That's Peter's old machine! Used to be in the care of Stacken, the computer club at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It's named Kicki because of the dual CPUs (KI KI). She had a sister named Katia ("a ten" in Swedish is "tia" and she had a KA CPU).
According to DEC you could only run one KI CPU, and then changed that when challenged to MAX two CPUs. So briefly she ran with three.
I remember seeing this machine (or one like it, but how many dual-processor pdp-10’s can there have been?) at Stacken sometime around the mid-90’s. Even then, it was a relic from a bygone era. Strange to think that the computers that were brand new then are now older than this was at the time. Damn, I’m getting old…
If you’re familiar with the way in which documentation artifacts like this fall out of a Claude project, you will recognize that every place where Claude says ‘this changes everything’ or ‘this is the load bearing insight’ most likely resulted from a human looking at what Claude had done, and redirecting it towards a more fruitful line of inquiry. When Claude gets ‘excited’ about a thing like ‘we figured out which clock measurement approach helps us actually optimize performance’ - excited enough to explain it in this level of detail - it usually results from the user pulling Claude out of a rabbit hole where it was going about things the wrong way.
This sounds like you have only had a superficial contact with LLMs. They do a lot of mechanical work, but "a bit of prompting" is not how they are used for something like this.
The app for public transportation in the Stockholm region give real time location updates for its busses, and station-to-station updates for tram and commuter trains. With the constant delays for the operator in my area it is invaluable for catching busses.
My guess as well. I don't like it when humans silently pass off LLM writing as their own.
I also don't like it when humans silently pass off LLM work as their own.
Prompting is not the same as doing the work. There are ways to genuinely collaborate with LLMs, but if someone silently takes full credit for work generated by LLMs, my assumption is they probably vibe coded it.
Plus, I spend my free time expending effort to consume human generated content. I’m okay with slop someone pays me to deal with, but don’t expect people to read your hobby related post when you couldn’t be bothered to write it.
A bunch of us old salty sailing nerds were actually discussing Decca Navigator System¹ the other day that was still very present in the 90s on the ships we were sailing. Now all replaced and removed.
This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.
