an attempt to push the world in a better direction
Since Doc Searls decided to start blogging daily again , I figured I might just as well follow along. Now that I'm retired (actually, yeeted out of the labor pool by Long Covid, but that's a different story), there's not much keeping me on a regular schedule. Maybe this blog will help? We'll see. I've been helping my friend Jim repair an old radio from the 1930s, an Emerson Catalan radio. It turns…
Upcoming projects include revisiting old ideas Bidirectional compilation - a compiler that can work backwards to enable radical refactoring, possibly into other languages. I'll start with Pascal, because it doesn't really do macros, which break reverse causality. Memex - I want to create a markup language for existing documents that can actually bring an 80 year old idea to life. The main feature…
The US created a new world order from the ashes of WWII. This gave us the incredible privilege of having other nations treat our Dollar as their reserve currency. Trump has thrown this away, and it can't be recovered. We're now going to actually have to pay, in hard currency for things we import from now on. This means we're all going to see our standards of living fall by about 70% in the next…
I can't get over the feeling that I'm wasting whatever portion of my life I've got left. In this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jgTCayWlwc "A rant on personal engineering projects" by BPS.shorts The author makes the point that when you're working commercially on part of a project, the organization always has a way to keep the project going, even if you fail. If the cost goes over, they…
If you've read about von Neuman, and wondered what it was like to bootstrap computing, and if there could be another way.... here's an interesting Birthday Gift from me to you... the BitGrid, and a writeup, on an HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115107
A few weeks ago, I replied to a thread on Hacker News about a "leaked" talk by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The key phrase I tried to pick apart was So imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want I had assumed he was referring to situations similar to my own experience as a software developer interacting with customers back in the 1980s. Programming was still a relatively…
My friend Jim bought an Apple Macintosh at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest on Saturday. It's got a bad keyboard. The keyboard has a bad Intel 8021 CPU. I need to replace that chip. It's going to take wayyyy more time that I'm used to dumping into a project successfully. This is part of my process to push myself forward. So far I've: Searched for an 8048 series disassembler, found none…
So, this morning when I click on my morning link to Peter Zeihan , I've been greeted with this, instead of him talking from some new location. We've entered the contest of wills. Google/YouTube thinks that they can force ads down my throat in service of their customers(the advertisers), and is willing to block my ad blocker in an attempt to force my compliance. I'm sure there will eventually be a…
I've been a programmer since the 1980s. I feel that the peak of the field was somewhere between 1995 and 2000. We had Windows 95/98, the Internet, and all programs were local applications run on a desktop, that people had gotten very productive on. The existence of Visual Basic and VBA support in the Microsoft Office Suite made it possible, and even practical, for most domain experts to build…
Here's the text of my most recent interaction with ChatGPT Mike Warot: explain how cesium beam atomic clocks work, in the style of Richard Feynman Ah, yes, cesium beam atomic clocks - a fascinating piece of technology! Let me explain how they work in the style of Richard Feynman. First, let's take a step back and talk about what we mean by time. Time is something we use to measure the duration of…
If I had a million $USD to do physics, I'd do some experiments. Berry Phase/Electromagnetic 4 Potential experiments First purchase/rental - a SQUID - Superconducting QUantum Interference Device. My first hypothesis to check is regarding the A field, also known as the electromagnetic vector potential. I hypothesize that if you were to take a bifilar wound coil of quite a few turns, the flux when…
Well, with the impending demise of Twitter, it looks like I'll be following Dave Rogers , and the rest of the world, on RSS again, along with everyone else. I've got a list... it's about 250 entries long, that will make the start of my RSS feeds. Twitter had an immediacy that RSS lacks, having solved the problem of feedback by outsourcing the policing of spam, etc. to a staff that has been let go.…
I'm playing with Stable Diffusion on my PC, to see what kind of things it comes up with, and learn a bit more about the nature of AI. I've been trying to visualize the words of my friend Lloyd Smith, who well before his passing often said in jest When I die... I want to be sat upright in a chair at a card table, on the surface of the moon, with a royal flush in my hands, and a shit eating grin on…
Any sufficiently popular computing environment contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of capability based security. In a recent Hacker News thread[1], I quoted from the source article Continuing a legacy is an honorable task, except in programming. This is the most important of the items in the list. The "upgrade or you're unclean" ethos has some very deep roots.…
We do need to do a hard thing, we need to reconfigure our world to cope with the end of the one time greatest economic bonanza of all times... the fossil fuel pulse. If you think I'm about to go on about global warming/climate change/etc... NOPE We've tapped most of the easy to reach oil in the world. Now we're fracking to get at things, and those wells have decay rates of 40%/year, instead of per…
I've lost multiple nights of sleep, and simply have no coping skills because there exist in this world a large number of people who just love calling abortion "Baby Murder" These people obviously know the difference between a dead child lying on the ground in a classroom in Texas, and a few cells removed in the first half of a pregnancy... yet they persist in this evil game. If the upcoming laws…
Closing the "Boyfriend Loophole" could do a great deal to stop future mass shootings. Someone who can't handle their feelings around people close to them enough to avoid violence, shouldn't be allowed to own firearms. This is THE BEST CHANCE we have at the moment, likely in the next year or two, for actually fixing some of the biggest problems facing our nation. The huge overlap between those who…
In 1945, the person in charge of research and development, who oversaw most of the science that won WWII with the help of Logistics, wrote an article about the most pressing task facing mankind, the need to organize and access the ever growing flood of information created by all of this activity. His vision was expressed in an article titled "As We May Think", which was eventually republished by…
I came across this comparison video , and it makes a comparison of features between Pop Linux and Windows 11 For the most part, they're equivalent.
Krystal Ball lays out exactly how the Clintons sold out the liberal agenda.
Nobody writes well written prose. Everyone writes, then does a better or worse job of editing. Like code, prose tends to crystalize into smaller and higher quality pieces over time. --- Process --- Write all of your thoughts in a stream of consciousness flow, don't worry about how it looks, just get your thoughts out of your head, and into the storage medium of your choice. This frees up stack…
Ask HN : As you get older, do you see programming as merely a means to an end? 38 points by amichail 18 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 45 comments That is, you become more interested in what your app does rather than the programming involved to get it to do that? --- My Reply --- at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30674662 Programming has gone through a weird path of…
a "no fly" zone involves acquiring and maintaining air superiority over Ukraine and neighboring territory. To do this we would have to destroy any surface to air radar and missile sites in or near Ukraine. We would also have to shoot down any enemy aircraft that violated that airspace. In sum total, it would be a declaration of war against Belarus and Russia. It would then be up to Putin to decide…
Doc Searls was at it again back in 2018 doing a Ted Talk . His story rhymes with his overall message, and the things he wrote back then. I think it's time to examine how events have evolved since then. *This story is me revising and extending my reply on Facebook. (It's buried in the comments, don't bother) Doc worried about the lost center in coverage of the news, and overall discussion. I too…
I believe in this causal chain, Computers are insecure Which many bad actors find profit in exploiting Which makes new web sites a risk Which makes users prefer their known "safe" spaces Which leads to walled gardens Which then sell the "users" for profit to advertisers Which incentivizes dark behavior of those walled gardens Which then attract the rentier class Which then leverage control for…