Someone just discovered why some of us enjoy shell scripts and Emacs so much. No need for LLM, just small hacks to solve specific problems in limited contexts that works well enough, most of the time, for one user.
Even phones these days have pretty good scripting environments (thinking of Shortcuts on iOS).
I’ve had really good luck with Claude helping me write shortcut scripts. For example, I wore a CGM this year for a bit and I couldn’t find an easy way to get the raw data. It did log everything to Apple Health and a shortcut was able to extract it and append it to a spreadsheet where each row was a reading.
Not likely to happen. There is geminiprotocol with gemtext though for those of us that are fine with that level of simplicity.
Work towards an eventual feature freeze and final standardisation of the web would be fantastic though, and a huge benefit to pretty much everyone other than maybe the Chrome developers.
Sonic Pi is SuperCollider, but using Ruby instead of the default sclang language. Overtone is similar (and possibly originally by the same developer, iirc?) but using Clojure, and is also missing from the list.
Yeah, that's some glaring omissions - not including Sam Aaron's work makes me distrust the whole list. SonicPi is fundamental for teaching kids music and programming and Overtone is just mind-blowing - I watched people DJing music while evaling things in Emacs, that looked sick.
Sadly it looks like there is no support kept for MS-DOS, which means this can not run on my favorite (most stable, future-safe, and portable) virtual machine, DOSBox (or any of the many other ways of running DOS software)?
Army men came in various sizes, and one of the most common one was always close to 1:72, or at least that has been the case since the 1980's.
I remember one of my friends had larger, maybe 40mm army men, but my collection was only the smaller size ~1:72/22mm. Same sculpts and colors. Various random no name toy brands.
The green army men of Toy Story and (for example) the Army Men video games were (searches) 1:35. The ones that were that shade of green (or a particular shade of tan—gotta have the other side) and in those poses with those exact sculpts, that every toy aisle or toy store had (in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the US) even if they did also have others.
Can’t edit, so self-reply: the legitimate current producer of this style appears to be called “timmee toys” and a search turns up a whole bunch of exactly the army men of that type, plus a ton of vehicles and such made from the same type of plastic that look familiar from decades past.
My guess is the vast majority of those were/are cheap, generic, Army Men types, usually clones of clones of some 1960's Airfix sculpts. You could buy those in large bags in toy stores in the 1980's and these days you can get literal buckets with hundreds of them online. Much cheaper than the hobby boxes.
I remember as a child I managed to convince my parents to buy a box or two of real Airfix figures in some hobby store, but the bulk of my old collection are generic no-name clones.
There are many 1:76 sets as well, even if 1:72 is more common.
Anecdotally, wargamers do not use those minis much. Some older gamers started out with playing more or less improvised wargames using 1:72 (mainly Airfix) figures in the 1960's or so, or playing games like Fewtherstone's wargames perhaps, but it is rare to see them now. Historical minis as a whole are less common now, but those that still play either use metal figures or figures from more wargame-specific companies (usually using more common game scales like 10mm, 15mm, or 28mm).
Most 1:72 ranges seen on that site (that I spent many hours on) are not that great for gaming. Lots of useless poses that are more for dioramas (or as kids toys maybe?). For gaming you need more just simple infantry walking or firing in some kind of good combat pose, but you often only get a handful of those in a set of 40+ figures, so it does not become very cost effective. Many poses look good, but not what you probably want to build armies for a tabletop.
1:76 is a very popular scale for model railways in the UK, so I wonder if they design figures for that audience, then paint them in fatigues to expand the market range.
The US preferred 1:87 historically. English 1:76 and American 1:87 trains run on the same size track, but the English models are typically built slightly over-size because their smaller bodies wouldn't fit a good motor easily.
Sweden used to have very cheap electricity. That's why there are so many houses with electric radiators. Far more expensive now.
That is why so many houses here now have air-to-air heat pumps. That is by far the cheapest way to improve heating in an old house with only electric radiators and no existing water heat pipes.
GW-BASIC, and probably other MS BASICs, only looked up destination lines once, then replaced the GOTO code with a direct pointer to the destination. Something similar may have been used for other symbols, but I don't remember for sure?
Guess the ZX BASIC did not do that, or it would have improved the measurements seen in the article?
BLUE Book of GW-BASIC is full of details and tricks like that and some of it probably is useful for other BASICs as well.
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