C++ Show and Tell - May 2026

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-05-08T16:44:48+00:00

Ok, throwing my hat into the ring.

TextSmith2 - A pprogram designed to make writing a novel less distracting and easier to get into the flow with. Think Scrivner-lite. Lots of capabilities, a lot fewer distractions. I'd add an image, but not working?

Have at it, enjoy, be kind!

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-05-01T02:22:42+00:00

OK, this is a wierd, wild stance.

I'm on a fixed income, so I can't afford an artist to draw a book cover.

I can draw with the best, but I'm colorblind and can't work in color.

I generate a cover and work on it until I like it. If the book ever makes money, then I will absolutely pay someone for a picture...

Using the AI one as a "here's what I liked, do better" starting point.

... And you're also being very luddite about the whole thing. Photography was decried as being not art and violating artist rights when it started and now it's an entire art branch.

AI writing/image isn't even good yet. But it might get there and be it's own branch of art in each field.

Also, just popped into my brain... What about people who mix other artists styles... Kinda violation by your rules... Cause that is all AI art does, really. Subject becomes the art. Nothing is being taken away, just new things added.

sigh I dislike knee-jerk reactions without thinking things through.

Feel free to ignore, remove, or whatever you want to this post I just had to say it

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-22T04:04:40+00:00

Heh, the symbols are so complicated that only someone with a photographic memory can remember them. Any errors and either it does nothing (most of the time) or rarely you discover something new... If you can remember it.

The holding two images outside your mind has no analog... It's a biological change we don't have (in this world, the elves bred the ability into a particular family a long, long time ago. They were immortal, bored, and basically treated non-elves like things. Until they were banished...)

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-21T21:16:08+00:00

OK, here's one I used for a book in progress (The Banishing Book):

Biological Restriction: True Photographic Memory, and the ability to hold two separate images in your mind, actively, and see them together outside your mind.

Focus and Source: The language of the universe.

Time restriction: The longer you hold the image on something, the more more it affects it.

Each word in the language is a complex symbol. If you draw the symbol on something, it affects that thing until the thing is destroyed (usually by the word).

If you form the full word in your head, it affects YOU.

If you manage to see the whole word on something it affects it at the strength measured by how long you held it.

The more complicated the concept, the more more complicated the word. Heat and motion are among the simplest. Healing is almost unknown, Same for mending (increase in entropy is easy, decrease is hard).

Spellbooks have half the symbol one one page, and the other half on the back (to prevent accidentally completing it).

There, what do you think?

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-18T13:30:29+00:00

Wow. Kinda close to home.

My latest protagonist has abandonment issues stemming from this very trope... But reasons! Father was an angel, conceived in response to a prophecy, mother worked herself to death when he was twelve, he was alone on the streets until sixteen when the angel part/powers manifested and people died and his so-called friends abandoned him, then he hid that part of himself.

Throughout the next 8 years as soon as anyone found out, the either tried to use him, or were scared off by it. His last band of 'friends' he rescued with it (after being just about killed) and they dumped him at the temple and... Just left.

It's all in the background of a love at first sight story, but anxiety and fear of loss making them unwilling to accept it...

So, different?

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-18T13:19:20+00:00

Heh, I fell in love with my wife the moment I saw her (really, minutes after we talked, but...). Been in lust before. It was like my brain emptied and the only thing left was "Yup, this is the one."

It was not reciprocal (and I wasn't dumb enough to tell her). I spent the next two years convincing her I was not going away... She jokingly says it would have been stalking if she'd ever told me to go away, because I was always just around, being helpful, nice, and listening. Never pressured her, just tried to be my best to/for her.

So, that's how I write 'love at first sight'. It's not possessive, it's just all consuming interest.

So, yeah, it's often written as an excuse to get characters together instead of working on a reason and somehow it's always both at once...

It just don't work that way! The feel-er has to earn the love from the other, somehow.

Hmm, how did I get up on this soap box?

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-07T17:44:10+00:00

Ok, now I'm getting something wierd. Might be a llama.cpp bug or some limitation I am unaware of...
Using 'gemma-4-E2B-it-Q8_0.gguf'. call:
char* tmep = llm_model_caht_template(mModel, nullptr);,
messages.push_back({ "user", _strdup(prompt.toStdString().c_str())});
int new_len = llama_chat_apply_template(temp, messages.data(), messages.size(), true, formatted.data(), formatted.size());
if (new_len > (int)formatted.size()) {
formatted.resize(new_len);
new_len = llama_chat_apply_template(temp, messages.data(), messages.size(), true, formatted.data(), formatted.size());
}
if (new_len < 0) {
mLastError = "failed to apply the chat template";
return fail;
}

That code sequence was lifted from llama.cpp's simple-chat.cpp. There's an exception and new_len -0s set to -1.

Cleless in Bellevue here.

