Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
This is pretty new, and I'm still trying to figure out what it will be. For the moment it's a blog, and it's mostly my astrophotography work, with some random code and nostalgia thrown in.
We could declare 4 to be a prime number, and keep the rest of the definition the same. Instead of just saying "no", you could ask, "okay, what would that do for us?" If there isn't a good answer, then what's the point? And usually, you're not in the 1% of 1% of 1%.
Some examples are in these comments, e.g. the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an amusing outcome, where 1 is the only prime if you take it literally.
But also mentioned elsewhere in the thread: if we declared 1 to be a prime, then many (I daresay "most") of our theorems would have to change "prime number" to "prime number greater than one".
One thing I used shape tables for was for a fade-in effect. I would draw my spaceship one pixel at a time, choosing the next pixel at random. (I made a tool to help with this, or else it would have been too tedious!) The shape tables were rendered so slowly that it make the ship "materialize" in a cool effect. After this initial fade-in, I would render the ship more sensibly.
Other than this, I never found much use for shape tables.
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.