Now for the chronology. This is the main "blog-like" part of the site. There are other parts of the site that contain ongoing web logs as I add to them. So this isn’t everything. Explore, have fun, and thanks for visiting!
Visit ratfactor.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2022 – Oct 2026
Software Engineering 9Programming Languages 6Life, Learning & Writing 5Tools & Productivity 2Career & Management 2Systems & Performance 1
Edit: Oh! Hello, there, HN . For context, we're talking about elementary school here. More importantly, I'm not arguing that students should get quick answers from encyclopedias instead of reading books and other primary sources. I'm arguing that Wikipedia is better than "a Google search," which is a position I will…
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
This is a technique I’ve used in actual for-pay software, but most recently in my text adventure game editor, Hiss .
A talk by Dave Gauer , 2023. Made with minslides , which I made for this talk . Use the J and K keys to go forward and backward. You can also just scroll down like a regular web page. Toggle notes/annotations with the N key.
Note to the impatient: You can just scroll down to the drawings of fitted sheets being folded. You won’t hurt my feelings. (I’ll never even know.) But you may want to bookmark this page for later instead. You can get fast at folding fitted sheets. But to learn how to fold fitted sheets is going to take some patience…
My Implementing a Forth article got some great feedback, particularly around the subject of tiny Forth implementations. (And it was an excuse to list some of the tiniest Forths I’ve seen.)
This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook. (Update: 10 years reached 2022-03-31, 100th notebook 2022-07-28.) After many attempts to write this up, I’m just going to disgorge it all. This article is long and rambling and I make no apology for it. Feel free to skip around to any part…
This page is a mini-site for my Snobol excursion with links to separate pages for my:
(Image of "Four-Armed Chuck" programming a PDP-11 is from my giant write-up of Forth .)
Don’t want a big old bloated multi-kilobyte executable with a data segment, but you do need to store some data?
The files mentioned in this article are available for viewing or cloning here: the 'pf-bedtime' repo .
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.