jbgreer's comments

jbgreer | 1 month ago | on: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

My read on the reception of Steve’s post is that there are largely 2 camps, one of which thinks he’s given them a concrete tool to use, and the other of which thinks he has given them something to think about. I read his experiment as suggesting an agent architecture akin to Erlang supervisor trees, i.e. agents are cattle, not pets, and should be monitored and processed as such, with the obvious caveat that context matters.

jbgreer | 2 months ago | on: Bag of words, have mercy on us

I thought this article might be about Latent Semantic Analysis and was disappointed that it didn’t at least mention if not compare that method vs later approaches.

jbgreer | 1 year ago | on: The Sperry Rand Corporation

I fondly recall being a site operator and programmer on a Univac 1100/62. Remote sync terminals (UTS 40s?) and UTS 4040 cluster controllers. Fun times.

jbgreer | 1 year ago | on: Firmware update hides a device’s Bluetooth fingerprint

I’m with you: I read the link and think they are referring to BLE advertisements. The frequency of such advertisements is configurable. AIR, the advertisement interval has to be a multiple of 0.625msec. Per the spec, a random delay of 0-10msec is added in between the interval to aid in collision prevention.

I’ve mainly seen “BLE beacon” used to refer to types of devices, especially ones that primarily advertise.

There are some devices, like BLE-based remote controls, that advertise very frequently, I assume to reduce latency between a user’s action and response by the receiving device. It makes for a very noisy environment if you’re playing at home and not filtering based on MAC, etc.

jbgreer | 1 year ago | on: Suno has raised $125M to build a future where anyone can make music

In the free tier, Suno owns all of the Output. I'm wondering when someone will make a song, realize it's pretty good, and attempt to recreate it after creating a paid tier account.

Subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, if you are a user who has subscribed to the paid tier of the Service, Suno hereby assigns to you all of its right, title and interest in and to any Output owned by Suno and generated from Submissions made by you through the Service during the term of your paid-tier subscription. If you are a user of the free tier of the Service then, as between you and Suno, Suno owns all Output generated from Submissions made by you through the Service, and, subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, Suno grants you a license to use such Output solely for your lawful, internal, and non-commercial purposes, provided that you give attribution credit to Suno in each case.

jbgreer | 2 years ago | on: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

I transitioned from Apple Pascal (based on UCSC p-system Pascal) on the Apple ][+ amd //e to Turbo Pascal on DOS in the early 80s. Turbo Pascal was a blast: the very quick compiler, good feedback, colorful editor, and use of the Wordstar keybindings, which I already knew, made for a great experience.

I recall writing programs large enough to require use of the overlay facility, which essentially let you page in different parts of your program under DOS.

I also recall meeting David Intersimone, a great ambassador of Borland, sometime in the 80s - might have been later 80s - when he visited my university as a guest of the local ACM chapter.

jbgreer | 2 years ago | on: What we learned making a plastic injection mold with a Chinese mold maker

Read the article and found myself nodding along. If you work with larger Contract Manufacturers, they often have design for manufacturing centers that will perform mold analysis and suggest modifications. They often have the advantage of having worked on lots of different designs.

And even further down the road: make sure to account downtime in your production schedule for mold maintenance.

I see others commenting on registration, certification and approval matters and I’ll only say: do not underestimate the time and cost of that for a global product. This landscape changes all of the time. One minute a country will accept evidence of an FCC filing; the next minute they require in country testing with a local authority.

jbgreer | 2 years ago | on: The other fruit company, Apricot

I have a small connection to an early part of this story.

In 1982/3 I worked for a local data processing / software consultancy / hardware reseller doing a variety of odd jobs. One day the owner came in and said they were going to become a reseller of a new computer, a Victor Technologies machine, as computers and terminals on IBM System 3X machines via Perle protocol converters. I remapped the keyboard of the Victor to allow the right shift to serve as a 5251 Enter key.

