Ted's Tidbits

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:01:39 -0500

I finally got around to reading the Ted Chiang piece in The Atlantic about how LLMs aren’t conscious. It is excellent. Everyone should read it.

www.theatlantic.com/philosoph…

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:15:39 -0500

Cory Doctorow:

What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from “creativity” can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears “creative” doesn’t mean that machines are human.

For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call “creative” in a human doesn’t mean that we defined “creativity” too broadly, it means that we defined “human” too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.

Fri, 22 May 2026 09:08:41 -0500

Jake Savin:

The hard part is finding all the invisible details, and the bargains that were made with the environment it came from.

And Frontier had a lot of those.

As someone who has attempted a few times to port Frontier to modern platforms, I can confidently say that he nails it. I love that phrase: “bargains that were made with the environment it came from.”

I’ve been enjoying watching his progress, which far surpasses anything I ever did with it.

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:36:13 -0500

Today’s Dallas Morning News front page 😢

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:41:56 -0500

The reason type coercion is important is that it provides an answer to the question: “What happens when you try to add two values of different types?” Let’s say you have a number and a string

3 + "test"

What should happen?

When you make the language you get to decide.

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 18:07:02 -0500

Type coercion is one of those language features that is really powerful because, when done well, the programmer using the language doesn’t even notice it.

9 years, 6 months, and 4 days

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 10:21:41 -0500

9 years, 6 months, and 4 days ago, I started a new job with a scrappy, but growing company doing really cool things. Today is my last day as an employee of this company, but not because I’m leaving.

Two years ago, were acquired by a much larger company. So far, we’ve been able (actually encouraged) to preserve our culture: our ways of working together and treating each other.

I’m hopeful for what the future may bring. But today, I’m also a little sad. The beginning of a new era is also the end of an old one.

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 10:00:52 -0500

I don’t like doing test posts, but I need to see if this gets posted to my Mastodon account.

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:35:59 -0500

Achievement unlocked: audible fan noise on my MacBook Pro M3.

The secret is to use Excel and max out its row size.

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 12:35:11 -0500

Finished reading: Entrances and Exits by Michael Richards.

As a Seinfeld fan who had written him off after his outburst at the Laugh Factory years ago, I appreciated hearing his story. He has lived a fascinating life and has an incredibly thoughtful perspective.

📚

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 11:37:26 -0500

I’m trying out the Vivaldi web browser, and I’m just blown away by the number of configuration options. I’m going to stick with the defaults for a while, but it seems that if there’s something I don’t like about the browser, I could probably change it.

Building a Programming Language: What is a Tokenizer?

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 10:31:31 -0500

Let’s say you want to make a programming language. The first thing your implementation needs to do is tokenize the input. What does that mean?

Your implementation will be a program that reads an input string and interprets its meaning, analogous to the way we read sentences and interpret their meanings. Consider the following sentence:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

When a human reads this sentence, they look at it and see words. But when a computer reads the same sentence, it just sees a bunch of characters:

'T', 'h', 'e', ' ', 'q', 'u', 'i', 'c', 'k', ' ', 'b', 'r', 'o', 'w', 'n', ' ', 'f', 'o', 'x', ' ', 'j', 'u', 'm', 'p', 's', ' ', 'o', 'v', 'e', 'r', ' ', 't', 'h', 'e', ' ', 'l', 'a', 'z', 'y', ' ', 'd', 'o', 'g', '.'

The process of tokenizing is the process of interpreting a series of characters as a sentence of words.

'The', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog', '.'

That’s much easier to understand now, but we’re not done yet. A list of words followed by a period does not necessarily make a valid sentence. To know if the sentence is valid and what it might mean, we need to know what part of speech each of the words are. Something like:

{ type: Article, source: 'The' },
{ type: Adjective, source: 'quick' },
{ type: Adjective, source: 'brown' },
{ type: Noun, source: 'fox' },
{ type: Verb, source: 'jumps' },
{ type: Preposition, source: 'over' },
{ type: Article, source: 'the' },
{ type: Adjective, source: 'lazy' },
{ type: Noun, source: 'dog' },
{ type: Period, source: '.' }

Now we have something that a computer program could begin to interpret. Each of those items listed above is called a token. It has a type in addition to its source which is the original string of characters.

Just because we have a list of tokens doesn’t necessarily mean that we have a valid sentence, but we now have enough information to be able to determine if this sentence follows the rules of the grammar of the language.

Of course, we’re making a programming language, so the “sentences” look more like this:

local (text = op.getsuboutline ());

And the tokens look like this:

{ type: Local, source: "local" },
{ type: LeftParen, source: "(" },
{ type: Identifier, source: "texttosearch" },
{ type: Equal, source: "=" },
{ type: Identifier, source: "op" },
{ type: Dot, source: "." },
{ type: Identifier, source: "getsuboutline" },
{ type: LeftParen, source: "(" },
{ type: RightParen, source: ")" },
{ type: RightParen, source: ")" },
{ type: Semicolon, source: ";" }

But the concept is the same. The job of a tokenizer is to scan through the input string and convert it into a list of tokens.

Once we have a tokenizer, we can start building a compiler which takes the list of tokens, interprets it according to the rules of the language’s grammar, and generates instructions for the computer to execute. But that’s for another day.

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 19:55:45 -0500

Happy 30th anniversary to Dave Winer’s Scripting News!

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:46:22 -0500

Dallas Morning News front page today

VGA Followup

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 16:58:39 -0500

I need to remember how valuable writing is as a thought tool. The other night I was truly stumped as to how to solve my VGA problem.

