Could Commodore have made a financially successful low-cost Amiga laptop circa 1991 - 1993?

I can't say definitively but based on my experience in 1991 with a 68K-based PowerBook 100 I doubt it. Even with a 1-bit monochrome display and no custom co-processors executing in parallel the battery life wasn't great. Also, most LCD screens don't support some of the weird field/frame and timing things the Amiga could do with CRT displays. Even rounding up from 59.94 NTSC field rate to 60 fps would have caused some Amiga software to have display issues.

Consider a spoon-fed spectrum for AIs working in large codebases, where is state-of-the-art AI?

"Here's a bug report, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and ideas for what needs to change in code, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and an exact plan for changing it, fix it."

If I have to spoon-feed as much as the last case, then I might as well just do it. The second last case is about the level of a fresh-hire who is still ramping up and would still be considered a drain under Brook's Law.

I suppose the other axis is: How much do I dread performing the resultant code review?

Put them together and you have a "spoon-fed / dread" graph of AI programmer performance.

Another thing is that working on a large codebase is not even mostly about writing code it's about verifying the change. There are a lot of tickets in our backlog that I could roll through "fixing" by just joyriding my IDE through the codebase but verifying each of those changes will in some cases take days (I work on a platform supporting most of the company's business).

I guess the AI folks will insist that the next step is "agentic" AIs that will push the changes to a test environment that it keeps up to date, adds and modifies tests ensuring that they're testing intent creates a MR argues with the other agents in the review, checks the nightly integration report and supports it into production.

AI can draw blueprints of a house. The house may look aesthetically pleasing, but if it can't hold it's own weight, the design is flawed.

There's a difference between an executed image and a display-only image.

At a certain point, judgment requires technical knowledge.

Wouldn't it be nice if popular libraries could export to .so files so the best language for a task could use the bits & pieces it needed without a programmer needing to know python (and possibly C)?

Were I to write a scripting language, trivial export to .so files would be a primary design goal.

Unfortunately the calling conventions and memory models are all different, so there's usually hell to pay going between languages. Perl passes arguments on a stack, Lisp often uses tagged integers, Fortran stores matrices in the other order, ... it goes on and on. SWIG (https://swig.org) can help a lot, but it's still a pain.

Exporting to .so (a) makes it non-portable (you suddenly need to ship a whole compatibility matrix of .so files including a Windows DLL or several) and (b) severely constrains the language design. It's very hard to do this without either forcing the developer to do explicit heap management using the caller's heap or very carefully hiding your VM inside the shared object .. which has interesting implications once you have multiple such libraries. Also you don't have a predefined entry point (there's no equivalent of DllMain) so your caller is forced to manage that and any multithreading implications.

It basically forces your language to be very similar to C.

And how many factories capable of casting steel cannons were in the south?

Same if the King can say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" then pardon the soldiers that do.

I'm Canadian and remember repurposing AOL floppy disks that came in the mail circa 1996.

Never used the service though.

If annexed and somehow given democratic rights, I suspect Canadians would form a protest party with the goal of budgetary shutdowns in the House of Representatives...

Zero support for any legislation other than Canadian Separation. Be a poison pill.

And that's the non-violent response.

Yep, all the US pundits talking about Canada voting mostly Democratic with a few Republican districts have it completely wrong. Canada would vote overwhelmingly for the Bloc Canadien.

Americans are incapable of thinking that another political party could ever exist.

The Quebec separatists would be particularly funny in Congress.

Stallman, who apparently speaks French, said the 'L' stands for "Libre". https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

The word matches his intent of "Free Software" without English's ambiguity around gratuity vs. freedom.

"In 2010, after twenty years under development, Stallman said that he was "not very optimistic about the GNU Hurd. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd