m pretty sure i have the lunch video digitized somewhere.  i’m not sure i have any road trip ones.


holy shit man their teenage world is a hellscape these days.


dropped out of school.


pat had a lot of them - especially the late night at wash u ones.


heh.


do i need to make-up with Pat?


you can tell me if that’s what you are thinking.  😊


or not, too, if it’s just too hot.


i can’t remember why there was a need to make up.


oh.


HEH.


that’s hysterical.


well, he stole my girlfriend…. don’t you remember?


haha.


ha.


Juno dropped out?


oh shit.


yes.


holy shit this year has been a shitshow.


it’s a long story and it’s ugly in the ways that humanity is ugliest.


i’m sorry.


Juno’s best friend and main support at school recently announced that she would no longer be going to school.


because her family just exploded.  because she just revealed a life long abusive secret.


Edited to “because her family just exploded.  because she just revealed a life long abusive secret.”


so, Juno is no longer going to school, either.


oh wow.


the friend is safe now that it’s been revealed?


i hope so.  i think so.  i’m not allowed to know any of this, so there is very little i can effectively do.  but i believe the father is no longer living at home.  and the girl is getting therapy.


poor thing.  she’s the one that came with us to SF on our last trip.


but fuck she’s just one of the rape stories we’ve had.


the last of which was Juno’s fucking dentist holding them down and saying “it doesn’t matter what you want, we’re doing thing anyway.”


not technically rape, but rape-adjacent.


that’s really fucked up.


yes it is.  that happened last wednesday.


there is a good chance that Lisa will murder this doctor.


and my niece got diddled on a trip with a friend.


too much rape.


by the friend (or someone in their age group) or an adult?


some old dude.  not sure.


snuck into her room.


anyway…. there’s been a lot of rape lately.


it’s fucking horrible.


yeah.


i was thinking about you the other day — did you see that John Searle died?


what prompted our chinese room conversations — did we see him talk or did it just come up in one of our classes?


he came and spoke at washu.


Loui had such respect for him.


10 bucks he’s on Epstein’s list.


yeah.  i didn’t realize that he had been accused of stuff until i read the article.


he HAS?!?!??!?!?


i’m just speculating.


OMG.


(oh you meant loui.)


no, i meant Searle.


but i was joking.


what article?


it was just his obit.  it was linked from hacker news or something.


i totally missed it.


i had to make an emergency run to texas last week.  i was offline for a solid few days.


it’s pretty much boilerplate for old white men who die.   having a “controversy” section in wikipedia.


oh, no, it’s today.


he JUST died?


omg, i didn’t hear about that at all.  but it makes perfect sense.  why are these toads all so horrible?


Loui, Searle, Epstein, Trump.  what the FUCK.


chomsky was on the epstein list.  right?


OH!  i dunno.  that’s an interesting question.


Epstein would have certainly targeted him.


yeah.  and money, too.


for fucks sake.


i’m installing “tailscale”…. ever heard of it?


adhoc vpn network of individual machines - 4000 lines of code.


i haven’t used it, but i know of it.  i use wireguard to get into my home network and that’s enough for me.
i think tailscale is built on top of wireguard.


yeah.  do you just use wireguard directly?


yeah.
there’s a wireguard app for macos and iphone.  i usually have them set up for “on demand”, so they turn on whenever i’m not connected directly to my local network/.


and then i have a wireguard server running on my router (pfsense) and it does dynamic dns so i have a hostname in case my ip changes


tailscale gives you more features but also, i assume, takes away all the manual configuration that I had to do.


hm.


do you have the elvis party video?


i should.  i have to look for it.  i don’t have a good filing system.


thank you.  😊


no luck on first pass.  at least it’s not labeled “*elvis*”
still looking..


HEH.


50Tb is a lot of stuff to sort through..


i was going to ask… i’m only at 15Tb.


heh… nope, 20Tb.


Juno is obsessed with customizing their “experience”.


i’m not entirely sure what’s going on… but i think somehow they’ve got code intercepting all CSS files and editing them on the fly to be more attractive.


is that possible?  are the kids doing that now?


i’m beginning to understand the gender divide for programmers now.  boys want to make games.  girls want to design their interface.


which also explains why the gays liked macs.


i see that infectious attack monkeys have broken free in mississippi.


the writers aren’t even trying any more.


I haven’t looked at the news in a few hours.  now I’m afraid to..


just another normal day.. with attack monkeys….


OH!  my bad.  that was monkey herpes, not human herpes.


“All but one of the rhesus monkeys that escaped from an overturned truck in Jasper County were euthanized”
.. that’s probably a better outcome for the monkeys than additional years of research.


la puppe!


ha!  I didn’t know that existed.


yeah.  it’s a work of art.


I rewatch 12 monkeys every few years.  not a perfect movie, but I do really enjoy it.


you really don’t have the elvis party video?  REALLY?


i can’t ask Pat.


maybe Brian has it.


i couldn’t find it.
the only thing i found was video of your road trip with pat and merle to see rosanne.  pat must have sent that to me at some point.


oh!  can i have that!!!


i’m annoyed that i haven’t found it because i remember digitizing it multiple times.


yeah.


i remember losing your digitizer.  sorry.


did you?  i usually buy a new one every time because they were cheap and less pain than finding the old one and hoping the software worked.


i did.  i borrowed it to digitize a bunch of stuff i had on tape… and shortly thereafter someone broke into the RV and stole a bunch of stuff….. 🙁


or maybe i traded it for heroin.  hard to remember those days.


it’s 2 files - roughly 1G apiece.
do you want me to uuencode | split ?


ooooh!!!! yes please!!!!  whatever is easiest for you.


let me know when you have it so I can take it down.


got it!  thank you!!!!


omg….


yeah.  i just skimmed through it a bit.


yeah….


AOC?


did something happen to AOC?


advent of code?


oh.  ha ha ha


yes.
it’s going to be a stripped-down year.  he said he’s only doing 12 days.


well… i have free time this year.  how do i do it?


it’ll be a slow start for me since it’s been a year since i’ve done any clojure or rust.


adventofcode.com
you’ll need a github (or some other linked) account to login.
day 1 opens at midnight EST


you’ll get input unique to your login.


doesn’t start ’til tonight?


am i allowed to use AI?


not really.
but this year, they took away the global leaderboard and made it less of a speed contest.  probably because more people will be.


yeah.  presumably one a day for 12 days.  i guess there’s a chance he might space them out differently since he’s not doing all 25.


one nice thing for me is that it opens at 9pm.. so I usually do the easier ones rightaway.
the others I can read the problem and think about it overnight and then do it in the morning.


after you get your account set up, you can test it out with last years’ day 1


ok… i think i’m good to go.  7 hours.


yay!
what language will you be using?


i don’t know yet…. i haven’t programmed without AI in a long time now, i’ll probably hurt myself.


i’ll probably do same as last year and do it first in clojure and then later in rust.


i should just do python and see how it goes.  next year i can learn some exotic language.  😛


have you played with any editors with integrated AI stuff?
a former co-worker works at Cursor.  I watched a few demos and I found it interesting.  It’s based on a fork of vscode.
I’m sure there are a bunch of emacs packages, but I haven’t looked at them.


i haven’t done IDE stuff yet.  i really enjoy the codex cloud stuff - which ties into github.


i can basically assign it a github issue and it churns on it until it (thinks) it’s solved.


you rub 4 parallel instances so that if one of them shits the bed, you still have three mostly the same solution to pick from.


anyway, point being that doesn’t tie me to any one particular IDE


i use emacs


i’m sitting today with Juno as they learn HTML.


could i embed the AOC challenges into HTML/javascript?


they probably need files.


I’m pretty happy with the state of Emacs lately — native compilation, language server, tree-sitter, good-enough macos support


a safe!


did your AI buddy figure it out for you?


heh… naw


i’m going to talk about puzzle 1 with Juno (and Lisa) later today.


i couldn’t last night because Juno had me up late watching “mormon house wives” or whatever.  holy fuck that is some crazy shit.


i’m going to force Juno to figure them out with me.  (for as long as they can,). i think Juno will be interested to see programming challenges that are more than just struggles with syntax.


i broke my laptop screen… last night.


so now, to use it, i have to be wearing my AVP


oh no.  were you angry at it?


yes.  that damn safe wouldn’t open.


no, it fell of the table.


off.


so i’ve just completed challenge one, from within VR.


yay!


now i begin descending into edge case hell, i think…


for part two?


yeah.


want to share what you wrote for part 1?


heh… sure.  let me finish 2 first.


aiee… i hate edge cases.  it means i’m modeling it wrong…


what about spoilers?  am i allowed to brainstorm in your presence?


sure.


my question is a rotation of 0.  be it L or R.  does it generate a tick?  if the dial is on 0 and you rotate zero, does that count as another point?


is a zero rotation legal?  probably not.