As I was finishing writing my previous post, I began to get an idea of where to start debugging my problem. I even said so in the post:

Remember, there’s a break at the end of every line. This means that I need to start loading the character data for the start of the next line at the end of this blank period. There’s also a longer break at the end of each screen. This means that I need to load the data for the first character of the screen at the end of this blank period.

I think this is where the bug is. All the characters in the first column are one half-line (at 320x240) lower than the rest of the screen. My best guess is that I need to start the data load a little sooner during the blank period.

So, I looked for the code that calculates which row of pixels to load, and I found this:

wire [11:0] rom_adr = { pattern_num, vga_vpos[3:1] };

This line says, “the location in ROM is composed of the pattern_num (i.e. the ASCII character) and bits 3, 2, and 1 of the current line”. Apologies to anyone still reading this that isn’t familiar with binary numbers, but those details don’t really matter. What matters is what I put in bold above. We are using the value of the current line to calculate the value of the next character. This works for every character in a row, except for the first character.

When we read the font data for the first character in a row, we are using a value based on the previous row. We need a special case for when we read the first character.

This is what I ended up with

wire [10:0] rom_adr = { pattern_num, (display_on ? vga_vpos[3:1] : next_rom_row) };

Basically this says that if the display is on, use the current line position. If the display is off, (i.e. the blank period at the end of the line) use the next line position.

There was some other work I had to to do calculate that value properly, but it works now!

Debugging a VGA Issue

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 13:23:37 -0500

I’m building an 8-bit computer. I should probably write an overview of the project, why I decided to do it, how I got started, etc, but today I have a problem to solve.

Take a look at the following image:

This shows a VGA monitor displaying text at a resolution of 40 columns x 30 rows. Each character is an 8x8 block, giving an overall screen resolution of 320x240 pixels.

Now, what’s the problem?

Look closely at the first column. Does it look a little off to you? It did do me, which caused me to zoom in.

The first column is one half-line lower than all the following columns.

How can this be?

It’s time to talk about how this is supposed to work.

I have an FPGA that is acting as a video processor (like the VIC II in the Commodore or the ANTIC/GTIA combo in the Atari). I have a character font stored in ROM. There’s also a section of RAM that stores the ASCII values of the characters to display on the screen in order. The first byte in this section of RAM controls the character in the top-left corner of the screen. The last byte controls the character displayed in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

In order to control a VGA monitor, the video processor sends the pixel data (either on or off in my case) for each pixel on the display starting at the top-left, one line at a time, moving left-to-right. This happens at a constant rate, with a fixed-length break at the end of each line, and a slightly longer break at the end of each screen. This process happens 60 times every second.¹

In order to display the expected values on the screen, the video processor must do the following:

Load the next character from RAM.
Combine the value from RAM with the vertical position on the screen to look up the font data from ROM. (Remember each font is 8 lines tall, so we need to know which line of the font to draw.)
Send the font data out one pixel at a time.

As you can imagine, the timing of these operations is critical. We need to load the next character from RAM and the font data from ROM while we are in the process of sending the pixel data to the monitor for the last character.

Oh yeah, one other thing. VGA doesn’t technically support a screen resolution of 320x240, but it does support 640x480. So I’m drawing every pixel twice per line, and drawing every line twice.²

When the processor is outputting the 5th pixel for a character, it starts loading the data for the next character. This seems to work just fine for almost the entire screen, except for the first column.

Remember, there’s a break at the end of every line. This means that I need to start loading the character data for the start of the next line at the end of this blank period. There’s also a longer break at the end of each screen. This means that I need to load the data for the first character of the screen at the end of this blank period.

I think this is where the bug is. All the characters in the first column are one half-line (at 320x240) lower than the rest of the screen. My best guess is that I need to start the data load a little sooner during the blank period.

For a much better explanation of how VGA works, I recommend Ben Eater's excellent video.↩︎
I want a 320x240 screen size because my 8-bit system doesn't have enough memory to support a 640x480 size screen.↩︎

Layoffs Will Continue Until Morale Decreases

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 13:55:16 -0500

Cory Doctorow:

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers' confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Five Dallas Council Members Call for Independent Study of I-345 Removal

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 09:10:09 -0500

Matt Goodman:

That’s the difficulty in this debate. It’s about the city’s future, a generational chance to trade eight elevated lanes of highway for an eventual new neighborhood. The members who added their names to the memo have expressed more interest in analyzing the opportunities removal could present; after all, traffic data cannot account for changes in technology and behavior, both of which inform how frequently people drive. As Councilwoman Willis asked last year, what happens if the city’s economic development plan creates jobs in southern Dallas so residents there no longer have to drive as far to get to work?

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 11:44:52 -0500

This just came in the mail. It’s about time I started trying to understand computers! 😜 📚

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 17:00:56 -0500

I’m finally learning how to solder. I think I’m doing pretty good.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:21:06 -0500

I just started reading: The Apple II Age by Laine Nooney. This is going to be an interesting read.📚

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 12:43:09 -0500

I really enjoyed reading this interview with Cory Doctorow.

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 16:07:26 -0500

Have you ever wanted to start composting, but have been too lazy? Do you have gutters? Are you equally as lazy about cleaning your gutters? I may have some good news for you.

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:51:07 -0500

Things they don’t tell you about owning a home: you will periodically need to sweep your roof.

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:16:44 -0500

In the early days of Twitter, all people posted about was Twitter. We have now come full-circle.