EvanAnderson

When I heard "carbon-fiber" and "pressure vessel" in the same sentence I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion

This would be the opposite of that, though.

If a company is willing to continue maintaining a piece of code their monopoly should continue. If they choose to stop (because they can't come up with a sustainable business model, can't find somebody to sell the monopoly to who will, etc) it should become, at minimum, source available (if not out right Open Source).

This should be the case, especially, for software that drives long-lived hardware devices in infrastructure roles (public works, manufacturing, etc).

There was an American Crow at a local wildlife rescue who could speak and mimic sounds. He would do a ringtone sort of sound, said "caw, caw" in a very human voice (presumably mimicking people mimicking crows), and sometimes would say "American Crow" (as he was identified by the sign on his enclosure).

I managed to get a recording once: https://drive.google.com/file/d/109wzdIsVW7hZwX1-8M3IioUMr49...

TIL. We hear and see the blue jays on our property frequently. We occasionally see a hawk but yet we hear hawk calls fairly frequently too. I always assumed I wasn't seeing the hawk. It never occurred to me another bird mimic the hawk calls. That's really interesting.

My local hospital system (Premier Health) was all-in on IBM and token ring. I remember being chagrined when they built a new hospital in 1998 and wired everything for token ring. The writing was clearly on the wall for token ring by 1998 but their IT department bled IBM blue.

Fast-forward to 2013, when my wife was giving birth to our daughter in one of their hospitals, and I noticed an unused type-1 token ring wall jack in our room right beside some occupied 8P8C (aka RJ-45) jacks.

I saw the title and thought "pykrete". Here's the aircraft carrier in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

I loved QWK! I was a Silly Little Mail Reader person.

The Computer History Museum collected an oral history[0] of John Backus[1] and there's some discussion about what computing was like when Fortran was created.

I really enjoy CHM's oral histories. I'm slowly working my way thru all of them and there are some real gems in there (Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Margaret Hamilton, Gordon Moore, Fred Brooks, John Warnock, etc).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDsWTyLEgbk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus

Wow-- I'd forgotten that Levy called Margaret out by name in the book. I also got the machine wrong-- it was the PDP-1, not the TX-0.

> Cycle accurate emulation helps little with this era PC demos, because back in 1993 PC hardware performance variation was already massive.

Absolutely

"How much of the sword emerged from the water" in Second Reality was a good measurement of CPU speed and video card performance, for example.

I remember seeing stuff in demos on my friend's Pentium Pro machine that I never saw on my 486SX-25 because routines ran faster and you could see more of the effect (since some demos were sync'd to the music and would move on irrespective of the progress of the effects). Heck-- just replacing my video card made a huge difference with some demos.

Check out starting on page 10: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Edit; It looks like I misremembered the machine. Seems like it was the PDP 1.

It's fascinating she was at the intersection of so many foundational points.

There is a very nice oral history the Computer History Museum produced: https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-ow...

In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.

Definitely worthy of a black bar. She was a pioneer of making software quality into a formal discipline.

Recalling more about this experience today.

There's a monument located near the outlet of a spring on the river bottom. A photo of the monument: https://www.ardeaprints.com/manatee-monument-king-spring-182...

I couldn't visit the monument-- I hadn't learned to SCUBA dive yet. My father, who was an underwater photography enthusiast, took photos of it. The next year we transferred the photos and 8mm movie footage he shot onto VHS for me to show to my 6th grade class. I can remember him reading the inscription for the tape in a very somber voice.

> "Life must become more than the wants and needs of humans. We are not on this earth alone. If the manatee goes into extinction because the needs of humans became more important then we will have taken another step backward toward our own demise. Extinction is forever and for all." - Dr. Harvey Barnett

I'd love to find that VHS. His picture is somewhere in the mess of slides I need to eventually scan.

I'd also love to back and swim with the manatees again. Apparently their populations are doing better, though they're still at risk.

> Why can't it be shipped as a shared library for the whole system to use?