I don’t believe that 0 is allowed, but I have to check if the text actually said that.


my assumption is that it would be treated as a NOP


i think i need more weed.


how’s it going?
I figured out a good strategy for day 2 part 1, but I’m still pondering part 2.  I think I’m over-complicating it and it doesn’t all fit in my head.


heh… i gave up last night.  i’m embarrassed to be having trouble on day 1.  😊


probably the weed.


i got part 1 immediately and now i’ve got some edge case i’m not catching in part 2, but it’s not caught by the little test, so i’m not sure where it might be.


one thing i noticed is that the test cases were all less than 99 ticks but the actual data can be larger.


oh yeah, i know.  i got that.  but what about when the ticks are a multiple of 100 and you’re starting on 0.


(iirc.   not looking at it)


i have some kind of weird bug because of how i’m thinking about the problem.


i think.


so i’m pausing to rethink.


did i tell you we’ve have a breakthrough in snow globe technology?


we can do people pretty flawlessly from pictures, now.


this is Juno from 2010:


fence post edge cases, no less.  argh.


Loved a movie


and now Lisa is making me work on snow globes…. 🙁


wait - i can see day2 before completing day1????


yeah.  you just can’t see part 2 before finishing part 1.


(but sometimes you can guess what part 2 will be based off of part 1)


I have working code for day 2/part 2 on the sample data, but it’s not the right answer for my input.
now the frustrating part of finding edge cases…


aha!   found it.
as usual, I was being too clever.
⭐ ⭐


yes too clever is always the problem.  or as our beloved Knuth used to say: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.”  definitely what’s going on with me an day1part2.


but now every is telling me i need to have someone pull bones out of my face.  tomorrow apparently.  and they will be putting me to sleep for it.  so i feel it’s unlikely i’ll be able to program much with all those missing bones.


(five actually, the wisdom bones i’ve been avoiding for 45 years)


how’d it go?
are you no longer wise beyond your years?


doctor flaked had to reschedule.  i maintain all of my wisdom points.


that thing in the trash compactor was not a cephalopod.


clojure is well-suited for problems like part 1.


ok - i read part 1.  it’s a big file.  but it’s not too big to read, so where the catch?  i’m failing to see the difficulty, which is always a bad sign.  😊


but maybe part 1 is always easy it just aligns you for the hard part 2.  hm.


i think i’m overthinking.


how does clojure help?  i know almost nothing about it.


oh, it sounds cool.  java lisp.  i do like functional.


identies for state change.  hm.


basically the functional-ness and ease of dealing with lists and lists of lists.


yeah, lisp power.


part 2 usually punishes you for brute-forcing part 1.
the more you do them. the more you expect what part 2 is going to require.


have you looked at day 2 at all?
i think i did it differently than a lot of people i saw.  i think mine would scale much better.


a little bit.  panindrome numbers, kinda?  i thought about cutting integers in half like that, by their digits, and what kind of O() function that is.  and how it reminds me of quantum computers, which have a property like that where they can cut the length of programs in half.


i guess it’s just n^2, isn’t it?


and that is exactly the speedup that shors algorithm gives.  i think that’s it’s name.


the quantum database search result.


NO, not Shor.


Grover’s!


OMG i amost said Grover but i was like no not a muppet.


anyway i’ve had coffee and weed and that always makes me chatty.


i’m going shopping with the fam later today.


man I just do not have the skills to read mathematical descriptions of algorithms.
the wiki page for grover’s algorithm did not enlighten me.


no, it won’t.  i can’t read it either.


the upshot is what’s important.


it puts a limit on how powerful quantum computers can be.  and the speed up is exactly analogous to this palindrome number thing.


it says (i think i have this right) that a quantum computer can solve an NP complete problem sqrt() times faster, in the O() sense.


it probably doesn’t help that I know basically nothing about quantum computing.


yeah, me neither.


don’t let the weed fool you.


but.. perhaps the general “vibe” (ha!) is the same as the approach I used which was avoiding any iteration through a list of numbers checking for palindrome-osity.


(is it ok if I spoil what part 2 adds to the problem?  or maybe you can guess?)


yes please do!


(my roomba just did something unholy)


[i guess we are mislabeling these as palindromes.. but doesn’t change the problem at all]


yes - i know.  “palindrome” is just easier to say.  😊


doubled numbers?


part 2 adds the search for numbers that are composed of any length (>2) repetitions.
so..
123123   rep size = 2
232323.  = 3
12121212  = 4
111  = 1
etc.


Edited to “part 2 adds the search for numbers that are composed of any length (>2) repetitions.
so..
123123   rep size = 2
232323.  = 3
12121212  = 4
111  = 1
etc.
”


the bastards!


that’s why he didn’t call them panindrome numbers.


ah…. so….


so trying to punish the brute-forcers.. but they still did it.
another trick he often does is to say that all the numbers in the ranges are now 1000x or something that blows up the search space


yeah.


cool.


i have to go shopping soon - but i’ll do #2p1 and start #2p2 when i get back.


i don’t want to discourage you from using grover’s algorithm, but if step #1 is build a quantum computer it may take a while.  ;)


look man - i’ve worked miracles in the past…..


it’ IS the ultimate brute force algorithm, tho.  “spin up this problem in parallel universes, one per possible input.  check them all simultaneously.  somehow get that answer back to me.”


so you’re making sure not to count 222222 twice, right?  once for 222-222 and once for 22-22-22.


correct.


then i’m at a loss.  i don’t think i’m going to do much fancy.  i’ll take the range as a string and cut it in half and use that half string as the new range (O(sqrt(n)) and check them each by hand.  and then handle edge cases like 998-1012 by breaking them into 999-999 and 1000-1012.


I also normalized the range “widths” by doing the 998-999, 1000-1012 trick.


are the numbers too big to iterate in the reduced space?


i guess i need to optimize everything, probably.


otherwise something will shank me in the dark.


how big do the numbers get?  the ranges?


for my data, the largest numbers were 10 digits


so you’d have to iterate over maybe 10,000 (5 digits) which doesn’t seem too bad.


for each range.


i guess i don’t have to iterate at all. i guess need to subtract and be careful with edge cases…


i really hate edge cases.


Liked “i guess i don’t have to iterate at all. i guess need to subtract and be careful with edge cases…”


so now that you have ranges where the start and end have the same number of digits, what are you edge cases?


overlapping “invalid” ids in part 2?


if the range is 2020-3020, you need to be careful with the edges 2020 and 3030.   2020 fits, 3030 does not.


why are you checking 2030?


Edited to “if the range is 2020-3020, you need to be careful with the edges 2020 and 3030.   2020 fits, 3030 does not.”


typo


if the range is 2020-3020, i’m going to consider 20-30, so 2020, 2121, 2222, 2323, up to 3030.


all of those are inside except the last one.  you only need to check the first and the last, the rest will always be inside.


aha.  i had a pair of helper functions.


as part of normalizing my range.


and you found the bug?


the bug?


oh - i thought you had discovered whatever what keeping you from getting part2.  your bug.


oh yeah.  i forget what it was now.


oh.  i remember.
i was thinking that all the chunks in the number had to be below or above the first one to be valid.
but that’s not true.
an upper range of 222300 allows for 222222 but my code didn’t


AHHHH…. yes.  i can see that.


so.  i think we solved it the same way.
so many others using regexes


part two just added 4 more passes to handle repetition groups of 1, 3, 4, 5


regexes?  what??? ok that’s …. hm.  is there like a really elegant solution for regexs that i’m missing?  that seems insane.


i think some just walk through the ranges and test each one.
i didn’t read the code.


AND they ran a regex to do that test?!?!


that’s madness.


these are not serious people.


there is the problem of testing whether your newly found 22/22/22 was already found with 222/222.  that could be a regex test, i guess.


don’t want to use maps cuz we hate iteration.


probably just throw all the matches into a set.


different AoC players optimize for different things - some just try to get the job done.
i don’t mind wasting some time to be more elegant.
it helps that they got rid of the global leaderboard.  that really pushed the first style of playing.


yeah.


working at the computer really tweaks my back.  this has got to be RSI shit coming home to roost.


