July 4, 2026
I have a good friend, Dave Walker, who is an inexhaustible learner of new technology. He can show you how to do anything, from napping a sharp stone axe to writing a prompt for an AI system to balance the Federal budget. He’s been urging me for a long time to learn this new technology and stop parading around town with a sign saying “Will program 6502 machine code for food.”
I kept putting it off because I didn’t have a use for it, but eventually that excuse evaporated when I realized that I need to convert all my ancient Java code for Storytron into something that will run on modern systems, like JavaScript. “Piece o’ cake!” Dave assured me. “It’ll have the answer before you finish typing the prompt!” He gave me some links to useful sources, and so I dove in.
My first try felt like running into a brick wall. After consulting some sources, I took advantage of a helpful page he had sent the link to, which provided a handy informal definition of each of the terms used in AI work.
At this point I must remind the reader that I am 76 years old. Your seventies are when you first start experiencing the serious effects of aging. I have managed to dodge most of the problems that beset my age-peers. My eyes and ears still work fairly well; I don’t suffer from arthritis; my dermatologist continues to remark on how healthy my skin is. I look younger than my age; I still wield a chain saw with panache; I still carry out some of the work entailed in caring for the forest; I still build stuff, use the tractor for a variety of tasks, and engage in physical labor. I don’t have the stamina I had forty years ago, and I can’t handle summer temperatures as well. But, while I run more slowly than in the past, I remain a fully armed and operational battle — er, physical worker in almost all tasks.
Except for one: there’s a big hole in my brain where my memory used to reside. This is a universal consequence of aging, but it’s hitting me a lot harder than most. Like everybody else, I have difficulty remembering words, but the Memory-Demon seems to pick on me more enthusiastically than other people. In my earlier years, I had a vocabulary to put Webster to shame, but now I am sometimes stumped by words that any high school kid knows.
The affliction is perversely random; as you can readily ascertain from my recent writings, I still seem to have a strong vocabulary, but sometimes I am brought to a Billy-Budd-like stoppage over a word like “frame” or “dowel”. Did you notice that I have no problem recalling Billy Budd’s fatal mental weakness? At the same time, I will sometimes say to my coworker, “Where’s that… uh… er… piece of wood that’s shaped like a long cylinder?” Why is it that I can use the word “cylinder” whilst forgetting the word “dowel”????
Yes, I can tell you all about the 17th-century Cossack leader Stenka Razin (what a name!), or explain the radical metabolic alterations in the koala bear that make it able to survive on eucalyptus leaves, or describe the process that lead to our word “monster”. My memory remains functional in some areas, and is completely gone in others.
One of those areas is technology. I am no longer to recall the tens of thousands of actions (I am NOT exaggerating!) required to use my iPhone. I refuse to upgrade my Mac to the latest version of anything, because the assholes at Apple continue to play games with the user interface. What worked last year doesn’t work this year. I am writing this on a seven-year old Mac using OS Catalina, which was retired four years ago. I do have a more modern Mac that I use for many purposes, but this is my favorite Mac, because it doesn’t taunt me with secret verbs and hidden menus.
It’s especially galling to see that my friend Dave, who is four years older than I am, just keeps soaking up new technology. I swear, he must have an eight-terabyte thumb drive surgically implanted in his skull. He’s been gulping down this AI technology like a college kid swilling beer. But I just can’t do it. My first attempt felt like running head-on into a brick wall; my second try felt like driving head-on into a brick wall.
AI systems like Claude are really a new kind of programming language. I was raised on traditional procedural languages like FORTRAN, BASIC, and microcomputer machine language. I remember the shock when I had to learn Pascal; it was the only language on the Mac, and its many structural restrictions were quite a shock, but I was able to adapt to it in a couple of months. Object-oriented programming was another shock; once again I had to rethink everything about programming. The AI approach to programming is the biggest programming shock I have ever faced. Ironically, it truly is ultimately easier to produce code with Claude than to learn coding. Instead of expressing your ideas in the alien language of computers, you express them in something close to natural language, but you must still obey some formal protocols. I envy young people nowadays who can start with something like Claude instead of, say, BASIC. Yes, I realize that the flaws inherant in AI systems require the programmer to be familiary with conventional programming — but those flaws are temporary. They’ll be ironed out soon enough.
So, I won’t be able to convert the Java version of the Storytron technology to JavaScript. In all honesty, I don’t expect that anybody else will be motivated to take up the task, so it won’t be done. That’s sad, because there’s a lot of useful and important technology in there. If anybody does decide to take a stab at the task, I’ll be happy to help, perhaps by providing extensive commenting in the code.