baud9600

Right that’s it. Time to get a standing desk at work!

Great work on Goose, a while load of practical thought went into it.

I’d love to see 1st class lightweight ‘processes’ and typed comms like CSP. These light processes would be cheap to spawn in thousands, with synchronous comms. So it’s possible to quickly use arbitrary networks rather than OS thread worker pools with queues. Maybe like:

fn producer(out: chan<i32>) { for i in 10 { send(out, i); } }

fn consumer(inp: chan<i32>) { for i in 10 { print(recv(inp)); } }

fn main() { let c = chan<i32>();

    par {
        producer(c);
        consumer(c);
    }
}

> “We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.”

Stafford Beer wrote that the purpose of a system is not its declared intent but what it does - what it manifests, causes or how it behaves (1979, 2001). Higher education has a lofty purpose, but the system manifests as a Defence Contractor among other things like teaching one’s kids. “We’d prefer not spoken aloud” is probably true.

Interestingly, early Ethernet performance studies suggested that about 37% utilisation was the best possible on a heavily contended network due to all the collisions. So a 10mbps Ethernet cable run was arguably similar in performance to 4mbps TR? That was essentially IBM's marketing argument for 4mbps token ring. But TR was more predictable under heavy traffic contention. That’s what we were told anyway…

And that was Ethernet at 4mbps over IBM “structured cabling”?

A very nice trip down memory lane. The big banks bought token ring because nobody gets fired for buying IBM, and Ethernet looked so amateurish compared to the heft of TR cables and chunky spaceship MAUs. Hermaphrodite connectors, remember those? I knew a bank that ran TR at 4mbps, connecting its head office buildings nearby and was considering an upgrade to 16 - it seemed mysteriously fast in those days. But then Ethernet came along, and SCO Unix servers on 486, so it was relatively easy and affordable to get a department of 30 people up and running with PCs as terminals. Those were the days…

One omission is Turing! Halmos gives JvN considerable credit for electronic computing without ever mentioning Turing or the connection between Turing’s universal machine and the stored-program computer. JvN knew Turing at Princeton, thought highly of his work, and offered him a position at IAS.

While the paper mentions the IAS in Princeton, it only briefly refers to the computer project which JvN directed, describing the IAS machine as “his electronic computer”. This is a surprisingly slight mention of a major project that ran for years and was highly influential (the project is the subject of George Dyson’s book “Turing’s Cathedral”, recommended).

I think the problem is when the execs aren’t looking at change-for-the-better. Instead they’re looking to appoint blame. Moving to a position of assumed competency in your staff and taking the perspective of how-to-improve-next-time is a real step forward in maturity. My guess is it’s rare and blame is easier: most management doesn’t reach this level, instead it’s immature.

We seem to be very sensitive to style. It can be rather distracting. This writing contained 7 exclamation marks and 9 colons.

As for em-dashes, there were 7.

In 2006 there was the documentary, “Who killed the electric car?” about the GM EV1 vehicle and the lobby to limit the adoption of this tech.

Among other topics, the film covers the zev mandate and its reversal after pressure from the industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

Good points. I’ve tried this a few times and I’ve been impressed by the dialogue. Given this was a very simple prompt, I am convinced a more precise version could be developed, including a rubric, a library of course content, starter questions and other guidance to the AI. I haven’t seen anything like this and schools / universities seem to be “struggling” with AI, which has me wondering why not embrace LLMs for learning and assessment, like this?

I am waiting for AI Viva Voce (“AVV”). I am really surprised we aren’t hearing more about this idea?

Try it for yourself by making a prompt like this (adapt as needed):

Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me, to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 5 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction. Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?

It would be interesting to install os8088 on a later series, like a Pentium III 500mhz or a modern Intel i7! Would it even run? I guess os8088 could not harness the CPU power to make it usable. Instead, could a modern CPU run multiple instances of os8088 like a server? That’s probably something Claude could code…? A multi-session server that provides 1024 instances of os8088 by remote connection?

> “The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting…”

Tell? Largest “tell”? Tell for me to tell?