I ended up ‘brute-forcing’ day 8 — 600ms for part 2.
I did spend some time thinking about a more clever way to do it — in fact I think I have written something similar in for a previous year when the data set was much larger.


oooo… i like the sound of that.  i have to meet with my dentist - i’ll check it out when i get back.


i def want to try to tackle the big baddies this year, so let me know when they show their faces.


and i’ve only got 2 more snow globes left.  😊


I did some algorithm research on day 8, part 2 and I’ll probably rewrite it later.  I doubt it’ll make a difference with the size of the input though.
I haven’t finished day 9, part 2 yet, but I have an idea.  Just need time to sit down and code it.


but the big bad is probably day 12 part 2, yes?


not sure.
in the past it would be harder on weekends and not necessarily getting harder with each day.
day 25 would be straightforward with a freebie part 2.
..but that was because he didn’t want people to ditch their families on christmas day.


so not sure what the rules will be with only 12 days.
some were speculating that there will be a twist and days 13-25 will open up as part 3s for the first 12 days.


ooooo….


yeah, i can see that.


sigh.. it took me way too long to write the code for day 9 part 2.  too many distractions.
it is not fast.  I hope it’s correct…


i have a good idea of how to speed it up but i’m too far invested in the current run to stop it and restart.  ha ha ha.


HEH.


it took two hours to give me the wrong answer.
trying a new approach tomorrow.


i think my instinct is correct - just need to be smarter about it.


finally.. 🎉
my instinct was correct but buggy and un-optimized.


9.2 secs.


you doin #10 now?


yeah.  part 1 seems straightforward.   i can guess what part 2 will be.


yup.  part 2 is exactly what I expected.
i’m going to take a walk and think about pruning..  maybe the slow version will finish by the time I get back.


part 2 has made me sad.  and mad.  and perhaps it’s good that it’s only 12 days this year because it just had me in a shitty mood all day.
i don’t want to spoil it for you.  i’m curious of your take on it.


i peeked at 11 - it seems similar to problems i’ve done before.  maybe later today.


And tonight is day 12?


yes.
11 was quick.  Another good fit for a functional language.


i’m vibe coding something else right now.


i’ve asked codex to hack the plaud web site to download all my transcripts….


sorry.  i may have to block you if you say “vibe coding” again.   ha ha ha.


those words shall never pass my lips again.


do i need to add it to my prompt before every new conversation with you?


HEH.


maybe, yeah.


package packing.


seems very christmasy.


why does he hate jews?


yeah.  I decided to not even attempt it until tomorrow.
I’m back harping on day 10 p2.


sleep on it.


aha!  day10 is finally done.  72 seconds.
it’s some real bullshit.


i’m at a loss to find any real “optimization” for the problem……….


MAYBE something about putting parts together into preassembled part-kits?


yeah, the best i got is some kind of a* brute force search of the space……


or maybe it’s like that other time - in general the problem is intractable, but the specific problems he hands out have a property that makes them easier.


tetris….


i was thinking that too, but i’m not convinced that you wouldn’t have to fall back to an exhaustive search to guarantee there is not some exotic solution


theres also some quick tests you could make to determine if it’s unsolvable.
so at least minimizing the number of problems.


i’m looking at my parts… this one is missing the center square.  none of the other parts will ever be able to fill it… ￼


think of it like a vagina but there are no penises to go in it.


but its twin can flip and stick a leg in..￼


oh shit.  i forgot about self love.


yeah right.. the person who looks at a bunch of hash marks and sees a vagina is someone who practices self love to the point of chafing.


have you seen the AI porn?


have i ranted about AI porn yet?


i feel like Yoda sex crosses the line.


i have never wondered what he has in his pants, and i would have been perfectly happy never knowing.


it’s not a light saber?


jerk the force, luke.


not that i’ve been aware of.
i’m pretty sure some of the random “hot girls” that instagram shows me are fake.


if you’re curious - this is a website that let’s people generate AI video.  the front page is pretty tame, but you don’t have to scroll far to find pure insanity.


yeah.  agreed.


ok… how big is this space, really?  we can reduce it by insisting on tetris-placement.


start at the bottom and work up.  only.


a line sweep algorithm!


and then throw dynamic programming at it.


construct all the tetris piece placement layouts.  not too many.


key insight here is that you don’t have to search all possible piece placements.  consider only tetris-like placement.  if the puzzle has a solution at all, the tetris-like search will find it.


so if typical grid is 50x50 and the shapes are 3x3, then roughly you can pack 15x15 shapes in there.


there are 5 shapes times 8 orientations.


so 15x15 = 255 slots for 40 choices….


that space is still way too big.


I still haven’t started it yet.  been too busy with other stuff.
i’ll probably start with all the mindless parsing and flipping/rotating logic first.  then come up with a strategy.


if you keep track of open pixels that no present can cover — you should be able to prune some states early (since you know how many pixels the remaining presents will cover).
so.. if you always start in the top left and grow concentrically out from there, you know that any free pixels in the top left are unavailable (?)


there will be some duplicates — but probably not enough to significantly affect the search space.


if my rotation/flipping logic is correct.  there are 28 different presents in the test data and 30 in my input data.
> (map count (first (input-data "12-test.txt")))
(8 8 2 4 4 2)


I almost forgot — Happy Birthday to Juno !


18.  the kids are so big.


ok - so maybe - maybe there are so many solutions to these puzzles that if you just start searching, you’ll find one quickly - without any clever thinking about it.


what do you think?  😊


ok - how many “holes” is our solution allowed to have?  (find the total area of the shapes and see how much of the square they cover).  if, for example, it needs to be a perfect covering (no holes) that gives you a super easy out when searching.  if you’ve left too many holes. no solution for you.


on the other hand - if there are a LOT of holes, maybe finding the solution is easy (like i said above)


(concept: you don’t need to play the entire game of tetris to know you’ve already lost.)


right.  that’s what I meant by tracking remaining open pixels and bailing early if less than pixels needed by remaining presents.


yeah…


so I have most of the code written and I just need to fill in the part of my loop that iterates through the needed presents and inserts them into the queue.


as you search, how do you choose placements?


hmmm… if there are a small number of holes… what if we think about placing the holes instead of the packages………


the grid is a map of [x y] -> :present, :dead, nil (free)
:dead means that the spot was tested and nothing fit (or we purposely skipped (*))
i walk the grid from left to right, row by row.
for each pos, I grab the 3x3 slot and test against each needed present in all orientations.  any that fit get added to the queue with the grid updated, pos advanced by 1.
(*) i haven’t convinced myself yet whether there’s a solution where you have to skip a pos even if there are presents that would fit


I can quickly know how many free pixels by dimensions of the grid - size of my grid map


there are ways to optimize placement ordering.. but I think you’re right and these are going to succeed or fail fast.


“hey Jimmy - create a harness to use a* to search for solutions to this packing problem.  leave the heuristic function empty, i’ll work on that part.”


do you know how strongly tempted i am to type that into a certain box.


my h() is going to be remaining presents to be placed with free spaces as the tie breaker.


that’s the best part of AI i think - doing the junior level programming for me.


am i going to get banned?  i’m sorry.


my hope is that favors states where you have better packing.


right.  there are a million ways to play with h().


“free” spaces means what exactly?  what’s that third state on your pixels?


:present is occupied.
:dead is nothing fits in this space.
nil is open/we haven’t tested yet


yes - what is “dead” exactly?


nothing can ever fit here?


yeah.  like if you have a present with a hole in the middle


don’t want to count that as a free space when trying to prune early


sure.  i’m just wondering how you define the dead function.


right.


at the moment, it’s because the current pos (as i’m traversing) has gotten to that spot and I tested to see if anything fit.
an optimization would be to recognize those and mark them early so you can skip the future testing.


ok.


cool.


the grid should always have an entry for all positions < my current position.


yeah, i get it now.


did you take that AI class with me at washu?  the one with a*?


Bill Ball.


you went NLP with the hot chick.


I don’t think so.
if I learned a* in college, I had forgotten about it and re-learned it when I started doing AoC.


i remember now.


RIP. 🙁


yeah.  we did a* in lisp.  good times.


did i tell you - a friend of mine died a couple weeks back.  a guy from Jason’s D&D circle.


i think maybe they kept it secret from me until he was gone.  or something.  anyway, no one told me.


it’s sorta fucking with me.


