For me, in the early 80s, this was all about state. Reliably keeping a state, well defined, numbers or strings, bytes preferably, and being able to act upon them.
Only later I learned that this, ehat I was missing in the analog world back then, was what made up the core of a turing machine.
So this beauty is still the same for me. Just the sheer amount of state that is available and provided by others make the concept much less powerful than back in the day.
Now AI brings that back a bit, by finding the right items that you can keep and iterate on. But we tend to let AI also do rhe iteration and that introduces that non-deterministic character that the computer had overcome.
So, no wonder, that I, and quite a few others, at the moment, still mostly use AI for finding and typing code to describe the structures for the machine, but keep trying to define the iterations ourselves, guaranteeing clear insight and access to the state we are trying to work with.
Everything else is more like working with an assistant back then (or today), extending your actionable potential instean of your mind. And depending on how you see the world or what the tasl at hand might be, you might prefer one over the other, control over action, insight and perspective over tinkering with the matter to push it somehow in the right direction or implementing a known process.
But that state thing, still priceless, timeless. The right augmentation to our fuzzy brains and better than paper, since, who thought, we can express the algorithms in the same way.
So, I guess I will always see this beauty, even in a simple flip-flop, coin, switch and any array thereof, and anything that can be controlled by that binary configuration.
Nice. I loved his Short Circuit tune back then and looked at its code with my cartridge's monitor to extract it into a standlone player shell of mine (which might actually have worked out). Great to see the sources for the addresses and their meaning that one had to make guesses about 40 years ago...
Also in the linked player under Short_circuit.sid , btw. Thanks!
Great project and write-up. I wonder whether most of those "hints" are really needed, though, as you are already using Claude CODE. Aren't things like "simple" and "clean" assumed to be part of its system prompt already (idnividual documentation style etc can't be, of course). While they were useful when using a general LLM for coding, I would think that they are now part of the overall setup of any coding agent. These days I run more into problems with language and api version drifts, even when specified beforehand.
Everytime OpenAI comes up with an new fascinating gen model it also allows for that bluntly eye-opening perspective on what flood of crappy und unnecessary content we have been gotten accustomed to being thrown at us. Be it blown-up text description and filler talk, to these kind of vodka-selling commercial videos.
It's a nice cleansing benefit that comes with these really extraordinary tech achievement that should not be undervalued (after all it produces basically an endless amount of equally trained producers like the industry did in a - somehow malformed - way before).
Poster frames and commercials thrown at us all the time, consumed by our brains to a degree that we actually see a goal in producing more of them to act like a pro. The inflationary availability that comes with these tools seems a great help to leave some of this behind and draw a clearer line between it and actual content.
That said, Dall-E still produces enough colorful weirdness to not fall into that category at all.
Only later I learned that this, ehat I was missing in the analog world back then, was what made up the core of a turing machine.
So this beauty is still the same for me. Just the sheer amount of state that is available and provided by others make the concept much less powerful than back in the day.
Now AI brings that back a bit, by finding the right items that you can keep and iterate on. But we tend to let AI also do rhe iteration and that introduces that non-deterministic character that the computer had overcome.
So, no wonder, that I, and quite a few others, at the moment, still mostly use AI for finding and typing code to describe the structures for the machine, but keep trying to define the iterations ourselves, guaranteeing clear insight and access to the state we are trying to work with.
Everything else is more like working with an assistant back then (or today), extending your actionable potential instean of your mind. And depending on how you see the world or what the tasl at hand might be, you might prefer one over the other, control over action, insight and perspective over tinkering with the matter to push it somehow in the right direction or implementing a known process.
But that state thing, still priceless, timeless. The right augmentation to our fuzzy brains and better than paper, since, who thought, we can express the algorithms in the same way.
So, I guess I will always see this beauty, even in a simple flip-flop, coin, switch and any array thereof, and anything that can be controlled by that binary configuration.