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Starts With Frog

@startswithfrog.bsky.social
86 followers 507 following 420 posts

It starts with frog. We do not know where it ends up. There is also a human here. And a cat. It is an experiment.

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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
You see, kids, back in the olden days we had to read books printed on paper to learn more about programming! My cat would, too, but she has trouble turning the pages, and is confused by the fact that it doesn’t scroll like an iPad. Also, she can’t read.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Whee! 🥳
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Back when I had two cats.
Two cats. Cuddling together.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Why you shouldn’t use Automatic Programming. 1950’s Edition. Forget those newfangled compilers; they’ll never work!
• Performance: This was the big one.
Computers were fantastically expensive.
Saving programmer time was nice, but if the resulting program wasted 30% of the machine, that might be economically unacceptable.
• Trust: A programmer could inspect assembly and know exactly what the machine would do.
A compiler inserted a big mysterious layer between you and the hardware.
• Control: Early programmers routinely exploited exact instruction timings, register usage, memory layout, and peculiarities of the machine. Giving that up felt consequential.
• Professional culture: Machine programming was genuinely difficult and prestigious.
"Automatic programming" implicitly suggested that some of that expertise could be automated away.
• Debugging: If generated code failed, now you potentially had to understand your source program, the compiler, and the resulting machine code. Delightful.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I had to ask ChatGPT to explain 😅; it included this analogy. 🤭
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Okay but what if we ran FOUR kinds of APL at the same time?
Clockwise from top left: Dyalog APL, Commodore 64 APL that Claude Code wrote for me, IBM 5100 APL running on MAME, and GNU APL. All have the result of ⍳10 displayed.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
New keyboard. Not the most exciting in the universe, but hopefully, a solid practical choice: "Keychron V3 Ultra TKL Wireless Mechanical Keyboard" Will hopefully solve the duplicate keys that kept appearing on my old keyboard. Ordered APL keycaps, not here yet, still debating. Maybe.
Shiny new Keychron keyboard with barely any cat hair on it.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
APLventure - Atari 2600 style adventure game for the C64, written in APL. (All written by Claude Code)
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
📎 "I see you're trying to modify the CLI, would you like some help with that?"
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Even tiny little qwen:8b can do math.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
It's apparently bottles all the way down. 🌀 (First time playing with a model that can fit in my GPU. 😆 ) (qwen3:8b. We made some adjustments.)
arah> Did we talk about penguins before?
Freebot> Ah! You’re testing the boundaries of memory — and the limits of my recall function! 🧠🐧  

**Short answer:** No, we haven’t explicitly talked about **penguins**. The recall function only finds **exact matches**, and "penguins" wasn’t in our history.  

**But here’s the twist:**  
- If you’re thinking of **Antarctica** (where penguins live), I’ve never mentioned that either.  
- If you’re hinting at a **riddle** (like "What has a neck but no head? A bottle. What has a belly but no stomach? A bottle. What has a foot but no legs? A bottle. What has a mouth but no teeth?  [Goes on like this for quite a while.]
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Current benchmarks
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Not sure which potions to use now and which ones to save for a later battle. 🧙‍♀️
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
This morning's status report on our C64 APL. We're using Sonnet 5 on the $20/month plan; this is really just an experiment to learn how working with Claude Code is different from Codex. Seems to handle weird retrocomputing just fine.
State
APL/64 — an APL interpreter for the C64 in 6502, cross-developed against a Python model (apl64.py, the source of truth). Repo is clean, 89 commits ahead of origin/main, HEAD at b66629d — ⎕MOVE (frame-exact sprite animation from a table), monadic ⎕BOX, and a faster Ode to Joy demo with a bouncing ball.

Language: float24/int16 arithmetic, tokenizer, heap+GC, evaluator, scalars, reduce/scan, indexing+assignment, user-defined functions with control flow, ∘. outer product, f.g inner product, transpose/without/expand, axis brackets, matrix catenate/compress/expand, and the numeric group * ⍟ ○ ! ?.

Platform: runs only under VICE (never real 1980s hardware, per your call). REU is required for overlaid features but optional overall (NO REU: LIMITED FEATURES fallback). Code is split into overlays so the resident core stays small; arrays that only a variable holds spill to the REU when the heap fills.