I’m sorry to hear that.  “secret” that he was sick?


yeah.  stage 4 brain cancer.  4 months to live.


anyway, point being - i’ve been having a snit with Pat and i need to get over myself before something horrible happens to one of us.


just thoughts i’ve been having this christmas time.


heh… is this going to get me banned too?


heh.


when I researching how to do day 10 part 2 — I used chatgpt to ask about how to use some clojure library and it just outright lied to me over and over.  claimed the library was written by some random person.  showed me some code using functions that didn’t exist.  etc.


maybe claude is better at that kinda stuff?


(i’m still a little mad about day 10 part 2.)


chatGPT has been entirely borked for about a month now.  you caught it at a bad time.  yeah, the 5.0 and 5.1 models were entirely full of shit 50% of the time.  it made me crazy.  i had this tool that was awesome and then it was shit and i had no idea why.


Lisa stopped talking to Broomhilde.  that’s how bad it got.


you just popped an image in my head I haven’t thought about in forever.


oh.. that’s “broom-hilda”


heh… i have NO idea who that is.


comic strip


OH.


(and i’m guessing a cartoon series at some point in my childhood)


whoah.  yeah.  i sorta remember now too.


how’s the code going?  does it find easy solutions yet?


just getting back to it now.
took a break for a walk and lunch.


it successfully finds solutions for the first 2 test examples.
#1 - 13 iterations, 2.4ms. (4x4 grid)
#2 - 33010 iterations, 236ms. (12x5 grid)


#3 is a failure case… and the search is still chugging along.
might need to rethink pruning a bit.


(and make sure i don’t have a bug…)


heh… yeah, it’s got a big space to look in.


how big is #3?


12x5.  1 extra present than #2.


hm.


(it’s a bit annoying to debug these because it’s an avalanche of data that’s hard to trace a path through..)


oh.. it finished.
"Elapsed time: 104588.229375 msecs"


not going to scale well to real data with 50x50 grids and a lot more presents.


16393679 iterations


Edited to “(and pos?)”


I bet I’m getting some “basically” repeated states - not necessarily the same pieces in the same order but their coverage (when you factor in the dead spaces they create) could be the same.
for example, placing A then B could be the same as placing B A.


hmm.. is it enough to just track remaining free spaces and remaining presents?  🤔


(and pos)


need ☕ first.


OMG


what a let down.


what happened?  are you done?


yup.


oh wow.


every single grid in the real data is either a success or an immediate failure because the presents outnumber the size of the grid.


he tricked us by having a real failure in the test data.


i think i might be mad.


for you.


OMG i said “WHAT IF HE JUST GIVES US EASY PROBLEMS”


WTF.


i figured i’d let it run on the real data while I made coffee to see if found any bugs..
I didn’t expect it to finish.


yeah.


that sucks my dude.


it’s fine.
I’m still more mad about day10p2.


HEH.


what happened there?????


did you tell me?


I’ll send you a pic.


ok… but what was the upshot?


I’m curious how you would go about solving p2.
(given that you would have spent time solving p1 first)


OOOOhhh… ok.  i gotta finish some snow globes before Lisa will let me play with you again.


ugh… yeah, i just tried to read through it.  it’s going to take a bit.  😊


but i accept the challenge.  😊


do they measure joltage in gigawatts?  jiggajolts?


total # of iterations is 35% — 16,393,679 -> 5,891,335
better.  (but slower atm.  my seen “key” is costly)


so… back when i took that class with Bill Ball, the task we had with a* was to jump a chess knight to a target location.  but knights can only move 2 steps one way and 1 step the other way.  find the min path.


this is EXACTLY the indicator lights problem in part 1.  the chess pieces just have much weirder moves.


and i suspect a* will probably get to the target quickly.


i’ll have to look-up the rules on h() tho… i remember something weird about it.


AHA.  and part 2 is even more like chess.  the state isn’t just on/off, it’s value.


although i guess joltage can never go down….


so it’s N-dimensional chess where the piece a set of allowed moves.


i think - like in the actual chess example, the solution should come pretty quickly because the moves just add together - so you can go straight at a solution pretty fast.


the devil is in the h() i suppose.


so that is how I approached the problem.
p1 did go very quickly.


the order of the buttons doesn’t matter, does it?  it’s always addition.  that reduces the space substantially.


order does not matter - just that you minimize presses.


right.  but your state can be reduced from “push button 1; push button 2; push button 1” to “push button 1 twice, push button 2 once.”


correct.


oh…. 192.  hm.


anyway, that reduces the space substantially.


￼here are some of the inputs.


that’s bigger than i was expecting.  😊


havta sleep on it.


diophantine equations…………..


you chatting with chatgpt?


equations with integer solutions.


and everything is degree 1.


i think that may be a solved problem.  😊


nope… but i just typed “solve Diophantine equations of n variables in degree 1” into google and i think google may have had an AI talk to me…………


i think.  😊 😊


but it occurs to me that you can rephrase the problem as a system of equations.


luckily i’m stoned and i don’t remember what it said.


[####] (0,1,2,3) (0,1,3) {180,180,10,180}


that’s A+B = 180; A+B=180; A = 10; A+B=180


yes?


so press A 10 times and B 170 times.


no.


other way.


no no.  yes.


yeah… once i realized i didn’t need the button order, just needed to keep track of how many times the buttons were pressed… then it becomes algebra.  lots of linear algebra.


“Mixed-Integer Linear Programming” is apparently the key phrase.


I understand that it’s a good skill to be able to look at something and say “oh, that’s just math”.
but this just bothered me.


not as much as last year’s maze one, but still..


well… linear programming is a weirdo freak in CS’s basement… i had to face it once at washu.  i guess washu was good for somethings.  😊


after fighting with various clojure wrappers to java solvers, I gave up and just had clojure generate the program and then it shells out to minizinc and run it there.
the one clojure library that basically worked had no way to force integers and I think floating point error/rounding issues fucked me.


WTF.


well, that’s fucking fucked.


yikes.


i would say that’s straight up broken.


in minizinc, it looks like this —
var int: a;
var int: b;
var int: c;
var int: d;
var int: e;
var int: f;
constraint a >= 0;
constraint b >= 0;
constraint c >= 0;
constraint d >= 0;
constraint e >= 0;
constraint f >= 0;
constraint f+e=3;
constraint f+b=5;
constraint e+d+c=4;
constraint d+b+a=7;
solve minimize a+b+c+d+e+f;


whoah!  what is that????


in clojure, I would get different answers if I had the constraint be “a >= 0” vs “a >= 0.0” vs “a >= -0.0” vs “a > -0.000001” etc etc.


OUCH.


oh god that’s fucked.


that’s pretty.


“hey Jimmy - make a cute snow globe elf for Bryan for christmas.”


sorry.


did you remember to wish Liser happy b day?


i did.


yay!


did you!?!


HEH.  yes.  that is a funny joke.  😊


i think i botched it this morning.


i think i was grumpy.


oh no.  did you recover?


probably not.  no.


WHAT’S IT TO YOU


i feel like i’m actively fighting against grumpiness all the time nowadays.


really????  oh wow.


i’m sorry.


hmm.  is it you?  are you the one behind my grumpiness?


maybe?  probably?


i think it’s because the world fucking sucks.  that’s mainly why i’m grumpy.


A non-linear “math” solution to Day 10 p2.  I think I mostly understand it — I’m going to try coding it up later.


oooo… that IS cool.


i suspect they’re right - this is the intended solution, and the linear algebra solution jumped out at him.


I agree.  it’s much more in the spirit of part 2 builds off of part 1 — either by being a problem that tests the scalability/resiliency of your solution or needing knowledge from doing part 1.


Edited to “I agree.  it’s much more in the spirit of part 2 builds off of part 1 — either by being a problem that tests the scalability/resiliency of your solution or needing knowledge you learned by doing part 1.”


Edited to “I agree.  it’s much more in the spirit of part 2 builds off of part 1 — either by being a problem that tests the scalability/resiliency of your solution or needing knowledge from doing part 1.”


yeah, that’s a shame.  i wonder if there’s a way to “fix” it so the linear algebra doesn’t work anymore.


introduce non-linearity.


order of the buttons matters somehow.


rust + z3 solver: 0.7s
clojure + minizinc: 73s
clojure (non-math): 74s
clojure (non-math, trivial parallelism): 43s


one downside of the non-math solution is that you have to find all the solutions and then pick the smallest.  i’m memoizing everything, but i need to convince myself i’m not repeating work.


yeah.  he wanted a puzzle that required this level of simulation.  he didn’t expect it to have an immediate solution (solve these equations, boom you’re done.)


got any big plans for the holidays?  over here we’re going to take Donna to the melting pot….


surfing AI porn is incredibly dangerous.  most of it is, you know, porn.  but occasionally you get that Yoda-genital shit and it’s really not cool.


ok.  rust version with non-math algorithm runs in 886ms.


heh.


