Dave W Plummer

Here's a topic list for my chat with Lex:

1:22 - First computer
7:00 - Dropping out of high school
14:41 - Joining Microsoft
16:53 - MS-DOS
20:05 - Windows 95
26:52 - The man behind Windows
31:48 - Debugging
37:05 - Task Manager
42:14 - 3D Pinball: Space Cadet
47:13 - Start menu and taskbar
58:12 - Blue Screen of Death
1:00:21 - Best programmers
1:08:22 - Scariest time of Dave's life
1:15:50 - Best Windows version
1:17:40 - Slot machines
1:21:23 - Autism and ADHD
1:40:43 - Fastest programming language
1:44:48 - Future of programming

Some months back, I bought the actual vector screens used to film the movie WarGames and did an episode on getting them working!

If you missed it....
youtu.be/JrwvIKK3D2o

When I ran a software company, the ad vendors would rather get paid by credit card today than by check in 15 days. So they’d knock a couple points off the invoice if you paid that way.

Some months the spend was large enough that even a 1% discount (plus the card rewards) was meaningful money. We paid the cards off in full every month, so it was interest-free.

We had four little kids at the time, so I wasn’t burning the points on business-class Vegas flights. I was turning them into Target gift cards for diapers, formula, and later Pokémon cards and DS games.

We still shop at Target today. The kids are grown, and Amazon is faster, but old habits die hard. Loyalty counts.

I still have my first car, from 1984. My Dad handed it down to me after having bought it new in 1969. So it's been in the family 57 years now!

When I started driving in 1984, the cheapest gas I ever saw was $0.49 a gallon.

Gas is currently $7.35/gal in Montreal.

That's a 15X increase, peak to peak, in my lifetime. Good thing this baby manages a solid 12 mpg :-)

I've got local AI working in a loop on my dual RTX6000s in my @Dell7975 Workstation.

I'm letting it experiment to see if the GLM5.3-Flash AI can improve my custom Robotron-playing AI. I'm having it create a hypothesis, A/B test it, and pick the winner as the new control, then repeat the loop forever.

Here's the prompt. I'm no expert; I'd be curious about how to improve it!
-----
OK, I want you to continue the Robotron A/B hyperparameter testing. Your instructions are to:

1) Analyze the Robotron project, model, structure, and architecture, looking for opportunities to significantly improve learning performance without adversely impacting performance without merit (ie: it can be a little slower if much better, but not much slower for a little better!). Create a hypothesis for an improvement that can be A/B tested.

2) Then A/B test the hypothesis for up to 30 minutes. Each A/B test gets 96 games, so initially 192 clients run, all unthrottled. When a game finishes, its client process exits after its score is recorded so that remaining games run faster. If a game does not finish in the 30 minutes, but is still playing, then its current score is recorded, and the client ends. So at the end of 30 minutes, each client game will have a score.

3) Average the scores, looking for the highest performer. Compare your A/B clients scores to see if the test revealed an improvement. That improvement should be statistically valid, at least 5%, 99 times out of 100 (confidence interval).

3a) Report the results, indicating what you were testing, what the result was, and so on. Keep a running log called results.md in the root that I can check to see what you are currently doing and the results so far.

4) Pick the winner (control or new) as the new control, then go back to step 1 to repeat this process of improvement testing indefinitely