Write in English, please:

“The biggest sign that shows me how culture and sentiment are changing, is…”

This is great -

It’s almost as impressive as the “GOS” written for Atari 8-bit running on 6502 at 1.79 MHz. Visually it’s almost identical but has a nicer font. The specs are somewhat similar with 16 task slots, calculator app and task manager, serial mouse support (ST mouse) and Atari’s hardware sprites helping with some of the graphics. The XOR window frame is the same idea. One has to admire the work and inventiveness in these projects. See description and videos here:

https://atari8.co.uk/gui/

Wow if a page ever needed reader mode, this would be it… Light grey on white !nice

One workable approach is for AI to conduct a viva voce exam with each student: after the student answers a question on a topic, the session prompts with another question which digs deeper. This goes on for say 8-12 questions, getting deeper each time.

I checked this idea by asking ChatGPT to examine my understand of 1970’s CPU history, assuming I was a CompSci student. After it asked me a series of 8 questions on Intel’s devices from the 4004 onwards, ChatGPT assessed me as a 2nd year student and graded me with a Credit. The experience was quite convincing and at the end it summarised the gaps in my knowledge, which I agreed with. It was also able to say what criteria it was using to assess me.

So why can’t AI-viva voce be a method to help students and professors with teaching and learning?

Try it out, in a subject or language you know well. Adapt this prompt:

Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 8 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction? Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?

One thing I’m wondering is whether we need an open source set of technical patterns and libraries for dealing with this changing traffic mix.

Millions of small sites and creators don’t have the ability to design their own protections against large scale automated access. If useful content now attracts aggressive crawler traffic, many sites will be too expensive or unreliable to run.

Is part of the answer a community response? Perhaps a community-maintained toolkit, based on traffic data, that host sites can apply? It could include standard agent identification, rate limiting, traffic classification, access policies, caching, challenge mechanisms, logging, attribution and usage control etc etc.

In effect, we need much stronger road rules for today’s automated traffic, available as open technical patterns and libraries rather than every site owner having to invent this alone (they won’t).

Someone should put this somewhere. In a book or a poster. On a LinkedIn post for managers

It’s true that “zen of” is bolted onto many topics… it’s a tired cliche to suggest “simplicity” when things are complex. Does it help or is it faux spirituality?

I’ve enjoyed reading the comments here and I think there’s truth in how the technical problem is divided and teams are arranged. The idea of frequency of features (or builds) being a reflection of our division of the problem, is interesting. It made me think about our teams trying to ship releases and the problems arising, but zen and parallelism don’t give any hints. It’s just about effort to organise better, like it always was

I remember when Steve Jobs stood on stage and complained about Flash, how he hated its dominance of the free web, how it was a heavy and proprietary technology that prevented mobile devices from participating. His solution? To adopt the latest HTML standards… and also to build responsive apps. But now some apps have become heavy, advertising-bound, subscription nightmares. So it’s back to HTML, right?

Daft! And very strangely true. I recognised several moments and events in the story

I was hoping this article would conclude with, “and the C language spec in K&R says THIS which is the correct answer”. Apparently not. So the appendix in K&R is ambiguous? And yet we use ++ so often! I can see people crawling the Linux source tree using LLM-bots looking for bad uses of ++ …

Brilliant. Love the tech-disrespect and the “right to repair”!

At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’ I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader

Strange days we live in. Python and C++? What about a line of bash:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory. So if we replace this with awk using a hash map to keep count of unique words, then it’s a much smaller data set in memory:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | awk '{c[$0]++} END{for(w in c) print c[w], w}' | sort -rn

I’m guessing this will beat Python and C++?

Does not render correctly on iOS (mobile Safari)? It’s a fixed Desktop view and you can’t pinch to zoom as needed. It takes effort to prevent mobile users like this! Do others get this experience?

Once you were familiar with occam you could see deadlocks in code very quickly. It was a productive way to build scaled concurrent systems. At the time we laughed at the idea of using C for the same task

Very interesting. Reading this made me think of occam on the transputer: concurrent lightweight processes, message passing, dedicated memory! I spent some happy years in that world. Perhaps I should look at BEAM and see what work comes along?

Mobile Safari only does this for sites that implement dark themes (and when you have dark mode enabled in iOS). But many sites don’t have these themes. The Noir extension seems to fix the problem for now. There is a reader mode that can go dark but it’s manual, per article