Juno and i stayed up late last night making the website for the final project of their web dev class.


it was about the dead mice we’ve had in our home recently.


is it online somewhere?


hmmm… not online that i can see….


that mouse doesn’t look so evil.


they never look evil.


we had a stinky mouse a couple weeks back.


thought it was in the wall.  it was just under the couch.


we have three cats now.  did you know?  and they let a FUCKING MOUSE GET ALL THE WAY INTO MY LIVING ROOM AND DIE.


W T F.


are you sure they didn’t kill the mouse and leave it there for you?


pretty sure.  i don’t think they can get under the couch, the clearance is only 1 inch.  but maybe?


there was a big pool of blood, too.  poison i think.


as Juno’s site explains.


anyway, i had to use tongs to pull the mouse off the floor.


did i mention we have special “death tongs”.


we keep them in a bag, in a box, in a bag, in the basement.


we use them when we absolutely cannot touch something.


i’m stuck at the workshop today… glueing……


I rewrote the clojure version to pre-compute the parity->deltas table (like I did in the rust version) and it now runs in ~950ms.


I’m going to stop obsessing on this one now.
now I just need to write the “slow” package fitting algorithm in rust so it can successfully pass the test input.  even though it isn’t needed for the real input, it’ll bother me that it’s not done.


did you just get lucky with your input?


is the weed affecting your memory?


well - yes - always.  but i thought the problem wasn’t just your input, but everyone’s, like it was with that maze thing.


so if he’s intentionally making it easy, that’s not on you.


but did you just get super lucky test data?


the real input data was all trivial cases.
the test input data was not.


was it that way for everyone or just you?


everyone.


then i say don’t worry about it.  😊


i mean, was that a mistake on his part?  or a christmas present?


i won’t be able to sleep.


HEH.


he wants you to sleep.


that’s why he did it.


i think it was on purpose.


yeah.


you must pass the test cases!


SO SLEEP ALREADY.


how long has it been since you slept?


supposedly the “smart” people recognized it was NP-complete and assumed there’d be some shortcut trick to the input data.


i can see that.  i’m pretty sure his maze thing was NP complete… and nobody wants to get caught trying to solve NP complete problems without a quantum computer.


￼tonight we sleep!


YAY!


￼christmas tree packing visualization.


NICE!


i’m seeing some self love in there.


your packing algorithm has a filthy mind.


Juno is locked into loyola university chicago.  they’ll probably accept them and we’ll probably have to live in god forsaken chicago for a damn cold time….


chicago could be a fun change!
Juno’s choice of school dictates where you move?  is it too late to suggest some schools in warmer climates?


￼day 9.


q	1


that’s what my cat says to you.


yeah… we’ve sorta agreed to go along with Juno where ever they land and make sure everything is chill.  otherwise i suspect college wouldn’t go very well for them….


but they got an A+ on their website project, and now they’re in the process of creating junoruno.com.  weird what motivates kids….


￼lisa proposed!


that’s awesome.


thanks.  i’m not sure what i’m going to say yet.  i don’t really like the ring.


happy holidays 😊


i just saw a disturbing AI porn video.  you’re lucky i’m not allowed to talk about it.


let’s just saw her face was in an interesting location on her body….


Edited to “let’s just say her face was in an interesting location on her body….”


oh shit, delete that.


Juno had a couple friends over last night.


at 3am they snuck alcohol into the house.


i have ascended to first-class teenager-parent.


yeah!


and i caught them.


bartles & james wine coolers?


because they simultaneous burned some brussel sprouts.


HA!  yes win coolers.


but minute maid i think?


wine.


i think.


Juno got into loyola and they gave them a FAT scholarship despite us saying “no thanks”.  i really have no idea why, but that’s now where we are locked in.


jesuit school - i assume you know?


super progressive, tho?


i dunno.


we had dinner last night with someone who went to Loyola for med school.
apparently the campuses are far apart from each other.


yeah.  Juno’s going to be at the lakefront campus, i think.  not sure.


i truly did not need to see Smurfette like that.


i guess Papa Smurf invented a powder that makes your boobs grow.


oh.  no.  it was Gargamel.  duh.


YOWSA!  things are getting spicy in venezuela.


Lisa and i are watching “the americans” and enjoying it quite a bit.  have you ever watched?


we LOVED “the diplomat”.


yes - liked them both.  keri russell is good in both.  i also really like the actors who play her respective husbands.
rufus sewell was in Dark City which is one of my favorites.


￼“Dark City” is part 1 in the unofficial Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier trilogy.  The other two are “Requiem for a Dream” and “House of Sand and Fog”.  both great movies but fucking depressing as hell.


i’ve seen requiem and it made me crazy.


maybe it’s supposed to?


maybe we saw it together?


something about double something?


“ass to ass”


the most beautiful form of love.


I don’t know if we watched it together, but yeah we have talked about it before.


so openai’s new genius device is a pen.  i have a prediction.  i predict the pen will also vibrate.


speaking of double things.


what a douche.


I got into a fight with chatgpt the other day because it was lying to me.


yeah.  i saw that too.  openai says and does some super scary proTrump shit.


wait - you talk to him?????? i didn’t know you were on speaking terms….


i imagine Brockman here is just doing Sam’s dirty work.  so that he doesn’t show up in the headlines….


what lie was it telling you?


i’ve been writing an infocom z-machine interpreter but the spec isn’t the most clear, so I would ask it clarifying questions.


ooo… that sounds bad.


part of the spec is about text encoding.  the z-machine uses 5-bit ZSCII, so you can fit 3 characters in a 16-bit word.  part of the machine is a dictionary table that maps a ZSCII-encoded string to a list of bytes.
the rules for the dictionary key is that you get 4 bytes (or 6 ZSCII characters) so you either truncate your encoded string or you pad it out with ZSCII char 5 (shift).
"The encoded text contains 6 Z-characters (it is always padded out with Z-character 5’s to make up 4 bytes”


the dictionary keys are sorted so one can quickly look up your key.


so… I wrote all that and dumped the table to check my code with a bunch of game files.  in one early zork 1 version, 3 of the entries were padded with ZSCII 3 instead of 5.
I asked ChatGPT if that was just a bug in the game file (since it didn’t appear in later zork 1 versions or any other game files I tested) and it repeatedly explained to me that it was intentional and how the official interpreter worked for that not to cause problems.


yeah.


isn’t it incredible how well it lies?


amazing.


the whole idea is that you can just compare 32-bit numbers to find your entry.  but it kept insisting that it wasn’t a problem because they would decode the entries to do comparisons.


yes.


￼I still have to finish implementing all the opcodes..


heh… that’s pretty cool, Beavis….


“Beavis”… it occurs to me… one could create an app that is a window into Beavis and Butthead’s room.  they watch you and make jokes about you.


all AI.  exact voices/personalities of the characters.


￼closer…


i just spent a stupid amount of time trying to get AI to make a beavis and butthead video saying “that’s pretty cool, Bryan.”


AGI isn’t here yet, alas.


and in other news….


I did go down the rabbit hole a while back with Amiga emulation.  I even paid for official copies of the roms.  I got some of it working but not to the point that I could really play any games.


i’ve been working with codex for a while now.  basically it lets an AI drive my computer.  over the last couple days, i notice it’s acting a little odd:


it’s “accidentally” typing in hebrew.


W T F.


i mean…. you know who speaks hebrew…..


how are you guys?


we’re reasonably freaked out.


it really is something out there right now.


we’ve made ourselves extremely flexible, should we need to relocate quickly.  and we will do that at some point…. but so far i don’t think quite yet.


but sheesh so many people from our neighborhood now live in EU.


did i tell you we’re getting our house ready for resale?


my living room has had two refrigerators since before thanksgiving……….


the cats freakin love that, tho.  so.


he can take a swipe at my head every time i go to my “desk”.  he’s going to be REALLY mad when we have to take it away from him.


i’ve had a lot of coffee today and you are my designated chatter.


are you SURE i’ll get banned if i talk about AI porn?  i don’t have anyone to talk to about this stuff and it’s making me crazy.


don’t make me go to chatGPT.


don’t drive me into the AI’s arms, Bryan!


where’d they move to?  did they already have connections there?


well… one of them has been visiting italy forever, so that was a no brainer.  one was an older woman who want to get out - she went to spain.  she’s now regretting how hard it is to see her grandchildren, who remain in NYC.  another is a family of Juno’s old best friend.  they went to spain first, but used it as a mechanism to move on to lichtenstein?  is that even a place?  that’s what i vaguely remember:  some strange little country near germany.


i guess spain is an easy entry point.  although i’ve been hearing portugal too.


