bcaa7f3a8bbc

Does your method work for QFN and DFN? I currently find them to be the biggest headache in prototyping. If you coat some solder on the chip and board using an iron and then reflow with a hot air station, it's easy to miss a few pins underneath due to uneven solder distribution; on the other hand, if you use solder paste and reflow with hot air, again, due to uneven solder distribution, you'll short some pins and miss others, and there is no straightforward way to fix it, the thing gets even worse when solder on the ground pad suddenly melts and causes unwanted movements (during rework) that misaligns the chip. I got my board working only by pure luck. I'd like to hear your recommendation.

Also known by the public as "shortwave radio" (although only a part of the HF spectrum is used for commercial broadcasting, but HF and shortwave is essentially used interchangeably).

DEC actually made a microprocessor implementation of the PDP-11 processor, called LSI-11. It has two chips, and is functionality equivalent to the large thing. Unfortunately, DEC was in a complete disregard of personal computers or workstations at that time, I don't think they made workstations with it. Otherwise it could be another legend in computing history: a PDP-11 workstation! Never happened.

Here's S100 computer board built around this microprocessor with a great introduction to the hardware details. http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/PDP11%20Board/P...

Yes, I'm familiar with second-source 6502. Also, I've seen the Rabbit2000 processor, it's basically a Z80 running at 50 MHz. But I wasn't aware that 80286 has any modern second-source clones. Are there?

Simple question: Why doesn't Boeing upgrade to i386 for their new planes? I heard it's available for aerospace applications.

> The war that Symbolics started was what wiped out MIT, but there were other events going on then. There were people giving up on cooperation, and together this wiped out the community and there wasn't much left.

The internal struggle in the MIT AT Lab due to Lisp and Symbolics seems more interesting than I thought. I read Wikipedia, and it says "there were two AI Lab people who choose not to be employed by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky". Wow, I never expected to see these two names in the same line.

Are there any good book that covers this part of the history and its connection to the later development of free software movement?

My score is 3/5.

One immediate redflag I have noticed is using "int", "char", "short" as if they have a definite size. They don't. C standard only guarantees a minimum size. For example, many PDPs are 36-bit. Assuming the size of a variable is a common practice nowadays, but at least one should use uint8_t, int32_t, etc. from stdint.h.

But I was still tricked, it should be obvious in hindsight, 12 years of schooling led me to think: If the author was asking these questions, at least one or two questions must be answerable (even if it's technically incorrect, but you'd better to guess the original intention of a question). So I still tried to guess and got two wrong answers... Get to be careful next time...

How exactly do utilities like Teracopy implement high-performance copying? In other words, what are the performance bottlenecks in explorer.exe? Personally, I've observed that:

1. Explorer attempts to do a file enumeration prior to copying, which sometimes could waste a lot of time.

2. It seems tools like Teracopy use buffering aggressively, which can speed up the copying significantly based on my experience on Windows XP with slow HDDs.

Are there any other points worth noting?

+1. I've heard some optimizations in scientific computing (e.g. Gaussian 16, from someone who does chemistry) is not available without AVX, but I'm not a practitioner of scientific computing, and know nothing about the current situation. Could anyone share your experience? Also, what is the performance figure of multimedia/encoding performance?

How do you ensure the proper requirements for routing analog circuits, high-speed digital circuits, or RF circuits are satisfied in a freestyle routing?

Also, check LibreSilicon [1], a free and open source semiconductor manufacturing process, currently in development. The target is 1 μm, but the developers said 0.5 μm should be possible. Here's a comprehensive introductory talk [2]. And as usual, the project is on GitHub [3]. If things went well, they said they planned to manufacture an open source RISC-V microcontroller, pin-compatible with Atmel AVR ATTiny.