Victor had rented space in a new office tower and held a grand opening a couple of weeks later. I demonstrated our wares. There wasn’t that much interest, so I wandered around all of the display booths, learned what they were demoing, and in some cases took over. I remember 3 distinct features: 1) variable speed disk drives, which meant the Victor could store more data than am IBM PC. 2) a built-in codec for recording sound, especially speech, and aiding playback. 3) a stylus/touch-screen monitor option, which could be used for CAD etc.

I had an option to buy a machine for half price. I was an Apple IIe guy at the time and couldn’t have afforded it anyway, but it was a sweet machine. Sadly, that didn’t matter much, and Victor went out of business soon enough.

jbgreer | 2 years ago | on: In Erlang/OTP 27, +0.0 will no longer be exactly equal to -0.0

As someone who programmed assembly on a one's complement machine* 40 years ago, this discussion is interesting, from both the "haven't we learned anything" and the "makes sense to me" camps.

More interesting to me is how they are introducing this change, both in the previous OTP and next, and how they will arm people with tools to hopefully identify and understand the impact. I wonder how many folks will actually be impacted?

* Sperry Univac 1100/62

jbgreer | 2 years ago | on: Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France

For alternate long distance French routes, check out Chemin St Jacques.

I note this trail passes through St Jean Pied de Port, and thus could be used as a natural connector to walk across France and Spain.

jbgreer | 3 years ago | on: VeinViewer technology helps physicians and nurses see a patient's veins [video]

VeinViewer was invented in 1995 by Herb Zeman, a professor at The University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center. [ Disclosure: Herb’s a friend, but I wasn’t involved and only know most details second hand. ]. Commercialization of the device has a contorted history. Search for Luminetx if you want to read more backstory….

jbgreer | 3 years ago | on: The Restaurant Industry’s Worst Idea: QR Code Menus

Interesting. As a counterpoint, I was in Norway a month ago on business and as a tourist. Did the Norway in a nutshell thing from Bergen to Oslo with time in Bergen, Flam, and Oslo. I used the Bergen and Oslo day passes for unlimited public transport in those cities. The later was especially handy, as it generates QR codes for both public transport and entry to most museums. My travel passes were handled via barcode docs on my phone. My tickets to a concert in Oslo was via an app on my phone. Route planning for site-seeing (which bus, tram, ferry, or rail) was via an app on my phone.

I paid for restaurants using credit cards directly to payment terminals.

I found the whole experience very easy and enjoyed how much I could handle on my phone.

jbgreer | 3 years ago | on: BlueJ – A Lightweight Java IDE

Back in 2006-8 I had an NSF teaching fellowship, and my peers and I used BlueJ as an introductory IDE in high school CS classes. BlueJ has a feature called “Object Bench” whereby one can instantiate and invoke methods on an object. The main thing I remember from that period is that Microsoft copied that functionality into Visual Studio, calling it “Object Test Bench”. Microsoft even admitted they were influenced by feedback from BlueJ users. Imitation, flattery, right? Then Microsoft filed a patent covering Object Test Bench. Suffice it to say Kolling et al. weren’t happy, and the news made it to several popular sites (Slashdot, etc.). Having been called out so publicly, and having basically admitted their knowledge of prior art, Microsoft withdrew the patent application.

jbgreer | 3 years ago | on: VRML

I still have my autographed copy of Mark Pesce's 1995 book "VRML - Browsing & Building VRML", subtitled "The definitive resource for VRML technology." I am pretty sure I met Mark and got that autograph at a SIGGRAPH meeting in Boston, MA that year. There was so much excitement and energy at the time.

[edit] I came back thinking, "We have got to take advantage of this." For a little while, there was an effort. The bigger players got involved, 'standards' started shifting, and the realities of our business network sunk in. Sigh.

jbgreer | 4 years ago | on: Who wrote this shit?

I have often said to other devs that if you write code long enough, you’ll eventually find some crusty piece of your own code that will make you want to throw up.
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