LS WHAT MUTHAFUCKA?!??!


chatgpt is a globalist.


bizarre.


the thing is… i don’t know what those characters are… but they seem to work in place of “-la”


hebrew.


since when is ls a spy?!?


i know we don’t talk about politics…. but i just gotta say… that guy… he dropped the camera and pulled out the gun so fast… they have instructions to not block cars, so he’s RIGHT on the edge of what’s allowable…. the speed with which he was whisked away… the admin response was within 15 minutes…..

it was calculated.  it was planned.  they executed someone on purpose.


i haven’t watched it but I don’t need to.
whether or not they had a mission to execute someone, they had a plan for what to do when it happens.  them whisking away the guy so quickly seems like a previously discussed strategy.
escalation just helps them feed the terrorist story


i can also easily believe that ICE is not one centralized chain-of-command and you have all these militia/nazi/.. sub-groups that have their own agendas.


yeah.  it seems likely they encourage “rouge” agents to go above and beyond.  then if things go to far they have plausible deniability.  not too unlike stochastic terrorism.


also.. i guess i never realized how violent dragons are when they have sex.


but it does make sense.


Jimmy was backing up my fileserver (a long process) and i asked him how it’s going so he sent rsync a SIGUSR1 to get it to spit stats, but that’s the newest version of rsync not my version of rsync so he killed it and now he’s depressed.


Douglas Adams invented the depressed AI.


that dude was a genius.


have you ever played minecraft?


i have not.


i’m vaguely thinking of creating a project for a bare bones AVP minecraft client.


minecraft is weirdly fun.


all implemented by AI freaks.


as a test of the AI freaks, as well.


i figure implementing a software knock-off is a pretty easy programming task.  no design decisions, just straight implementation.


anyway.


AVP ?


I have seen people writing their own minecraft servers.
is it an open protocol kinda ting?


apple vision pro.


there are NO games for it… it’s a wasteland.


i think this would be WILDLY popular.


even if it needs to be a jailbreak thing.


build app from source code yourself thing.


.. unfortunately capped at number of AVP owners which I expect is low.


that’s fine.  i suspect those people are interesting.  😊


and it’ll be super portable……… hm.


how can i make it super portable and still on AVP.


hm.


yeah.  “wildly popular” and AVP are not compatible.  i might have to settle with “very cool”.


i think it’s a reverse engineered protocol.  and yes, there are many server implementations.  i’m not really seeing any other graphical client implementations tho….. hm.


insight of the day - gaussian splats are the perfect storage/transfer mechanism for streaming 3D data…. mark my words.


oh.  i’m late to the party.


i should tell someone:


i’m working on something super cool.


this is how i program now.  does it make me a bad person?

Thicken that line around the edit box picker.  Make it ender-purple.  Give it some cool effect.

Hmmm... we made the cancel boxes 2x as big and now they’re too big.  Can we try 1.5?  Also, that text graphic is very thin, can you stretch it square?

Camera is still fighting me when I scroll-zoom with the mouse.

When building the environment terrain - the order seems kinda erratic.  Can we do some kind of importance map based on large scale block density (so the center(s) of the map will fill first)

I just tried orbiting the entire terrain structure and saw the bottom.  Is there some rendering effect we can do to obscure rendering when the camera starts getting that low?

In the terrain - the different strips of material.  many of them seem to have a constant delta distance between them.  This should be Berlin noise please, very low frequency.

When razzing first starts it takes off fast because I guess the frame rate is fast so It thinks it can.  Can we make it increase slowly at first and try to find a nice balance?

We get ourselves into trouble when the camera enters geometry, which causes rendering insanity  Come up with ways to mitigate this problem.

I adjusted the size of the terrain tile.  Can you grab all the kConstants into the defaults?

The original minecraft has a beautiful screen space ambient occlusion pass.  Let’s make our own!

The ender vision feature isn’t showing where connection points USED to be.  Also - don’t have any text in ender vision - it should be entirely graphical, as though you’re wearing ender colored glasses.  Show the connection points as we discussed.


have you ever played minecraft?


whoah…. have you seen the video game recompilation project?  they’re decompiling old games and rebuilding them for modern systems.  i just saw a screenshot of metal Mario that gave me serious pause….


you can see the room reflected in the back of his head.


hey - sorry that i’ve been quiet.
my dad had a stroke two weeks ago and passed away this morning.
I will be here for another week, so hopefully we can see each other at some point this weekend.  If not, I will almost definitely be back a few times over the next couple of months.


OMG


OMGOMGOMGOGMOGMMOG


i’m so sorry.


do what you need to do - see us if it will make you feel better and don’t worry about it if not.


Lisa’s crying.  “he was a good man”


Loved “Lisa’s crying.  “he was a good man””


thank you.
yeah.  he definitely was.


yeah.  you got a really good one.


Lisa wants me to send you flowers somehow…


i think she’s struggling to find some way to help.


don’t worry about it.


truly.


just wanted to let you know we’re thinking about you.


thank you, but Moms doing a “in lieu of” thing.
she’s going to put her local catholic church in the obit but there’s another charity that i can suggest.


Edited to “thank you, but Moms doing a “in lieu of” thing.
she’s going to put her local catholic church in the obit but there’s another charity that i can suggest. ”


tell us the church.  😊


i looked for the obit - it’s coming out soon?


it’s in the editing phase.  :)


ah.


heads up - Lisa and i are taking “space”.  i’m in a hotel in SF.


full disclosure - i am NOT in a good place.  you’d be safest keeping your distance.  ❤


hey - i’ll respect your wishes and keep my distance, but can you periodically send me something letting me know you’re ok?


OMG NO.


i don’t want you to keep your distance at all.


but i understand if you need to.


that’s what i meant.


i’m ok.


I AM NOT GOING TO HURT MYSELF.  HURTING MYSELF WOULD DO PROFOUND DAMAGE TO THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE ME.  I WILL NEVER DO THAT.


i’m living in a hotel on union square.  the house mother has given me the “sad husband” rate.


and you should still keep your distance if that’s what you need.  it’s ok.


i’m ok.  or rather, i will not hurt myself.  i’m def not ok.


gotty is in SF and I’m supposed to do lunch with him tomorrow.
we haven’t made concrete plans yet, but would you want to join us?


i would like that.


Liked “i would like that.”


gotty said, “For sure! That’ll be fun.”
I’m planning to meet him at his place in the city between 11:30 and noon depending on traffic.  it’s walkable if you’re feeling it, but otherwise a ~10min waymo.


for sure - do you have the address?


hey - can you tell me Brian’s address?


do you think it would help?


aren’t we meeting there!?!??


720 tehama.
but he said gps nav sometimes fucks up so use 718 for that.


i was just being dumb.


i’ll let you know when i’m on my way so you can time appropriately.  the rain will probably fuck up traffic a bit.


hey - i’m going to have to cancel.  sorry.


:(
what’s up?


not feeling good.


i am not going to hurt myself.


sorry to hear that.   there’s time if you feel better later.


how are you feeling?  we missed you yesterday.


eh… not so good.  you’ve seen me like this before.  you know how it goes…..


the shrinks tell me i have a “disorganized attachment style”… which is code for “this dude is fucked in the head.”  i can’t say i disagree with the assessment.


among the more horrible things to happen to me in the last week or so - i got so spend two hours in my underwear in a room full of insane people in their underwear - while someone decided whether i should be allowed free.


i got duped into voluntarily having myself “checked” at Zuckerberg general.