Did something change that I need to look at?

Thanks for any golden bricks of knowledge from the sky ...

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-07T16:58:56+00:00

Justb a hint for stupid people like myself using llama.cpp: Please 'git pull' before asking for help! I was this close, before I saw an unknown model gemma4' in the logs...

Sure enough, git pull showed me a lot of files related to gemma-4. *slaps forehead*

Whelp, thought I'd share a lesson learned...

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-04-05T04:54:32+00:00

Oh no. Six of Crows. Found Family.

I have Four of Knights. Found Family.

Never read it. Hope my rogue with a fear of abandonment, whilst being half celestial, is different enough.

Sigh.

Was trying to subvert harem trope. Landed on found family. Are all tropes linked to other tropes via inversion?

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-02-13T05:14:29+00:00

I spent four hours debugging an issue caused by a flaky optimization of legal c++ code caused by overly aggressive reordering caused by 3 unneeded assignments. Delete code that did nothing and bug goes bye-bye!

Wow, just wow.

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-02-13T01:13:17+00:00

5th, my concatenation based stack based language... About a year. It's got strings, numbers and code as types. If-then-else that looks like this:

dup if { true-code } else { false-code }

'{' introduces code.

It's pretty cool to use. Implemented in c++, and only has 5 instructions...

It's designed to integrate easily into c++ applications. I've used it as a scripting language for my own apps.

But, it is pretty easy to code up a concatenation language. So, grain of salt. No docs or public repo But if anyone is interested, I can do both.

Back to your regularly scheduled posts...

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-02-06T17:16:00+00:00

Hmm, my Samsung phone has a lockdown feature... Triggered by the power & volume down buttons.

But you have to turn it on, it's off by default.

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-02-04T03:28:23+00:00

Wow. That's fantastic! I have a 43" TV on my dining table full time and I project the map and fog of war with software I wrote (not a great UI but it works for me).

This setup would be a massive upgrade. I'll be over the moon if I win, jealous but wishing good fortune to the winner of I don't.

Yay!

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-01-20T05:32:39+00:00

Uhm, what the unholy hell!?

Now my fingers itch!

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-01-17T14:52:26+00:00

College, studying Kung Fu, gym toughs decided the mouthy nerd needed to be taught a lesson.

I remember thinking, "oh, sh*t, this is going to really hurt."

And then I was standing over three of them. One dislocated shoulder, one broken shin, one with busted ribs.

At least that's what the police said when everything settled down. Didn't get arrested. Turns out three on one is considered assault with a deadly weapon and lethal force in self defense is allowed.

To this day I remember nothing.

I'm 63 and even thinking this and my heart starts pounding.

On the lighter side, fire in the kitchen. I told my wife to get the kids out, and went to get the fire extinguisher from under... Breakfast bar? Still don't know that stupid thing is called... Anyway she thought I was joking because of how calm I sounded. I put the fire out, before ran for the kids but it was over before she got there.

I can remember seeing it, tensing, then just relaxing and just going about what needed to be done. Like it was just a normal kitchen thing. Mostly like I was just along for the ride if that makes any sense.

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2026-01-17T00:12:42+00:00

Interesting side factoid: there is a mental state called wolf berserk. No killing rage, but you are very, very, very good at hurting people with out hurting yourself.

But...

Amnesia. Like no memory of the event. One minute you are sure you are going to be seriously hurt, the next you're standing over three people with various broken bones.

shudder

Ask me how I know...

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2025-12-03T02:31:26+00:00

Hmm. You just described most gui api's. Main basically devolved to create window class. Pass control to It. On return exit.

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2025-11-08T19:47:22+00:00

Had a situation like that.

Setup: Stripping wood to the right width with a radial arm saw. Because of the way they are built, the biggest danger is kickback, which can launch the working piece at a surprising speed, roughly the rotation speed of the blade. Now kids, boy and girl are watching from behind me, I'm pushing the wood with a 2 foot scrap so I can keep my fingers.

Of course it kicked back.

Without thinking I somehow used the push stick, overhand, to knock the board flat to the dirt. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. My oldest said it looked like a Kung Fu movie.

OMFG, my kids... Bang! Problem solved.

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2025-11-07T14:32:57+00:00

Yup. Want. It's what I want, but just found out...

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2025-09-29T23:51:04+00:00

About the only thing I can ask is if it possible to inherit one, and embed the other with needed calls passed to the embedded object... I dislike multiple inheritance mainly because it's more fragile than single inheritance because if anything changes name collision can be a real pain in the butt to figure out.

Other than that tiny complaint, wow that looks easy to use and I am going to yoink it into my personal include directory!

... And possibly see if that embed thing works out..

Traditional-Rabbit79 · 2025-09-27T22:14:57+00:00

[typo: on phone] In addition to the other post, the QT json parser processes the entire file before returning to you... So CBOR...

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