It's not dead. It's included with every copy of Desktop Excel and probably will be for 20 years. Press Alt-F11 and away you go (enable Developer tab first i guess?). Forms, SQL connectors, collections, alot of other stuff even XML parsing is in there somewhere if you dig around enough.
I mean it's like. not being developed anymore and not added to, and its a pain to have it deal with modern stuff like https but. yeah. its only mostly dead.
Surprised Wildberger’s youtube channel wasnt in here.
People ask whats the point? For me the study of the infinitesimal vs finite has really helped me better understand issues of precision and approximation in computers. I feel like I know exactly why 1/3 plus 1/5 is not exactly 8/15 in my Calculator app. Or why points in my 3d object face are not coplanar after rotation. Or why games have weird glitches when your character is too far from origin point. Or why a spreadsheet shows rounding issues
Jaquard loom was one of the first machines that could operate based on a set of symbols / patterns encoded on a punched card. Computers ran on punched cards until the 1970s. Voting machines used punched cards until pretty recently (infamous "hanging chad" from 2000 US election).
I had this feeling of alien math when I went thru his videos on ancient Babylonian math. They were very serious about the everything divided by sixty stuff. Good times.
The other thing it can give you is computationally exact results since rationals are closed over division. Sine is interesting because where the input is rational the output is almost always irrational and where the output is rational the input is almost always irrational. In computation the first time you use sine in a program you have injected approximation. If you want to build things like reproducible code and geometric caching it can be interesting to compare using a purely rational computation system to an approximative system.
Even bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
How I started.
Once upon a time there was this magical kingdom called Radio Shack. But it's people left the Earth and went to Capacinor - the Unshorted Lands, a place where batteries are always charged and every circuit board has a schematic.
Nowadays there is Pololu, Robotshop, Sparkfun, Adafruit, and Battery Space. Maybe Microcenter, Ebay, and Temu.
I spent a while on an open source project debugging some bizarre crashes. Cant remember exact detail but something like Someone was throwing an exception inside a destructor which had been triggered inside another exception. It was layers deep inside a massively templated 3rd party dependency library. so I like wound up parsing the string in the exception message and doing weird logic to make the program keep going since the exception wasnt actually a dire situation as far as the main program was concerned. So Exceptions can be fine in theory but I understand the idea that a ban can simplify a lot of things.
Ran linux in an 8 mb 486 in the 90s. X ran in 256 color mode and twm or mwm were the window managers. It was so hard to use though. Had to setup modelines settings for your monitor in a textfile and theoretically could damage it with wrong iputs. Programming X fuggedabout it - I was from turbo borland msdos land where everything was neatly documented and designed with clear examples to make programming easy. I was lucky to get an x program to even compile. Hard to find books back then. Pre Amazon. Xv image viewer probably the only thing i used X for. Actually used the machine most of the time in the text mode terminals using alt function keys and used lynx as a browser (before javascript… but gopher was becoming obsolete at that point… ftp still popular though ) with random assortment of svgalib programs for any graphical stuff. Still there was something magical about seeing that black and white check pattern come up and the little X mouse cursor appear.. like there were… possibilities.
Floating point numbers are not closed under addition. They are not real numbers and not rational numbers. FP is on a grid whose size changes the farther you get from 0,0. For example 0.1 doesnt exist in fp nor does any number not representable by binary fractions. Also its a quirk of opengl and most 3d renderer to get issues when one surface coincides with another so the preview renderers like the little bumps. Also the underlying CGAL rendering kernel can be problematic when planes are almost nearly coincident but not one hundred percent. Finally OpenSCAD has an internal grid it tries to snap things to which can also cause issues. Not sure if the new Manifold renderer has these issues but in general the loss of info from ascii decimal to FP is the source of most of the problem. Those professional cad programs have enormous resources behind the scenes to make that stuff appear easy when its actually very complex and basically an illusion. Rotating anything using sine and cosine instantly loses information so planes with more than three points become non planar ever so slightly. So this assembly you made with “two surfaces touching” is not touching after rotation due to sin eing transcendental function simulated on a computer with finite time and memory. For example. These fancy CAD systems all have ways to deal with this.
Also since LLM generated content is not copyrightable what happens to code you publish as Copyleft license? The entire copyleft system is based on the idea of a human holding copyright to copyleft code. Is a big chunk of it, the LLM part, basically public domain? How do you ensure theres enough human content to make it copyrightable and hence copyleftable….
Every copy of Microsoft Excel includes Power Query which is in the M language and has tables as a type. Programs are essentially transformations of table columns and rows. Not sure if its mainstream but is widely available. M language is also included in other tools like PowerBI and Power Automate.
That immediacy is mostly thanks to OpenCSG which is essentially a magic trick to quickly fake 3d rendering of booleans between 3d objects using stencil buffer of gpu. http://opencsg.org/
In other words it renders the cylinders cubes spheres etc and their unions differences etc, to a 2d screen without actually calculating the intersection of those meshes / solids in 3d space.
This is the special thing about OpenSCAD design is they figured out how to build an abstract syntax tree that could either be sent to OpenCSG, CGAL (old engine), Manifold (new engine), or even the bare bones 'ThrownTogether' renderer (ancient engine on machines with no gpu that just draws 'negatives' as green blobs iirc).
It should be theoretically possible for any CAD program to do this. its just a lot of work.
well the fact that you can wire the Rotary Switch to power and the thing physically rotates --- that's definitely Haptic Feedback that i dont ever recall seeing in a computer. lol.
that manual is wild too. entire section on games.
reminds me a lot of those old radioshack "build your own circuit" boards. the wires to components especially but also the manual, the way it just builds up dozens of examples from simple to complex, so if you really wanted to, a child could work their way through it slowly and understand everything.
looks like the inflation adjusted cost would be around 900 bucks today.
so it appears the entire text has been Translated with non-breaking space unicode x00a0 instead of normal spaces x0020, so the web layout is considering all paragraph text as a super-long single word ('the\00a0quick\00a0\brown\00a0fox' instead of 'the quick brown fox') - the non-breaking space character appears identically to breaking-space when rendered but underlying coding breaks the concept of "break at end of word" because there is no end as 00a0 literally means "non-breaking"). per Copilot spending a half hour explaining this to me, apparently this can be fixed by opening web browser developer view, and copy/pasting this code into the console.
function replaceInTextNodes(node) { if (node.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) { node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue .replace(/\u00A0/g, ' '); } else { node.childNodes.forEach(replaceInTextNodes); } }
We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be. Different human languages have different concepts of time, numbers, nature, place, intention, relationships, and so forth and so on.