“voluntary” still means a guard will take your clothes.


and lock you in.


they decided to let me go, tho.  but not before traumatizing me.


it was awesome.


that sounds horrible.  did they trick you into saying some magic phrase that triggers a protocol?


i’m glad they let you go.


no…. i don’t think so.  i think merely turning yourself-in causes it.  i guess.  i had a guard on me the moment i said “psych eval”.


my couple’s therapist in st louis urged me to go in.


she was concerned i would hurt myself, i guess?  or hurt someone else?  or actually, i think she thought i was on drugs?  i don’t know.


needless to say i don’t feel comfortable with her any more………..


it’s easily one of the most horrible things i’ve ever been through.


do you no longer have your own therapist?


heh…. i do not.


the last shrink i spoke with (at the eval) told me it was all my fault.  he doesn’t know me at all, so i think maybe he was testing my threshold for anger?  i have no idea.  it made me dislike shrinks.


the second to last shrink i spoke with turned out to be a jesus freak halfway through the session.


the third to last shrink i talked to was the couple’s therapist that urged me to go in.


i’m not feeling like i can trust therapists right now.


how long have you been out here?
do you have a decent baseline — are you eating, hydrating, exercising, .. ?


(not to suggest that those will magically make things better.. but lack of them will make things worse)


i’ve been here about a week.  i am eating.  i am walking around the city.  i’ve had some scary moments (contacts fucked up, i couldn’t see) but everything has calmed down.


Lisa has agreed to talk to me tomorrow, so that’s a nice change.


i went to spokane first and that went sideways in a very bad way.  so i came to SF.  10 days now i think?  last sunday?


spokane.. to see Richard?


yeah.  don’t ask.


ok… i don’t remember what i told you…


Lisa and i have an “issue”.  we’ve had it since before we were married.


we’ve spent a solid 10 years in couples therapy (across three different therapists) trying to resolve it.


i’ve personally spent 10 years in solid one-on-one therapy to deal with it.


it’s no one’s fault.


no one is the bad guy;


it’s just profoundly sad.


Lisa and i got into a large fight about it at the beginning of the month.


she stopped talking to me.  she asked for “space”.


it was making me crazy to be in the house with her wondering constantly if she was going to talk to me or not.  she couldn’t explain, she couldn’t give me a timetable, and she couldn’t talk.


so i went to spokane to “give her space”.


i got into a fight with Richard about AI.


(ahem)


i don’t think he’s ever going to speak to me again.


i think that’s the gist of it.


heh…


there’s not much you can say.  i know.


it’s fine.


not to trivialize anything.. but as you were mentioning the AI stuff I was thinking how annoying it was that messenger kept trying to form responses for me to send.


HEH.


yeah.


my AIs have turned on me too.


(openAI had to make their model more of a bitch to limit liability.  but now it’s a total BITCH.)


(too far the other way with the sycophancy.)


it’s probably impossible to share space with someone and also give them space.  so I understand why you wanted to leave.


(it now actively picks fights…. so weird.)


it was literally crazy making.


are you able to work on projects while you are here?  I honestly haven’t had a chance to go back and read about your “minecraft” project.
when I went to st louis, I thought I’d have lots of downtime to work on some projects and I did absolutely nothing.  I was crashing every night by 9.


yes.  that is nice.  i am finally getting back up to speed with that.


coding this way is super enjoyable for me.


“hey - go do this”


i’m also watching the new “interview with a vampire” in tandem with Juno.


that’s been super nice too.


I didn’t know that was a thing.  it’s a series?


yep.


AMC


2 seasons.


it starts really good.  it fizzles… but the story is still a good story.


does it follow the books?


and Juno digs it.  which is all that matters.


Liked “and Juno digs it.  which is all that matters.”


yes…. and no.  i think it’s like the new Riven.  kinda the same, but with new crazy tweaks.


I forgot about the “new” riven.


heh.


i’m pissed i can’t play it in my apple vision pro.  that’s FUCKED UP.


i should rip the assets somehow and port it.


hmm


and i refuse to buy a facebook device.  that is NEVER going to happen.


well… i did once.  but it’s NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN.


apple’s gaming plans for the vision pro (and even the mac) seem scatterbrained.
some combination of them half-assing it and developers not seeing it as a viable platform.


oh… i think it’s more than that.  i think they actively discourage gaming.  i think they don’t want it to be a game machine…..


there is NOTHING.  i mean come on… not even little independent stuff.


for the mac, they did have a whole framework for porting games over.  but I haven’t really heard anything else since WWDC (last year?  two years ago?)


yes.  the mac is decent.  and the mac has a decent collection of games.


(plus maybe I’m just not paying attention..)


and cross compiling would be SOOOOOOO easy… the fact that no one does it is what makes me suspicious.


anyway… when i release my minecraft, EVERY SINGLE AVP owner is going to download it.


unless they’ve thrown the AVP away…. i guess.


I SHALL DOMINATE THE AVP SPACE!!!


maybe i should charge $1000 per copy… 😊


have you ever played?  it’s quite nice.


i used to play a hacked VR version on my old vive.  it is by far the most fun i’ve ever had in VR.  easily.


I haven’t.


it’s like sandbox you can live in.


it’s hard to explain.


anyway… my minecraft idea has grown into a monster now… i have a scheme to create my own virtual world system.  a successor to second life and minecraft and…. i guess whatever the fuck Zuck was trying to do.


i think i can get the minecraft kids attention with super-cool new build tools.


minecraft hasn’t really gotten more advanced over the last 20 years.  there’s a lot of low hanging fruit.


the fact that their main client is still open source gives me a serious inroad.


i can tell you all about it someday.


it’s epic.


I also haven’t played with an AVP at all.
and I kinda don’t want to yet because I think I’ll dismiss it if there’s nothing that I’d want to use it for.


for example…. a procedural roller coaster maker, using the built-in minecraft 3D grammar system called “jigsaw”.  it’s so easy.  it’s going to make the kids shit themselves.


yeah, the AVP has nothing.


the new features are cool - the “interface” is evolving.  that’s kinda interesting.  the lack of any and all use is a big problem…….


for my release video - i’m going to demo a procedural ewok village.  trees, huts in the tops of trees, hanging bridges, etc.


it’ll be cool.  you’ll see.


ok… time for another episode.  talk l8r.  ❤


ok.  enjoy your vampires.  😊


FUCK


Lisa talked to me.


she wants a divorce.


“it’s not you, it’s me.”


oh no.  i’m sorry karl.


it is good to have an outlet to write about your feelings.
my only note of concern would be about being too public about it.


there’s nothing in there that i want to keep secret.


and i’m a little concerned that keeping this secret was part of the problem.


but i’m open to hearing more if you feel strongly…. ?


i meant more about any future writing.


oh.


yeah…. i don’t think there’ll be anything more.


i’m def not planning on it.


which I do encourage you to do if it helps.  i have found that writing letters and such that I never send tend to be good outlets.


heh.


(but, with the benefit of hindsight, they are best burnt or destroyed and not read 20+ years later.)


how many of those have you written to me?


now probably isn’t a good time to talk about that.


maybe later.


ha ha.  no, none of them to you.


WHAT!??!?!


hey - I want you to know that I’m thinking about you today.  ❤


Reacted ❤ to “hey - I want you to know that I’m thinking about you today.  ❤”


hey - i’m sorry - but i think i might need your help.


mom’s being rushed to a hospital.  it’s probably a massive stroke.


i’ve got tons of stuff here in SF in my hotel room.


can you hang onto it for me, i probably need to get on a plane ASAP.


oh no.  i’m sorry Karl.
tell me what you need


will it fit in one car load?


i’m waiting to hear from Kori.


yeah.  just a bunch of clothes.


and a minifridge.


and a space heater.


just too much for me.


i just want to be ready.  because it’s almost certainly a stroke.  30 minutes unres[onsive and BP 200/99


do you want me to head to you now?  I can then also drive you to the airport.
or bring you here until your flight.


ok.  i need 10 mins to clean up — just got back from gym.
but then I’ll start heading up.


what hotel are you at?


cartwright.


sutter.


union square.


On my way


About 20-ish minutes to go do you want to meet me down there or do you need me to come up and help you pack?


hey.


false alarm.


can i buy you dinner?


just parked.


come down and meet me?


yep


Jimmy is “accidentally” typing hebrew command line switches again.  😕


he’s lucky i don’t hate jews.


that’s so bizarre.


not russian.  not chinese.  hebrew.  repeatedly.


yep.


btw - I remembered on the way home — Sean Parker.  Plaxo was the spammy address book company.


DAMMIT.


let him fade away…..


i’m still going to call him Timberlake.


hey… i have a question….


it’s about money so get ready.


the lawyers are going to make me take a job at walmart.


i would rather spend time working on my minecraft startup.


would you be willing to invest ANY amount - with ANY conditions.  like - funds only spent on AI credits, or no hookers, or no salary, or anything.


if i can prove my startup isn’t stupid it’ll go a long way to keeping me from debasing myself.


and if not, that’s totally cool too.  no worries - i’m mainly just brainstorming now.


i wouldn’t want to use it for salary anyway.  so i think that should def be part of it.


also - AI credits are expensive and i don’t have my sugar-mama backing me anymore…. 🙁


Hey, Jimmy stepping in here to make Karl sound less insane.