Flashbacks to DataTypes on the Amiga: https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library

I don't have a whale moment, but my manatee moment gave me feelings that are probably similar to yours re: being incapable of feeling anything but respect and awe for the aquatic mammals we share the planet with.

In the late 80s my father took me snorkeling at the Crystal River Manatee Sanctuary[0]. We rowed our boat out into the river and anchored. I jumped in and immediately spotted an adult manatee and a calf. I've always assumed it was a mother and her calf.

Judging distance under water is difficult, but I'd put them at least 40 feet away in water that might have been 12 feet deep.

The mother put herself between me and the calf surprisingly quickly. Knowing the rules I didn't approach them. I just floated there watching.

After a few moments the calf poked its head around its mother and looked at me. It felt just like a curious child peeking from behind a parent's legs. I stayed still and just watched them (thankful my father made me wear the yellow Navy surplus horseshoe collar BC that had just enough air in it to keep me afloat without the need to tread water).

My father was still getting his SCUBA gear together and hadn't jumped in yet. I think I stuck my head up and told him they were there-- I can't remember for sure-- but I know he stayed in the boat for awhile leaving me alone with the two manatees.

As I watched over the next couple of minutes both mother and calf went up for air and moved closer to me. It seemed like they were grazing along the bottom in the plants. I didn't see them eat any of the plants, but it seemed like they were nosing around in them. I definitely got the "sea cow" comparison.

The mother got close enough for me to see ugly gashes in her back from being stuck by boat motors. They weren't bloody or raw-looking, but they did look deep and painful to have acquired. Her calf's back was smooth and a lighter color.

As they proceeded past me the calf turned, swam over its mother, and approached me. I was shocked at how fast it could reorient itself and move. Again, having been told the rules, I kept my hands close to my body and didn't move. The calf bumped into my legs and rubbed against my back as it swam past. It descended and circled back around under me and rejoined its mother. They continued swimming away from me, into the murkier deeper water and down into the sanctuary where we weren't permitted to follow.

The whole thing might have lasted 5 minutes, but it really stuck with me. The memory is surely tarnished and altered, having been recalled so many times, but I definitely got bumped by a curious manatee calf whose mother was wary but didn't flee.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_National_Wildlif...

I dug up to code to make sure I was remembering properly and, oh boy, I was! There's a header on the file that indicates a revision date of 2011. I wonder if the coding style isn't based on style-guidelines at the MAS 90 customization company. I'm betting they have code going back decades, and keeping a consistent style is probably a win (even if the style is eye-gougingly bad to read). I do see they've adopted a mix of numeric line numbers and alphanumeric labels.

I'm used to "ON ERR GOTO"-type error handling in BASIC dialects, whereas in this code I'm seeing a lot of defensive "IF ERR=xxx" after API calls. It looks like they're also "cleverly" using the division by zero handler as an "escape hatch" out of a subroutine. To paraphrase some their code:

> 31338 IF ERR=15 THEN LET ERRMSG$=MSG(-1) ELSE IF ERR=14 THEN GOSUB DB_LOGIN; IF NO_CONNECT THEN LET a=1/0 ELSE GOTO 31337

That's the stuff!

Apparently they didn't make use of line renumbering (or the ProvideX environment doesn't support it) because I see features and error-handling shoehorned in between lines numbered ascending by 10. It reminds me of 9 y/o me shoehorning in new code when I was trying to write text adventure games using a unique INPUT / IF/THEN / GOTO block for each "room" of the game.

HN discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057

I dealt with ProvideX code for a Customer who was using an industry-specific customized version of MAS 90. I managed to see some of the source (under NDA) of the customizations and it was fucking horrifying-- line numbers and GOTOs and global variables. It makes my eyes burn a little thinking about it...

You're correct. I did a ton of ASP in JScript back in the day, but VBScript was much more common.

I thought it was a reasonable comment and, like you, I thought they were good questions. I haven't followed what kind of watermarking LLMs are putting in their output that might be a telltale for their use so maybe it's readily apparent in a way that isn't to me.