[1] https://libresilicon.com

[2] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9410-libresilicon

[3] https://github.com/libresilicon/process

A more direct motivation is recent U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies, the state support in semiconductor section has been boosted significantly, since decision-makers in China is now seeing the lack of state-of-art semiconductor manufacturing capabilities a critical threat to national security. Plausibly, developing the domestic semiconductor market to reduce foreign reliance is going to be a major goal.

As we see, SMIC has already withdrawn from New York Stock Exchange entirely [1], and purchased a 7nm EUV lithography machine from ASML for $120 million [2]!

[1] https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3011737/chinas-biggest...

[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13941/smics-14-nm-mass-produc...

Sort of. Google, but 5000 years earlier.

> China is turning inward, maybe they're getting some state support, monetary, political, or otherwise;

This seems to be the most likely factor.

Insightful comment.

> Would the biodiversity of ideas actually reduce? [...] the tool doesn't work according to our modern technocratic expectations.

One failure mode immediately comes to my mind: some fields of researches would progress rapidly, but after a while the entire human civilization may stuck (like a broken hill climbing algorithm) at a local optimum forever and wastes a lot of time.

And again, here's my idea of a Sci-Fi novel.

Information retrieval is difficult. Many important works in various subjects in human history have been developed much earlier than they were widely known. They remained unknown due to geography, language, culture, and popularity barriers. Even today when everything is online, sometimes important works are still ignored until rediscovered.

What if an alien civilization came to Earth in ~4000 B.C.E and gave human civilizations worldwide a information system, which can: (1) search keywords and obtain full text of any written work related to a topic, (2) obtain the state-of-art researches on a subject by querying it with natural language, (3) create an online forum for scholars to communicate their works, (4) translate the text to any language.

That is, the alien does not directly create or teach any knowledge for/to humans, but help humans to retrieve and communicate existing knowledge to the maximum extent.

What could the alternative human history be? Would we discover Newtonian mechanics 1000 years earlier? You know, if the Greek tradition was followed, or if Arabic scholars were able to communicate their researches directly with Europeans and Asians, discovering Newtonian mechanics 1000 years earlier sounds extremely plausible.

Last time I asked this question, someone suggested that the inevitable consequence is the creation of a global patent system, in which pure objective knowledge can also be patented.

And during the initial development of ARM, a BBC Micro was used for writing an ARM simulator. After the successful production of the ARM chip, the BBC Micro was still used as a monitor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#ARM_E...

Great!

I'm currently working on a homebrew Z80 computer on breadboards and wirewrapped boards, and building all the (simple) hardware and software from scratch, using vintage chips (strictly no post-1989 chips) and Steve Ciarcia's Build Your Own Z80 Computer as a reference, but with a much higher spec (32K or better).

My original plan is porting Li-Chen Wang's Tiny BASIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC) to my homebrew computer, and describing its operation at my local hackerspace. Basically, after Bill Gates' has written his letter, there was a revolt in the microcomputer scene and many hobbyists sought alternative implementations. Around the same time, Li-Chen Wang released his hobby project - Tiny BASIC, with full source in public domain. In retrospect, it can be seen as a free software project before the free software movement. Although its functionality was extremely limited Proof-of-Concept and never widely used, but I believe it's a piece of important legacy of the FLOSS community worth mentioning.

But now, since BBC Basic is now free, I'm looking forward to port BBC Basic to my system as well!

Read the screenshot mockups in the article carefully, it reads, "https://mediem.com/". So the author is clearly also annoyed by Medium.

I also strongly recommend you to read From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner [0] together with What the Dormouse Said. The two books are really an eye-opener and revealed how everything connected together.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author)

> Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum.

Yes! Recently, David Perell wrote an excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], which examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and part of the article has a similar argument just like mine.

[1] https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on

---

It's interesting to see that the personal computing and the Internet was envisioned by our pioneers as an open, peer-to-peer, decentralized structure, and they hope to bring the world to a freer and more egalitarian future (Cyber-utopianism). They were the people who laid out the crucial groundwork of everything (PC, Web, microchips, crypto, etc) throughout the 70s.

