In the 1990s there was a company called Be. Be created an operating system called BeOS and tried to compete against Macintosh and Microsoft. Obviously this didn’t work–but we got a very clean design for a desktop system out of it. That heritage continues as Haiku.

The Slow Lane

Despite being written in and for C++, Be is basically running the Smalltalk object model. Objects send messages to handlers. Handlers then take them in to their mailbox in some suitable fashion and process them as they can. It’s a very standard model that SDL and Allegro have also used for games since the 2000’s.

In the continued adventures of billionaires trying to force everyone in to chastity belts¹, the government is now mandating platforms implement “age verification APIs.” In the most basic cases these are just simply having a User is-adult flag that the platform can use to send all other age filtering down some pipeline.

The silliest case is systemd patching in a metadata field about a user’s birthdate. This is the absolute minimum for compliance and goes with California’s law without any of the Palantir contract bullshit elsewhere². People are setting their hair on fire about making freedom forks³ that remove the age checks. Especially funny is people setting their hair on fire expecting the results of enterprise corpoware to “take a stand” against the state by refusing to implement the APIs.

Occultism and esoterica can be a very fun topic–but the etymology of the word occult and occlusion, simply means that which is difficult to see.

Let’s start with a silly concept: there’s an apple on a nearby table. But the apple is a cosmic void–trying to perceive it directly just results in seeing a big ole chunk of nothing. How can we get the apple off the table? Well you can still see the table. You can see a big existential horror gap where the apple seems to be. You can see everything around that is not the apple. Therefore you can reason about this odd artifact and still manage to pick it up¹.

I tested out GLM 4.7¹ to do some LLM-assisted programming with Nim². One of these tests was to take hand written spec docs based on a PDF of how the LPeg³ parsing machine works. The goal was to cram through as much of the bootstrap phase as possible with it. It was able to create a recursive parser bsaed on some examples⁴ and mostly get it right. Then I realized while working on the AST extractor that there was a flaw in the spec.

Space Drilling Sim came out a couple days ago. I played it for a few hours.

tl;dr if you love being given a one quart cup of water and told to piss a gallon or be fired: this game is for you.

The conceit of the story is blah blah global warming blah energy crisis. A rock of Unobtanium hits the earth. Generic evil megacorporation goes waow we can burn this for fuel. Wagies get shipped off to die in the coal “draxnium” mines.

The game SpaceSlog was recently released. I played it for somewhere around an hour.

• It wants to be “Rimworld in space”
• Written in Godot
• You can put “temporary stockpiles” outside of your ship. This is the game’s idea of a sorting table¹

That is all I can say nice about it.

The things I can say I didn’t enjoy about it:

• “Reroll” didn’t work when I clicked it. I couldn’t regenerate my captain character.
• Hairstyles seem to be assigned at birth. I could neither reroll to get one I liked nor pick one.
• My captain kept complaining about a “lack of privacy.” I presume this is because they did not have a dedicated bedroom. This was farcicical as they were the only person on the entire ship complaining about a lack of private time².
• Standard “ate without table” nonsense³. Sleeping on the floor debuffs⁴.
• Selecting stockpiles requires clicking on floor tiles multiple times. Once selects the floor tile itself, then it selects the room, and only then does it select the stockpile.

I was able to enter “high burn” but this doesn’t seem to give you a map⁵. I guess we just go forward until we can’t go forward anymore. I never saw any indication that we were near anything worth stopping to see. Nor any indication we were headed anywhere at all but “forward” somehow.

The Neo-Reactionary

Any project who does not lynch any contributor who ever once touched an LLM is slop.

They seem to think resisting AI by just isolating everyone who talks about it¹ is going to work. I don’t think these people are going to be very happy going forward–you have developers like Torvalds and Bellard testing out the models and finding the large ones to be good enough at low level work to admit they are useful sometimes. The amount of software that is going to have no interaction with anyone who interacted with Claude is asymptotically zero. That position is a house on a broken foundation that is sinking in to the swamp.