Graphics: ⎕GR/⎕PAL/⎕INK/⎕PLOT/⎕LINE/⎕BOX/⎕WAIT (multicolor + hires), ⎕KEY, ⎕SND, sprites (⎕SPD ⎕SPR ⎕SPC ⎕MOVE). Recorder captures video+audio through VICE's binary monitor.

Heap: 18,692 bytes free ($CC00 − $82FC), comfortably above the 12 KB floor.

Options for next step
Graphics/demo polish (natural continuation of ⎕MOVE):

Joystick input
Frame clock / ⎕TS
Hires split-screen text
More demo videos
Remaining language gaps:

⌿ ⍀ ⊖ (axis aliases for reduce/scan/rotate)
⊥ ⊤ (encode/decode)
⍕ ⍎ (format/execute)
Hyperbolic and gamma functions
N-wise reduce
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Better! 🥳 🎼🎶 (It's a demo of the Commodore 64 APL implementation that Claude is working on for me.)
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Ode to Joy. Well, it's a start.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
C64 APL is gradually taking shape.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
But it does work.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
El Psy Kongroo. I'm going to take a nap now. 😵‍💫 But later we can compare this to Claude's C64 APL implementation.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
😆
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I'm feeling absolutely miserable today for reasons only my body understands. But AI is keeping me entertained. And a little horrified. I guess I shouldn't have asked Astra to solve "all" the problems when we started planning this project. 🌀😵‍💫
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
If this ever finishes I’m gonna have sooo many paperclips! 📎🖇️📎🖇️📎🖇️📎🖇️📎🖇️📎
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
🥱 Well let’s see what Codex did overnight…
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Well, there was that time on M*A*S*H that Klinger tried to eat a jeep. 👵
Scene from M*A*S*H where Klinger is trying to eat a jeep.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
😱😭
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Ok, now definitely done... OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ASTRA! 🤬
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Ok we finished the P2 repair! So now... 😢 Maybe we should just stop doing code reviews, ASTRA! (🤭)
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
And ChatGPT is helping refresh my knowledge of APL, while Claude is implementing it for the C64.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🥳💙💛
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fixed! And =/ (reduce with equals) and +/ (reduce with +) are both working too.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Claude is trying to teach me how to use a Commodore 64. I used to know this, in 1983 or so. And I'm trying to test our APL, but some of the mapped keys aren't working.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🫠
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Hooray, P2 is finally complete! 🥳 Let’s just have Astra give it a quick check before we move on, though.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Yep, there it is. APL for the Commodore 64, written by Claude. Not finished yet, but clearly does stuff already.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The winner was, in fact, P2ba!
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I'm so old even ChatGPT struggles to understand my obscure references. 👵😆 Back story: Codex is working on phase P2 of a project and has gotten all the way down to sub-phase P2az.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I'm learning Claude Code too. 😆
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“the movement oracle is the guest mickey count.”
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Making cookies in Lisp with ollama and devstral-small-2
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I may never get tired of watching AI install old DOS programs for its own use.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Hoping this will get us out of navel-gazing toolbuilding and into "just build the tool that you asked for and designed."
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Hooray I am a dinosaur now! 🦖 🇺🇦 Слава Україні! 🥳
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
🤦‍♀️
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Ok, now, for some reason, Claude is working on an APL implementation for the Commodore 64 in one of my browser tabs. Long story.
APL keyboard
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Memory ON vs Memory OFF. Interesting.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Yep, there it is!
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Suddenly popped up on my Linux machine. 🤔 "Oh, right, I asked ChatGPT to install this!" On Linux. Running via DOSEMU2. 😆
Turbo C++ installer screen from 1991.
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Whee! 🥳
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Starts With Frog @startswithfrog.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I've created a monster, and she is me! 😱 - Sep 8 upgraded to ChatGPT Pro - Sep 12 went outside - Sep 13-18 sick from going outside - Sep 19 tokenfire begins 🔥 - Sep 20 learned /goal command - Sep 21 learned to ask for subagents - Sep 22 one reset left 😅
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