In the 80s, this Cyber-utopianism evolved into Cyberdelic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic) and cyberpunk, computer was seen as the new LSD. The cyberpunks of the 1980s and 1990s embraced technology and the hacker ethics. They believed that the Internet could help human beings overcome limits, liberating us from authority (crypto-anarchism) and even enabling us to transcend space, time, and body (transhumanism).

Later, a group of entrepreneurs absorbed this idealism (see the early Wired magazine, it was fascinating!) and transformed it into the Californian Ideology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) and created the dotCom bubble in the 90s, finally bringing us to the present world.

But if we compare the original vision to the web dominated by Silicon Valley today, one would say that the Valley already betrayed this vision at large. What the FAANG empire have claimed to do, is not what they were/are actually doing. (On the bright side, the Free Software Movement succeed, and the Electronics Frontier Foundation is still going strong, but both with little influence compared to the megacorps.)

What happened?

Ideologically speaking, the most straightforward explanation is that the idealism has been sold out to corporations and capitalism for profit. I think this idea is fine and it can explain a lot, but this is a cliche and there's enough criticisms based on this approach that one could found online, so I will stop here and explain it from other perspectives.

Technologically speaking, the whole thing didn't come without warnings from the inside. The first warning came in 1984, from the Free Software Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement), it said the objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the software running on a computer grants freedoms to users, otherwise it would create a dystopia instead; The second warning came from the Cypherpunks Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk) in the late 80s, it said objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the computer and network systems are explicitly designed to preserve the security and privacy of the users by utilizing cryptography, otherwise it would create a dystopia instead; the third warning came in late 1990s, from Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Common movement. He wrote a book called "Code is Law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cybersp...), arguing the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties by itself (envisioned by the original utopianist), but it was actually an effect created by the running code. Whoever controls the code can completely reshape the cyberspace and transform it to a dystopia instead, we must make sure that our democracy, freedom, human rights is coded properly into the computer programs, to achieve this, the government must enforce heavy regulations of the code and the Internet by passing strict laws. This is controversial, but he got the idea (the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties by itself, we must implement them explicitly), just like the free software hackers or the Cypherpunks. But unfounately, neither solution has been implemented at a large scale.

Finally, I would try replying to the original question: why do we have a problem of "Fake News" newadays? I believe part of the answer is the limitation of all the elitism from the forementioned things. The ideology of the Internet, more or less, has an element of populism. People believed we could change the world by empowering the individuals by freeing computing powers from institutions to the people, and connect them via the Internet, eventually, we can create...

> a postpolitical, non-hierarchical society made possible by cyberware, in which the computer-literate, super-intelligent, open-minded, change-oriented, self-reliant, irreverent free-thinker is the norm and the person who is not internetted and does not think for him or herself and does not question authority is the "problem person".

And it looked pretty good: things appeared to be moving to this direction - the emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove this point. This was seen as the case even before 2010, when we had the Occupy Movement and The Arab Spring.

But it turns out,

1. It was the populism of the elites. Yes, they were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism played a positive role, it bought us the free software movement, for example. But after all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, the same populism would stop playing the original positive role.

2. The development of the Internet was done in the beginning of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism. From the 1980s to 2007, the world was following this trend, so there was no major social conflicts that contradicted the idealism of the Internet manifested itself through the web. When the middle east politics started getting destabilized, people celebrated because the revolution was liberal. There was even the "cute cat theory of digital activism", which says when there are funny memes involved, people are more likely to join the political protest of Internet freedom. And it was seen as a good thing - a faceless dictatorial government was overthrown by lolcat. Isn't it the miracle of the postmodern Internet?

But post-2010, this world order started to disintegrate. Now it's clear, that "The Internet is an inherently platform of democracy and equality, which empowered the individuals to be free from the establishment", this narrative from the 80s has been proven to be wishful thinking. This is when the entire thing started to get out of control.

