I bought a few older FPSs in the Switch sale...

Gotta love when that harp kicks in #VGMwednesday https://youtu.be/nNFJsxfjG8Q

I have a BASIC programming question that I'm sure has an obvious answer, but why is it LET when assigning a value to a variable?

Like, LET a = 7 just sounds as though a has an innate need to be 7 and you're finally allowing it to happen.

Why not just SET? #RetroComputing

Something for the #asstodon crowd. These two were chilling out in the shade today 🫏

LLM's pull people in by 'feeling' very human because we all have a language model inside us. It's how we go from implicitly understanding a situation to communicating it, and that path is so well trodden that many of us even have an internal monologue where we move between our understanding and the words expressing that without ever speaking them.

And when we speak to other people, from our own experience, we believe that their link between language and understanding of the situation is just as ingrained.

But they're not the same thing! We know this because people speak different languages, but still have the same understanding of a situation.

Unfortunately, that Idea is so much a part of our existence, that when we meet something that's just a language model, that's just designed to create words that sound like the answer to a question, we assume intelligence.

But there's not.

There's no understanding of the situation.

It's just a pretty word blender

The main problem with membrane keyboards is that hooves tend to push more than one key at a time.

Videogames make sense. The worlds are easy. The rules are well defined. Conversations have easy to navigate dialogue trees. Response choices are rarely ambiguous. Everything is signposted. Handy text says "xxxx will remember that".

Apparently I don't do so well in real life.

Side projects are an endless cycle of managing to make the smallest amount of progress in a stolen hour during the evening. Thinking about it the rest of the day and realising that you need to redo everything you did last time because there's a better way to do it.

I have decided to write something for the ZX81 in BASIC. here's a sneak peak at level generation and dealing a hand of cards.... Albeit at a 5x time lapse! 😅 This system does not do things quickly.

A few people asked about the code for my #ZXSpectrum #raycasting demo, so I've put the .tap files here if you were interested.

... Be kind, the graphical glitches get much more noticeable near the walls... #RetroComputing
https://hundstrasse.com/2025/02/24/zx-spectrum-simple-machine-language-raycaster-demo