It's less about the strength of coffee than about your metabolism. I used to be unaffected by caffeine, and now it takes a few sips in the morning to mess with my sleep in the evening - sth that started happening in my twenties I believe, possibly liver-related.

Interesting, do you have any good links for this?

I can have a coffee a bit before bed if I really want. I also used to think I had a "high metabolism", but don't say that anymore since it comes off as kind of bogus.

I've been struggling with early waking for a few months, and recently experienced improvements by meditating before bed. Have you ruled out sleep apnea?

I wouldn't hold it against anyone wishing my great grandfather shouldn't have existed for playing a minor role in Nazi Germany. Altman is in cahoots with a government that just a few days ago threatened to end a whole civilization. So no, I don't understand where you are coming from or why you're disgusted at the comments you linked.

It's kinda wild - It's now only publicly objectionable when its against an extremely privileged and powerful person??

Oh no !! /s

Meanwhile that same person implicitly condones violence - for example getting in bed with the US gov.

They don't need defending on HN.

The former are doing way more damage to civilization

Give the latter a nuclear bomb and see how true that stays

You might be too young to remember it but they said the same thing about North Korea.

When they actually got a nuke all it meant was that the US stopped threatening them, halted practicing manoeuvres in preparation for attack and generally just left them well alone.

Iran has probably realized by now that if they dont get a nuke the US and Israel and will keep slaughtering their schoolchildren.

Sometimes we're the brutal savages who need to be stopped, impossible though that is for some people who have more of "racial loyalty" mindset to comprehend.

I'd try to strike a good balance between CS fundamentals to teach students how to think and solve problems rigorously and patiently, and soft/leadership skills such as nonviolent communication, project management, business analysis.

Do you think there's enough such opportunities that we'll all be able to pay our rents?

If we dispense with the waste that goes into fighting slices of the pie and focus instead on making a bigger pie? Absolutely.

If we try to double down on the zero sum games that we learned from our parents, maybe not.

Which model is being used? Is there an unrestricted open weight model that could be used?

Sounds like MJ pioneered not only financial simulators, but also vibe coding

This is amazing! Having no knowledge of Basic, a.) what makes the rewrite "impossible"? b.) how do coding agents perform on the codebase? It might make for a neat benchmark similar to ARC

I gather the version of Basic is not Object-Oriented.

So the program most likely is flat: a bunch of global variables (and possibly memory addresses), and instructions ordered by line number, rather than functions or methods.

Functions yes, and actually PowerBasic does have OOP. Michael didn't use it but it's there.

No line numbers except for goto labels, but gosub is the challenge for transpilation.

Apparently PowerBasic was the successor to Borland TurboBasic and complied to a native executable. So this wasn't an interpreted 'line number' Basic like our kiddie computers. It also probably had the Borland Windows GUI stuff.

(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)

No line numbers but you can use numbers as goto labels. It uses Dynamic Dialog Tools which is a Win32 wrapper which most of my "job" is gutting out those calls, implementing Single Responsibility in functions and plugging in Electron UI. And trying not to break EVERYTHING...

Thanks for clarifying. Super smart approach to adopting legacy code to a modern interface.

Maybe I missed it, but are you still using the Powerbasic compiler or have you worked around that somehow?

Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!

The BASIC from that time was pretty limited, IIRC.

No real functions, only `gosub` and `goto` so everything is a global variable.

I think even assembler for x86 is easier to unravel.

PowerBasic does have functions. Go there is thousands of goto and gosub which would need to be unraveled which there isn't really a 1:1 for gosub at least in say C++. Or EXIT IF... The bane of my existence...

a) At the time it was impossible for me. I think I could actually do it now. But now that I can read the BASIC... what would be the point? If I wanted it cross platform, I will build a virtual machine. b) Claude Code has performed exceptionally well. I haven't tried the most recent Codex update. But I don't see the point in spending thousands of dollars on tokens to rewrite it when it works perfectly fine. It would be much cheaper to have Claude Agent build the virtual machine. That's just my opinion. If it ain't broke don't fix it I guess. I do want to bring it to mobile though, whether that's a phone app or responsive website.

Can the original code simulate the stock market as it operates today? The main reason I would want to convert the engine to a modern language is to make it easy enough to understand that I could add features.

I think it will definitely need refactored in order to do an overhaul like that.

But the best way I can answer your question. WSR does not claim to simulate real markets. It probably leans too much into fundamentals for our time, at least for the blue chip stocks in the game. What is actually is is a M&A and tax evasion simulator on top of a financial market sandbox to create tax implications to be avoided.

I see. So no 'meme stock' and no 'Wacky POTUS' modules!

Maybe as DLC!