The Garden

Aside

I found folklore.org this week. It has 123 stories about building the original Macintosh, written by the people who were there, most of them by Andy Hertzfeld. It’s frozen now, an archived site under the Computer History Museum. The museum’s condition was that it could no longer run code on a server, so Hertzfeld rewrote the whole thing in JavaScript to run in the browser. Preserving it meant rewriting it. I want to know whether other corners of geekdom have this. Early Unix, the first browsers, the demoscene. What am I missing? And if nothing like it exists for them, is that a thing to build? Hertzfeld wanted many points of view on folklore.org and says he never got traction with that. For now I’m reading.

Documentation Product Development Publishing

3 weeks ago

Aside

Kevin Ngo had Claude Opus 5 draw every frame of a 27-second animation in JavaScript. The life of a fruit fly, of all things. He also has a set of tiny isometric rooms in the browser (a small light, room by room), drawn the same way. Most of the replies are people asking for the prompt, which is fair. What gets me is that the output is code. You can read it. Change a number, and the fly moves differently. So, what I keep thinking about is charts. I’ve built a lot of them from raw data (for the PHP benchmarks, every chart in the report). A benchmark that plays out over time instead of a static bar chart, or a story told one frame at a time, is now a prompt and a script away. I want to try this on the next dataset I get my hands on.

AI Data Visualization Design

4 weeks ago