Anyone like James Michener?
Any conversation
bill gates built microsoft by making computation cheaper faster and harder for government to restrain. now that he's a billionaire no longer dependent on the free market for his own success he's discovered the virtues of taxing the next wave of computation. 1995 gates would have called it a tax on innovation. classic pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you politics.
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
spiral
for(y=-5;y<5;y++){
s=""
for(x=-10;x<10;x++){
r=Math.hypot(x/2,y);a=Math.atan2(y,x/2);s+=" .:*#โ"[((r+a*2)%5+5)%5|0]
}
console.log(s)
}::.........:::***##
.. ...::**##
######## ..::**#
###********# ..::*#
#**:::...::*# ..:**#
. ##**::. ..::**##
##**:.. #*::***##
##**:.. ######
. ##**::... ...
. ##***:::......:::
