Colin's Notes

What if you want to know the number of digits needed to represent an integer variable in base 10? You may want to know before printing if it will fit within a printed field. Furthermore, you’d like it to be done pretty efficiently. [Read More]

The other day I tried out a Z80 emulator Z80 Pack, and had the idea to make some software for the Z80, which I’ve never done. [Read More]

Sometimes I like to saute sliced sweet potatos with some kale for lunch when working from home. Add a little vinegar and seasoning, maybe a bit of cheese and you’re done. This meal turns out great using typical orange sweet potatos, but fails badly using purple sweet potatos – they’re too pasty and crumbly. They’re almost inedible cooked this way, but I don’t want to waste them. So what to do with the purple variety? Make them into fries. [Read More]

Much like our modern food and environment have made it hard to eat healthily without effort, and our modern transportation and farming and automated manufacturing have made exercise an optional activity, extreme wealth and power make difficult thinking an optional activity for the super rich. The billionaires can’t help it; they’re victims of their own success. [Read More]

The economics of the software business has been really good for developers since the 1980s at least. By developers I mean anyone in the business of making software, not just individual engineers – developers in the Apple App Store sense. Before the 1980s software was mostly a consulting style of business (think IBM.) [Read More]

Here are a few of the best (most disturbing) short stories I’ve read, ordered from newest to oldest. They’re squarely science fiction (maybe the Quickening is a slight exception here,) which only adds to the horror. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural – there’s an explanation, however unlikely. [Read More]

For fun, I’ve been trying out Claude Code on a variety of my personal projects, not expecting much. I am curious to find how hard is too hard for Claude. A fairly straightforward board game proved too much. And then, debugging broken features and adding new language features to a somewhat complex language was a breeze. I have some idea why that may be, and a few suggestions for how to get such good results. [Read More]

AI code assistants will cause great harm to business in the next ten years or so. Why? Because nobody will understand how their software works, what it’s doing exactly, if it’s actually secure, or in what ways it may fail to scale and so many more particulars. To some approximation AI could answer these questions, but good luck with the maintenance. Over years, widespread and deep employment of AI coding will devastate the software development ecosystem companies rely on for healthy cyber-infrastructure – not just application code but operations and security. [Read More]

I’ve tried out most of the AI LLM products at this point. For the most part I haven’t found a use for them beyond short term entertainment. Recent releases of Claude and Gemini have gotten good enough to perform some busy-work coding for me, but anything complicated needs too much review still. But today I stumbled on an actually valuable use-case for writers. [Read More]

This pizza uses almost none of the standard pizza toppings and it tastes great. [Read More]