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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I write programs for myself. I have learned enough C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic to write small things and even larger things like a visual file manager for MSDOS, or my own version of the venerable STAR TREK game. I even know of big O notation (But I don’t know how to calculate it for a given algorithm)

    But I never wanted to be a programmer - having to work on other people’s programs 8 hours a day. That would ruin programming as a hobby. When I am self-directed it is fun.

    I was a Data Center tech instead. Minding 3 football fields of other people’s computers.


  • I use chatgpt to make up stuff, imagine things that don’t exist for fun - like a ‘pitch’ for the next new Star Trek series, or to reword my much too succinct prose for a manual for a program I am writing (‘Calcula’ in gitlab) or ideas for a new kind of restaurant (The chef teaches you how to cook the meal you are about to eat) - but never have it code or ask it about facts, it makes them up just as easily as the stuff I just described.













  • I am interested in all things random or mathematical. I have written programs to simulate the decay of radioactive ‘stuff’, a program that simulates the CA Lottery by flipping a coin (someone said that your chances are about the same as flipping a coin 25 times in a row in a run of either heads or tails).

    On the mathematical side, I have written a program to run the 3n+1 (Colatz) series and record process features, like counting evens and odds, the number of steps, and the maximum value found in the series. Perhaps the average of the values in the series would be interesting to calculate…

    Combining mathematics with randomness - I have worked on the 100 prisoners idea, How many loops are created in this run, and how long is the longest one? If any loop contains more than 50 members then the prisoners lose and don’t get to go home.

    I have ideas for a traditional basic interpreter only lines are labeled not numbered.

    I have a traditional Star Trek program that I have written many times improving slightly each time.