I still use my TI-89 from high school, but I'm interested to find if there are any open hardware/firmware calculator projects with basic engineering tools and a CAS.
I can't speak for the person you're replying too, but I use -- for emdash for two reasons: I never remember how to type an actual emdash in linux/X11, and more importantly, I do most of my writing in Asciidoc which converts -- to an emdash automatically. It's nothing to do with bot detection or whatever.
But it does get me confused sometimes because in LaTeX (and other markup languages) -- gets converted to an endash whereas it takes three hyphens --- to make an emdash.
I haven't tried it for anything myself yet. The paper provides several benchmarks. The emphasis during training was on multi-language support (over 1800 languages are represented in its pre-training data, which is 40% non-English) and non-copyrighted training data... and the benchmarks seem to suffer for it.
Apertus is the open source 8b and 70b LLM from swiss-ai. They've published both the base and the instruct sft models. Very cool that projects like this exist.
Though see the Plain Text Accounting[0] movement for something maybe more unixy than Gnucash. I download .csv files from my bank and credit card issuers and import to hledger[1]. hledger has its own rules engine for filtering/transforming imported entries, but you could also preprocess the files using any unix tool before importing if you needed to.
In case it helps anyone else, the first time I tried to run purr I got "OSError: PortAudio library not found". Installing libportaudio (apt install libportaudio2) got it running.
Interesting that you didn't use dead reckoning at all to return to the nest. I didn't think I could get away with that. And somehow using a second channel to extend the trails never occurred to me.
I just came back to check if anyone else was discussing their entry, so thanks for posting your write up!
I wrote mine by hand just testing it using the in-browser simulator. I initially used subroutines to try to keep things structured but then resorted to inlining most things (and flattening as much state as I could to bare registers) to try to speed things up, though i never quite got my ants to always move within the 64 op step.
> Thunderbird delivers RSS feed items the same way as email, so you can apply filters to mark them as "read"
This is a good idea. I use Thunderbird only for a small number of feeds I want to read every post from. I used to also use a separate feed reader for my "river of news", but eventually I stopped looking at that and just loadded hackernews or reddit when I wanted a distraction. But I might try Thunderbird for more feeds and just auto-mark most of them as read so I can browse at my leisure.
I guess it's not prefatory remarks or disclaimers that I find so grating, but the explicit "I'll explain" (or worse, faux conversational "May I explain?" "Let me explain") followed immediately by the explanation.
This is a nitpick, but since this essay is over 15 years old now I don't think the author will mind. This phrase always rankles me:
> Let me explain what I mean.
It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me. I guess it acts as a "hack" to try to impart some gravity to what follows without actually having to write a convincing introduction, but unlike "it turns out" it can almost always just be deleted to improve the flow.
I don't know when the term became widespread for gui-style terminal programs, but the wikipedia entry has existed for more than 20 years so I think it is an older term than you imply.
I cloned my voice and had it generate audio for a paragraph from something I wrote. It definitely kind of sounds like me, but I like it much better than listening to my real voice. Some kind of uncanny peak.
https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...