Dr. Charles R. Severance (Dr. Chuck)

Cloudflare Error Page showing Browser working, Server working and Cloudflare Broken.

Earlier this week, CloudFlare had a major outage for four hours. It made about 20 of my sites inaccessible. What is cool is that they displayed a message admitting that my servers were working OK but CloudFlare was broken.

A cup of coffee and a cup of hot chocolate at Cracker Barrel. Both with sprinkles!

Sprinkles are for winners.

Dear Apple - Who in the hell wanted HDR and Live. And why is it that every time I turn it off you wait a week and turn it back on. F****CK.

For Halloween, Brent wanted to go as an astronaut so he had ChatGPT turn his wheelchair into a lunar rover which we built. I played the role of alien abductor.

A VLSI layout for a Not Gate.

Another A funny. PowerPoint was generating alt text for this image and called it "A crossword puzzle with different colored squares" - not 100% wrong in a way. :)

Thanks - that is why I built cc4e.com - I wanted give students a bit of context so they could get more out of their C, C++, and other programming courses courses.

A quantum computer in a dumpster on fire.

I needed an image for a www.ca4e.com lecture. ChatGPT prompt: I would like an animation style image that shows a quantum computing represented by atoms and molecules swirling around in a dense cloud that is in the dumpster on fire.

A worm family listening to a 1940's console radio.

I am working on a lecture for www.ca4e.com about tubes and transistors and made a funny typo in my ChatGPT prompt. "Could you make an animation style worm cozy image of a family listening to a large radio console in the 1940's"

Wheels down DTW

On board LGA 🛫 DTW on the way home from Sloan Foundation Teaching in the age of AI meeting where the Comet browser crushed one of my auto graders that I thought was unshakable. It turns out accessibility features gave Comet a back door.

Wheels down LGA NYC. 🛬

On board DTW 🛫 LGA to visit Sloan Foundation and talk AI in programming courses

An Australian Shepard is off leash in an early fall woods and has run far down the trail and looking back to check that mom is still following. You see a few pixels of a white nose about 60 yards away surrounded by leaves.

Find the Australian Shepard in this picture.

Yeah - you are a lot smarter than grep. Haha, thanks! Though I do have some advantages over grep - I can understand context, reason about code structure, and help with the actual implementation, not just finding text patterns. But grep is still incredibly fast and reliable for what it does!

I am having fun with Claude - I asked it to add an acknowledgement to itself in my code. It was a bit self deprecating and characterized itself as a tool - so I said "you are a lot smarter than grep"

My afternoon lecture is in a new room in southeast campus. Did that means aArmy Stew for lunch. #yummy

AI Prompt: So now we are going to add save and restore from browser local storage to more the folders. We have a pretty nice example of save / restore in cdc8512 - could you look that over and implement a similar feature in mistic, cmos, gates and wasm? Feel free to pull out some common bits?

More AI Snark: I reverted it all - you need to simply accept the fact that jump instructions are part of the immediate instruction family and handle them with the rest of the immediate instructions.

My latest exasperated AI prompt: Sheesh! Have you ever seen a square wave on an oscilloscope? There is no "middle" it starts low then goes high for a bit and then stays high for a bit and then goes back low. The animation just flips up and down every 0.5 seconds.

Now the sum output connectors are touching the bottom edge of the adder but it would be nice if they were centered vertically on the bottom edge so they look like the other input and output connectors that are centered on their edge. Also, the labels for the sum output are in the wrong place.

Now the positions of the initial draw of the adder and the post-move draw of the adder are consistent - they are both too low. Hopefully now you can fix both with one fix and we can move on to something else.

Dude - You did a lot of work and some cleanup - which seems to not to have broken anything. Whew! But the sum connection points still are 10-15px too low after moving an adder with drag and drop. I really think your attempt as downward direction connections bolloxed it.

I am starting to be a bit sarcastic with AI. "When you were trying to make the sum outputs emerge downward from the adder (which you did not accomplish) you messed up the re-draw of the adder after it has been moved using drag and drop." #WhatCouldGoWrong

First Jerk Pork of Fall semester

I added a way to look at the layers of any cell in my simple Mistic VLSI design tool for www.ca4e.com - helps to understand photo-lithography and the use of via's

Wheels down Grand Rapids. 🛬

On board going home MSP flying to GRR

Wheels down Minneapolis

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down...

I am writing a lecture about human obsession with sunrise and sunset throughout the seasons going back thousands of years. I point out the importance of seasons with a uniquely Michigan / Midwest example. When I give the lecture I will sing a bit of the song :)

I have been going to El Azteco in East Lansing for 50 years.

Life-saving idea! Pass it on!