#history

3 articles

Pong Wars on the Commodore 64

Imran Nazar recreated a JavaScript animation demo on 1982 hardware and wrote up every decision along the way: 6510 assembler, fixed-point math with no floating point available, a CPU bug turned into a cosine lookup. When he lands at 30fps, he can tell you exactly why without running it. It's very cool.

What's Old is Old Again

A Reddit user on r/SaaS is looking forward to the consulting rates he'll command once the wave of projects trying to dig out from under AI slop hits. He's not wrong, but he's dated the pattern to 2010 offshoring when it's older than that, and the lesson never sticks: coding was never typing.

The AI Dilemma

The software industry has a short memory. Every generation of tooling has made the same promise: let the machine handle implementation so humans can focus on the problem, in mostly disappointing ways. Now LLMs are making the same pitch, and the instinct is to either panic or sneer. Both responses miss the point. What changed isn't the promise - it's how much of it is actually being kept. The question worth asking isn't whether to adopt, but how to do it without hollowing out the understanding that makes the tools useful in the first place.