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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • In a way, this happened to my daughter. She is studying in a foreign country, the courses are in English (not our native language), and of course she is writing all her papers in English, too. Which she is very good at, so the texts are usually perfect from a language point of view. She had already been rated “native speaker” in school although she actually isn’t, and worked as an editor on an English language story website back then, fixing American and British native speakers’ spelling problems).

    Other students actually asked her what AI she was using to write her papers. Guess who was seriously pissed…




  • I like scientific cooking. I’m a big fan of Sebastian Lege, who is a cook and food designer, and who knows all the little chemical tricks of the food industry. I wish he would publish a cook book: On the left, a recipe for the dish as made by a professional chef with normal ingredients, on the right the recipe for the same dish as made by the food industry.

    I remember one show where he made “Banana Milk”. The banana flavor was made from vinegar, some alcohol, and some other acid…

    Just today, I applied one of his ideas. I made a Chinese dish with chicken, and added baking powder to the marinade made from soy sauce, ginger, garlic, honey, salt, oil, and chili. And it was amazing!




  • As I described, I’d need way fewer, as the optimal computer counter-move would already be included in the next board.
    So if you placed your X in the top left field in the starter image, the link would directly go to a field with the X in the top left, the O in the center position, and links in all the remaining seven positions. And of course the pre-calculation will eliminate some of the boards already, e.g. if the player or computer already won after the third move, where placing a fourth will not make sense.


  • Indeed. One could have done the whole thing with a simple, static HTML page.

    On top an empty board with 9 clickable fields. Each of them links to a new, pre-rendered board on the same page, with the move of the player and the perfect reply of the computer already in place, and 7 clickable fields. Which link to other, pre-rendered boards with 5 clickable fields remaining, then with three. The last one only has one field open, so this could be pre-filled as a player move.

    All in all this would result in 9x7x5x3=945 pre-rendered boards max on that page. And, of course, two links to “You won” and “You Lost”. I’m no HTML junkie, so I have no idea how many bytes one would need to produce such a board, but I’m sure this all could easily done way below 170MB.


  • When I started with computers, the cheapest way to get software was to buy a computer magazine which published software as printed source code. Yes, you had to type page after page from that listing to get a game or utility running. On top of that, I had NO means of saving such a program - it took some time until I could afford the cable to attach a cassette recorder as a storage device.

    So I got quite good at two skills early on: Typing fast - and debugging. I basically learned debugging code before I really knew how to program.

    And how did I get into coding? I remember the first attempt of understanding code was to find out: “How do I get more than three lives in this game?”

    And from there it went to re-creating the games I’ve seen on the coin-swallowing machine at the mall that I could not afford to play, but liked to watch.

    Since then, I’ve done about everything, from industrial controlles for elevators to AI, from compilers to operating systems, text processor, database systems (before there was SQL), ERPs, and now I do embedded systems and FPGAs.

    I’ve probably forgotten more programming languages than todays newbies can list…


  • If you don’t care for the looks, just put it down where needed, and fix it to whatever is around with cable ties.

    I did the same in my daughters shared accommodation. Officially they had wifi in all the student rooms, but my daughters room basically had no reception, so I ran a cable from the other end of the flat where the router was down the staircase into her room for a local AP. When she moved out, it was a quick job with a pair of pliers to get it out again.


  • Got a bunch of RPIs, some of them retired.

    One of the active ones runs a MediaWiki engine (if it detects my home wifi on startup, it acts as a mirror slave to the master installation on the server, if not, it opens a wifi with my home wifi’s credentials and offers the wiki as read-only).

    Another one runs a DB that controls a number of ESP8266 clients controlling lights, motors, and sensors.