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Fly.io engineer departs to build new AI-native computing project with Kurt

A Fly.io engineer has announced he is leaving the company to join Kurt on a new venture focused on rethinking how operating systems and applications work in the age of AI. The essay argues that AI is dissolving traditional boundaries between programmers and users, allowing anyone to generate custom software with natural language instead of code.

Commodore 64's cheap chips gave rise to the first massively multiplayer virtual worlds

The Commodore 64, launched in 1982 for $595 with just 64 kilobytes of memory, went on to sell roughly 12.5 million units and become the best-selling desktop computer ever. Its combination of an inexpensive industrial CPU, a music-synthesizer sound chip, and a game-oriented graphics chip made it unusually capable for its price, despite being seen at the time as a mere 'game machine.' That gaming-friendly hardware ended up enabling some of the earliest persistent, open-ended online multiplayer worlds.

New GW-BASIC-compatible interpreter runs directly on UEFI firmware

A developer released Thoreau BASIC, an interpreter compatible with GW-BASIC that can boot directly on bare-metal UEFI machines, with a Windows version also available. It supports classic BASIC constructs like DEF FN, GOSUB, error trapping, and graphics commands such as PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, and PAINT, working at native framebuffer resolution with 16-color EGA or 24-bit RGB.