jleyank

I would have thought the vax owed more to the pdp-11 culture than the pdp-10. If you don’t want to move the line add a second one. Berkeley Unix really helped things network and hack and that came from the 11 onto the vax.

If "programming" is not a skill (too broad?), then "design" and "debugging" are skills that can be be applied to all sorts of activities other than programming. Not sure if they can be taught, but they certainly can be learned via practice. Another example where 10K days/repetitions are required to build up the necessary muscles.

My group was new, lacking much in the way of research funds. Therefore, we taught for support (Chemistry): lab proctor, recitation leader. Somebody had to wrangle those 1000 people taking 1st-year chemistry. Pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dental, biology and a rare chemistry major or two. In return, the department covered my living expenses. This was in ancient times, but I figure similar mechanisms exist today because the student base seems to be quite similar.

Perhaps study the fields that are cs-adjacent as these might be positioned to expand when coding ceases to be a limitation? Biotech/pharma, engineering disciplines, these rely on modeling and data management tools whose improvement would be a win. Developers with discipline-specific knowledge are quite useful.

The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.

There was a whole lot of interesting and important computer work done in the 60's, but there was way larger stuff that went down. The moon race, 'Nam, decolonization, the Cold War, unrest in Europe (Paris, Prague Spring), Civil Rights, ... I'm sure I missed stuff. If the computer stuff "went wrong", things would have been delayed but people would have created things eventually. Maybe we'd all be using Algol.

If the other areas "went wrong", more wrong than some of them did, a whole lot of people would have died. We might be looking at a recovery similar to what followed WW I w/o the roaring 20's. Worst case, we'd have tested Sagan's models.

Much of the 20th century was a hot mess. I'm very disappointed that more people don't know this and wish to recreate it in the 21st century. Not a positive commentary on human nature I guess.

Category error. These comments are only relevant with a democratic administration.

These things are a balance that require at least medium term perspective. No jobs no Uber Eats. So perhaps letting people handle delivery keeps more cash circulating in society?

More cops? Better mental health? Just fewer bloody guns? Seeing others as people not NPC's? Opinions vary.

At the moment it’s worse than this title suggests. The US has ceased being a guarantor of peace, preferring to be one that will end the peace.

The US and Soviets had various teams looking for "Germans with technical information". This was more valuable that all the industry and materials seized. I'm sure, like this one, the teams were working to control whom acquired them...

And it might take into the next generation to find that other job. Hard to retrain past 20-30 or so. And, perhaps, automating taxis aren't something worth all that effort? Having a driver means they can do things when there is a problem rather than just phone home.

Quantum mechanics, molecular modeling (classical mechanics and empirical), data handling, chemical reaction prediction, …. There’s FOSS and commercial software for all aspects of drug design.

Hopefully, people don’t look back from a few years on and state that this was the last truly stable or secure versions of the kernel. Yeah, I assume Linus is assuming people understand their submissions but people are lazy. If they were given code in some fashion, it wasn’t thought through.

They better plan for fewer well-paid customers if they’re eliminating developers. AI doesn’t pay for things, and we’re in a consumer economy that lives on customers.

For some of us researching how to solve a chemical problem, "those days" were "yesterday"...

Aren't COMMON's implemented as static structures? Stuff that's accessible from multiple functions - except that Fortran requires explicit rather than implicit reference.

There was a CS literature joke that I saw back in 1982. "Whatever language is used to program high-performance machines, it will be called Fortran.".

"that followed existing mathematical practice". Not what I would call primitive thinking. It set out to handle math quickly and it succeeded. I/O wasn't its strength, and I'm sure the latest versions look like verbose C.

With vector machines, Fortran yielded (much) faster code because (a) there was a whole lot of work on preprocessors for "dusty deck" code and (b) the lack of pointers and their overlap let the compilers do their stuff. C code needed a lot of #pragma's to let it know that some pointers didn't overlap and so could be optimized.

We found it best to to the front-end and I/O of the code in C and the compute in Fortran. Fastest calculations especially with those tailored libraries.

Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.

And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.

There are tools to help catch these things. But this assumes people take the time to test for them. All languages can have logic errors, insufficient testing leaves them unresolved.

In other words, proper programming is possible in C it just might take a bit more rigor.

This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.

The conservative Christians enter the conversation.

There comes a time in life when there's "just too much stuff". Whenever that happens, things like e-books and other digital media become more important. And today, unfortunately, books might not be items that have any resale value.

I assume it's "you can see all the source, but I won't accept your changes"?

Perhaps get a PhD in something that (heavily) uses math, such as Physics or some aspects of Chemistry? Similar to CS, it might be better professionally to work in areas where CS is a tool rather than the product. If you can make math (or code) appear, than these associated areas should advance a bit more quickly.

Gresham's Law applies here too. Bad code drives out good. And if it costs money to maintain good code, it's going to hasten its departure. I really hope Linus and others at that level filter out all the slop that's being produced.

The main side effect was, as indicated, weight loss. They’re trying to identify and understand others and once they can make a biological model for them they’ll start drug design. Ideally something smaller and tailored to the specific model. But they’ll take anything safe and effective given the piles of money from a blockbuster.

Still gone of biological mechanisms that are unknown, even unsuspected. Meatbags ain’t quite engineering yet.

Remember, one of the best tools for decoding something is a screwdriver…. Math helps, too.