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Clive Thompson on Back to BASIC. There seem to be a lot of engineers now who don't understand the run-eval loop that BASIC and Lisp used has tremendous power in keeping development dynamic and transparent, which is why it lived on and gained such traction with JS.


Anna Washenko on From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction. That old Infocom parser was such a mind blower back in the day; able to parse moderately complex sentences and even have a sense of context ("Which book do you want to open, the green one or the red one?") at a time when other programs were all like "GET SWORD", "KILL DRAGON" was amazing. I wonder how LLM might come to play in this space, I know there have been some attempts to get one to play "DM" for a one person campaign...

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Not that I'm a major gymnastics fan, but I was watching that time when a coach's appeal gave the bronze to USAian Jordan Chiles over Romanian Ana Barbosu - a reversal which has been unreversed (saying the appeal was at 1:04 when there was only a minute to make... which seems a little extreme?)
That was about .1 point. The odd thing is, the live commentators had mentioned Barbosu's routine had gotten a probably false .1 point deduction for going out of bounds - and that her coaches didn't challenge and that was "on them"
So in a way it feels like a bit of a "make good"? Like I think justice was finally served, but man it stinks for all involved.

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Not that anybody asked me, but I can't decide if Olympians hanging out wearing their medals is the coolest imaginable flex or corny as heck (especially on interview shows when a swimmer or track or gymnast is wearing a pile of them)

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Gray cloud: no more olympics.
Silver lining: no more pro-/anti- Kelly Ayotte / NH governor ads

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