Hey all and Richard! I’m still alive and kicking. A few minor health issues but no big deal
....
I recently saw a post on X where Elon mentioned that complete newbies were able to create video games with Grok’s (X’s AI) help. I was curious if it knew Liberty BASIC so I asked if it does. It said it did so I described my program and asked if it thought it might be able to help improve it. In its reply it suggested I use Liberty BASIC Booster to improve speed. I thought Richard would get a kick out of that.
Anyway after a few hours we were able to modify my program to correctly display at any DPI and screen size. No small task but it is able to spit out complex code in seconds. I was very impressed to say the least.
Richard should find this part especially amusing, and it gave me a new appreciation for how difficult it must have been to create LBB. While it does know LB syntax, LB has many little quirks that tripped it up. So much so that our 3 chats has a combined 89 uses of the phrase “LB quirks”, LOL
If you happen to have an X account you can use Grok for free but it is limited to 18 questions per every 2 hours. Try it out, you’ll be amazed!
Programming with AI
Re: Programming with AI
I mainly use DeepSeek for writing - and reviewing - code; it's free and unlimited (at the moment). It's pretty competent at BBC BASIC but obviously not as accurate as it is with 'mainstream' languages like C and Python.
I find its 'DeepThink' output fascinating, but it is rather long-winded and repetitive. It's also been demonstrated that an AI's 'explanation' of how it has arrived at an answer is sometimes very different from how it really has.
In a twist, I actually added a new feature to BBC BASIC (array slicing) simply because DeepSeek had convinced itself - wrongly - that it already existed, and had used it in some code! I have subsequently found it an incredibly useful feature, so DeepSeek did me a favour in that regard!