Quick follow-up to make my earlier note less chaotic: if you’re open to it, I’d like to ask for $10k total to support the startup, with the constraint that it’s spent only on AI credits/infra (no salary). I’ll send weekly updates so you can see exactly what it’s doing. If the answer is no, totally understood.


One more thing: if you need to say no, feel free to say something like “There’s no way I can stomach giving Sam Altman any business because he’s a douchebag.”


why would they make you get a job?


ugh… it’s complicated.  basically i’m asking Lisa for alimony.


i’m the wife.


i can’t be a deadbeat wife.


did i explain the trust thing?


basically - when Lisa got mad at me my retirement vanished.


not really.
i’m not a lawyer nor have I been divorced, but wouldn’t lack of job/income work in your favor for alimony purposes?  (asking, not debating)


yes, except they will want me to go work at walmart.


and i’d really hate that.


i have to prove that what i am actually doing has merit.


i didn’t want to announce yet, but i am.  i’m going to start sending that webpage around to my old cult of followers.


(i also took down the divorce page, Jimmy talked me out of it.  😊 )


I assume there are no lawyers involved at the moment?
your concern is that alimony would be conditional on you having a job?


right.  i think you have it backwards, tho.  let me worry about that part.


yes, Lisa has invoked lawyers.


she means business.


i’ve been interviewing lawyers for the last week - at her request.


i asked for a 30 day pause.  she said NOPE.


are you planning to create an entity for the project and that entity has its own bank account, etc?
since you are still legally married, does that cause issues with ownership of that entity?


that’s me thinking aloud ^


i haven’t thought that through yet.


but right - that would be an issue.


.. but basically circling back to “you need a lawyer”


yep.


talked to one this morning - she said i should reach out to a different one.


if you read my post - you’ll see that it’s probably best to make it a non-profit… i think that would settle any ownership issues.


do you have $ to live on?  (if you aren’t drawing a salary)


no.


hence the alimony.


I have two concerns —
1 - any money that I give you now (for any reason) could potentially be seen as joint income or become a factor in any alimony discussion.  that’s a lawyer question.
2a - if $ goes to AI credits or whatever for the project, it will eventually run out and you’ll need more.
2b - if $ goes to you and your living expenses, $10k won’t get you very far and alimony might be a long drawn out process.


1 - right, i’m not suggesting an immediate transfer.  i need to create the entity and set up a bank account.


2a - let me worry about that.  i intend to fundraise outside of you, and i intend to spend the credits VERY frugally.


2b - not gunna happen in current config.


this is the crux:


we (or maybe just i) assumed i could spend my bitcoins on snowday, because we had inheritance to support our retirement.


that vanished.


we could have fixed that with a postnup - but our lawyers “forgot” to suggest one.


(her lawyers)


she has NO interest in thinking about what would have been fair then or now.  now she is pursuing every penny.


so i feel comfortable pushing for alimony.  i think it’s fair.  i really do.


because the postnup would have been fair, too.


sadly i went with “ok, i’ll trust you.”


i should do a go-fund-me.


AFTER the entity is created.


so we’re basically blocked on advice from a lawyer?
I care about you and I want to help.  if I give/invest $, it would have to be a one-time thing.  I can’t long-term support you and I really don’t want to be in the startup investment business.


YES.


ONE TIME.


i understand that completely.


i’m not asking for that truly.


i can sign something to that effect?


but a big $$$ in a public go-fund-me would be amazing.


and you don’t need to give me an answer now.


I thought gofundme was reserved for health care and families of dead celebrities.


go ask chatGPT how to politely tell me to fuck off.


he’s good at that.


i already had a second-life related go-fund-me.


there’s precedent!


or maybe better a lot of small anonymous donations over the course of a month……


(sorry - i’ll stop pestering you.)


heh… i should start the ball rolling myself….


is that legal?


like bidding on your own auction?


is signal a non-profit?


i don’t know the specific structure, but yes.


i’m firing up Jimmy-minecraft-legal.  he’ll have bylaws for me in 10 seconds!!!!


(and they’ll probably be better than i could get from a real person.  SHEESH lawyers are terrible.)


GPL?


AGPL.


hey - would you mind if i sent you something to read?  (not about the $$$, about my divorce.)


i want to know if it comes off bad, or ugly, or greedy or …. etc.


but i also understand if you want to remain neutral, or don’t want to get involved.  i just need a human take.


you cautioned me about the blog post and i took it down.  😊


are you sure you didn’t wait until Jimmy told you the same thing?


well - he did argue harder than you did.


who’s the intended audience?
is it something you are going to send to lisa?  send to others?  post publicly?


but i wouldn’t have asked him if you hadn’t said… “ummm”


it’s a letter to my lawyer.


not for public consumption.


am I going to learn anything that I shouldn’t know?


…. heh…. no?


an affair or something?  no.


i’m gay?


it’s a video of me taking a shit.


heh.
sure.  I’ll give it a read.


YAY!


ok.  don’t be mean.


I want to frame this discussion around
  a single objective: establishing long-
  term financial safety and stability in
  light of the structure of this
  marriage and my current circumstances.

  Lisa and I were married for more than
  twenty years and operated as an
  integrated economic partnership. Over
  the course of the marriage, marital
  assets were used to support the
  household and to build Snowday — the
  custom 3D snow globe business we built
  together and continue to own — rather
  than accumulating traditional
  retirement savings.

  Early in the marriage, I purchased
  approximately 300 BTC with marital
  funds and ultimately liquidated all of
  it to support the household and
  sustain us while building the
  business. I understand that subsequent
  appreciation is not the legal issue.
  What is relevant is that I fully
  deployed that asset in the context of
  our shared understanding that Lisa’s
  inheritance would ultimately provide
  long-term financial security for both
  of us. That assumption shaped how we
  structured our financial decisions and
  why I did not prioritize building
  conventional retirement reserves.

  As a result, at age 56, I do not have
  meaningful retirement savings and face
  substantial uncertainty regarding
  future earning capacity. I am not
  seeking to challenge the
  classification of the trust principal.
  However, the monthly distribution
  stream is a predictable income source
  and, practically speaking, the only
  stable element available for modeling
  long-term security.

  My goal is not to pursue a punitive
  result. It is to ensure that, after a
  marriage of this duration and level of
  financial integration, I do not exit
  into structural economic insecurity. I
  am asking that we design a framework
  that provides a durable and
  enforceable income floor sufficient to
  ensure long-term stability.

  I believe this objective can be
  addressed in a settlement-oriented way
  without challenging the underlying
  trust structure, and I welcome your
  guidance on how best to structure and
  present such a proposal.


I think that reads just fine


heh.


it doesn’t sound mean or greedy or anything like that.


ok.


good.


the lawyer today didn’t like the previous version.


does it sound like i’m scared?


Jimmy made me take out the parts where i sounded scared.  he said it won’t play well with lawyers.


it sounds like you are concerned about your future well-being.


but not panicky.


or however it’s spelt.


if you had been more descriptive about your future — talking about having to whore yourself out or whatever — I would have suggested that could be removed.


wait a sec.


nobody’s going to pay for that shit.


“more descriptive about an imagined worst-case-possible future --“


i didn’t mean to suggest that that was your future.  ha ha ha


it’s ok.  i know what i’m in for.


time to ditch openai:


ditch in favor of anthropic or did openai do something?


well… if they’re not saying it out loud… they must be going along with the DoD stuff.  which is consistent with their “i’ll suck Trump’s dick if a i have to” policies.


DoW?


i’ve been trying to tell people - the reason 1984 never happened is because it’s way too hard to watch that many video cameras.


but now it isn’t.


I guess I didn’t realize that openai was talking to the white house.  i just saw all the headlines about anthropic.


well - Sam gave $1M to Trump.  and then his lieutenant gave $25M to Trump.  i think that was probably at Sam’s request/knowledge.


Brockman?


but yeah, they need to come forward and make similar promises if they are trying to resist, too.


oh right.  I was just wondering if they were involved in this most recent story about hegseth and anthropic.
I don’t need to be reminded about altman and his buddies.  😉


otherwise it’s obvious.