Michael Will 🍁

A harbinger of #EdgeComputing.
The inventor of Microchess for the KIM-1 used every scrap of RAM, storage, and automation he could scrounge. It was brilliant. Leave no transistor unused.

#8-bit #Computing #GOFAI #Chess

"The Wizard of Oz" (1939).
A tale of snake oil, flimflammery, androids, witchcraft, lies about the nature of true intelligence, lots of wind.
It had it all.

#ArtificialIntelligence

On this International Women’s Day, we remain vigilant about what we must protect.

And we remain determined about accomplishing the work ahead.

Exactly at that time, the world was approaching a watershed moment. We were about to enter a time of widespread #ComputationalThinking. An era of breath-taking democratization of numeracy, logic, and DIY exploration.

Instead, we got zombification by eye candy, culminating in #enslopification. Alas.

If your pop-sci book shelf is looking for a new addition - Emma Chapman's Radio Universe is coming out this week. It's genuinely delightful and well worth picking up a copy!

👉@dreochapman.bsky.social
📖: www.waterstones.com/book/radio-u...

UX testing was still decades away. The thrill of having an actual microcomputer to play with was everything back then. Like the penny farthing bicycle, its mere existence was the miracle, comfort meant little.

#8-bit #Computing #GOFAI

Almost 50 years ago, I met the creator of Microchess.
gofai.discourse.group/t/gofai-and-...

#8-bit #Chess #GOFAI

I wish Isaac Asimov had lived longer. Fortunately, he penned a lot of wisdom before he died. And he still lives on in many minds.

TESS Planet Occurrence Rates Reveal the Disappearance of the Radius Valley Around Mid-to-Late M Dwarfs We present the deepest systematic search for planets around mid-to-late M dwarfs to date. We have surveyed 8134 mid-to-late M dwarfs observed by TESS with a custom built pipeline and recover 77 vetted...

Interesting new M dwarf #exoplanet occurrence rates paper! I'm glad to see that the new TESS result (with much lower uncertainties) is consistent with our Kepler result!

arxiv.org/abs/2602.23364

Way back when, there was an article in one of the early computer mags where some guy published his entire BASIC mega-program called 'The Creator'. It was a program that wrote programs conjured up by user prompts and decisions rather that coding prowess. So 'vibe coding' isn't new.

#8-bit #GOFAI

Begun, the Slop Wars have.

#GenAI vs #ComputationalThinking #Forth #GOFAI

Radxa Cubie A7Z in a similar form factor to the Raspberry Pi Zero.

I was curious to figure out what the beefiest single board computer under $30 is (AKA C$40). The first real standout is the Radxa Cubie A7Z. The model with 1 GB DDR4 meets that. Features an Allwinner A733 SOC: 8 CPU cores, PCIe 3.0, WiFi6+BT5.4, RISC-V coprocessor. 🤯

Also available with 2/4/8 GB.

Harbinger of GenAI.

#Forth #GOFAI #ComputationalThinking

It's not nice to anthropomorphize Mother Nature.
She cares naught for our parlance or philosophy.
Lest we end up collecting and curating butterflies.
Or even worse, butterfly stamps.

#Forth #ComputationalThinking #GOFAI

So COBOL rides off into history. #FORTH is still here, and always will be. GenAI cannot write useful software in 20 bytes.

#GOFAI

There seems to be a bifurcation happening. One path is slop, the other is rigour. The clearest example is North America.

Of course, I said the same thing about MS-DOS 3.0

#LegacyComputing #GOFAI

My 2 cents worth (although Canada got rid of pennies in 2012, so it rounds down to 0).

I'm not rich, but it isn't money that stops me from buying cool stuff, it's space. Anything bigger than a Pi Pico is hard for me to find desktop space for. USB peripherals and connectivity really help.

#GOFAI

Thank you so much for making the book available. Music theory and music sociology have long been blind spots for me. Bayesian models of 'anthropological psychohistory' have led me to study syntonicity, but almost everything I find is a music reference. (I'm an old industrial systems dev).

The picoXpert Story picoXpert was one of the first (if not THE first) handheld artificial intelligence (AI) tools ever. It provided for the capture of human expert knowledge and later access to that knowledge by gener…

The Motorola 6809 was the first processor to open the #GOFAI door to personal computer enthusiasts. No ivory tower, no vast corporate or academic laboratory, no exorbitant buy-in; just curiosity, imagination, and maybe a soldering iron.

www.scidata.ca/forth-a-synt...
www.scidata.ca/the-picoxper...

Matching Veterans with NASA Citizen Science NASA citizen science projects provide fitting opportunities for veterans transitioning from service or looking for another community with purpose.

Air Force veteran Kimberly O’Brien explains why NASA citizen science and veterans go together so well. www.military.com/feature/2026...

Ignorance offers no protection. AI isn't new, "The Forbin Project" was a flashing red light over half a century ago. If only we had embraced widespread #ComputationalThinking back then instead of the mindless sifting of eye candy. Alas

I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them
- Isaac Asimov

"There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen"
- Petrarch

#GenAI #Writing is #Slop

A data center often takes many Mega Watts, while a human mind takes two dozen Watts. We've been scaling in the wrong direction.

#Forth #Efficiency #Sustainability

An abstract representation of the #LEGO mindset has been available as a programming language since 1970.
It's called #FORTH.

#ComputationalThinking #AssemblyTheory
#Concatenative #ThreadedLanguages

Way back in the mists of time, I had a school trip to a science centre. In a big room full of cool exhibits, there was one where a digital circuit board generated an artificial voice giving a reasonable facsimile of one word: "coffee".
It attracted the biggest crowd. We're wired to believe.

#Robots

Original
Correct
Important
- choose two

Tinney's cover for the August 1980 Byte was about threaded languages, especially #Forth. Reading that issue, and a few supporting materials, and bit of earlier experimentation with #Forth landed me a job as a professional Forth programmer. Almost half a century later, I'm still using it.

#GOFAI

I long ago gave up on using my (post Asimovian) computational psychohistory model for (far) future prediction (but not archaeology). Maybe I'll take another look at GPR. Thanks.

"I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them"
- Isaac Asimov

#GOFAI #ComputationalThinking #Syntonicity