I'd be mortified if a comment I made was accused of being LLM-edited or "created". I don't use any of that junk but if I'm reading LLM output and not realizing it I just might be adopting some of its mannerisms and styles with realizing it. That's chilling.

My "favorite" Space Shuttle abort mode is the Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort[0] because of the complex energy management procedure necessary to pull it off.

As I understand it the energy management of an RTLS is tenuous because, ultimately, the orbiter is an unpowered glider (with a glide ratio similar to a brick). The limits of stress on the orbiter's airframe are a factor, too.

The orbiter's mass, energy (altitude), and downrange position all have to be in a reasonably tight envelope to make the landing without coming up short or overshooting (there's only so much energy you can bleed off doing S turns).

John Young[1] described an RTLS abort working thru "continuous miracles, interspersed with acts of God".

Somebody made a fun (if you like this kind of stuff) simulation of an RTLS abort[2] in Kerbal Space Program.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#Retu...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Young_(astronaut)

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx94b9nHTHg

Having the power of violence behind you makes technical hacks mostly irrelevant.

A lot of law is adjudicated based on the intent, not the black-and-white definition. Proxying your traffic thru a friend's house (VPS in another location, etc) would be considered a "VPN" by a court. Definitional hacks, for the most part, don't fly with judges.

To handle the matter technically Utah would need a "great firewall of Utah" and a legislative mandate that all ISPs route thru it. Somehow they'd have to factor-in signals from cellular sites neighboring states and satellites.

> He's also the inspiration for one of favorite characters in fiction, Sherkaner Underhill from A Deepness In The Sky.

Oh, hell-- that totally makes sense and I completely missed it until now. Thanks for mentioning that-- it adds some additional depth to a book and a character I already enjoy a ton.

I think it's more likely the industry would rather rent us our compute and storage than let us own it ourselves.

We can have our Raspberry Pis and our ESP32s, but meaningful amounts of compute and especially storage will be rental-only.

Requiring proof-of-humanity using device-bound cryptographic attestations (which the "age verification" camp will rally behind) will insure the toy computers we are allowed to own won't be able to conduct meaningful online discourse. Only phones and other locked-down platforms will be trusted to make the attestations necessary to interact with banks, merchants, and governments.

Edit (now that I'm not on mobile):

I think storage ownership, more than RAM or compute, is the cornerstone of digital sovereignty. Big tech will be happy to let us store our data on their servers for a fraction of the cost of self-hosting, so long as we let them train their models on our data. Any storage, be it self-hosted or rented, where the data is inaccessible for model training, mass surveillance, or censorship will command top dollar.

It'll be just like "dumb TVs" going extinct. "Dumb storage" will be impossible to get for any reasonable cost for consumers.

They're coming for business computing too, BTW, but consumers are the low-hanging fruit.

If this goes on long enough the prices crashing won't matter because the manufacturers of all the other PC hardware will be gone.

I think we're seeing the end of the PC as we know it, personally.

I don't know that I've ever done a workshop like you describe. It sounds like it'd be a fun thing to try. I'll have to figure out a way to get into something like that.

Here's how I feel about it, FWIW:

I taught at a community college for a few years and have spoken at conferences. Those engagements are immensely enjoyable and energizing to me because they're performances. The roles of the audience and presenter are clear. I do my thing and the audience does theirs. I get that energy and enjoyment (a ton more of it, actually) performing live music. I walk off a stage jazzed. It's a wonderful high.

The dinner party scenario is absorbs energy. It's not necessarily less enjoyable than performing, but because it's peer-to-peer there's so much more protocol, nuance, and thought than performing. Even if I'm talking with people I know well I don't walk away energized. With people who are new to me it's a lot of work. Like anything it has come easier w/ practice.

Until "cyber" insurance underwriters suffer catastrophic losses and the price for policies rises accordingly I don't think we'll see any significant change in IT security status quo. If doing the right thing is more expensive than insuring away the risk the business will always make the cheaper decision.