Now it has been clear that ANY idea, can by popularized and supported by a free Internet. Now in the current age of deglobalization and political and economic failure, naturally, extreme post-truth and nationalistic ideas are getting more and more popular support, just like the Arab Spring, both was supported by a number of people who were frustrated by the status quo.

I guess this is how we suddenly got the "Fake News" in recent years. It was simply because the world politics created a big market of the reactionary populism, and the web is the best tool to sell it. It wasn't a significant problem because the market was not as big as today.

The grassroot nature of the Internet started to revolt against its own founding principle, democracy and equality, which made the grassroot nature of the Internet possible in the first place.

I think your comment is gold. Because I've been also thinking about the construction, organization, and mechanism of online communities in general, most of my comments were posted to another community, but I posted some related comments on Hacker News as well. I'll start dumping comments as well, I hope you find them interesting. Feedback is appreciated.

1. First, I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.

* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220

* Recommended comments (read the link below before you continue):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914

Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.

We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.

On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse.

What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social-economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems.

If you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press.

Here's are related comments on this issue I have posted before,

* Twitter has barred hundreds of accounts for posing as liberal activists

My comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239216

* RIP Culture War Thread

My comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19231994

This one is mostly a repetition, but it includes one more book recommendation. I also recommend to read the original web article. It has covered a lot of related discussion.

2. I was also trying to characterize online communities in terms of its medium, feedback mechanisms, and filtering mechanism. A online platform has a lot of content, but you only see a subset of content. The filtering mechanism determines which subset it is. We could say, the first generation of online community is mailing list, Usenet newsgroups, and web forums. It only has a simple filtering mechanism: grouping the content by topics, and a kill file (a people/keyword blacklist, sometime shared). It works relatively well, and has the advantage of producing diverse topics, free-flowing discussions, but there's nothing to stop low-quality discussion, so a good signal-to-noise radio must be carefully maintained. Another problem is the lack of feedback: when nobody reply for post, it means five different possibilities, see Warnock's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma). Another important issue is: the entire forum basically stops scaling when the number of users exceeds 10,000 or so. The information is too much to handle for any individual.

Platforms like Reddit or Hacker News can be seen as the second generation, it introduced voting as a feedback mechanism, which simultaneously (partially) solves the problems of content recommendations, restriction of low-quality content, and scaling. The "karma" system of Slashdot also counts, but it has a innovative "community moderation", so I guess it's 2.5 generation. Anyway, overall, its usefulness of voting as feedback is great and now becomes an integral part of many communities, but not without its own problem. Voting creates a strong incentive for people to collect upvote. People may stop talking about insightful contrarian views, which otherwise can generate an intellectual interesting discussion in a newsgroup. Also, voting seems to be more suitable for link/media recommendations, but less suitable for discussions. Many subreddits has thousands of votes for links but a single digit of comment.

Finally, ~2007, here comes the social media. Social media is unique because it leveraged the underlying human social network as a means of the filtering mechanism, and has a somewhat "decentralized" model of publishing. Unlike a forum where everyone post to a single directory, on Twitter, you post to your own account, and others can simply follow a number of people, then interesting posts simply circulate by itself. The system is highly effective, I love social media. Unfortunately, problems. First, the content has to be short, no long discussion is possible. This is usually not a problem, but the social media has slowly killed most forums in the process and became the center of the web, forcing people to use for discussion, although the social media is an awful platform for this purpose. Its structure is conversational, posts don't have a single thread, but a dozen of microthread. A replies to B, but this reply is usually ignored by C, which may have crucial context. Furthermore, the volatile nature causes many problems, A mentioned X 3 hours ago, and now X is missed by most readers. Or, A posted X and Y, but often only a single X/Y is seen by other readers, while the other one has important context. Also, the social media has the strongest filtering bubble effect compared to all platform, which may create an echo chamber, increase political polarization among other effects.

But think about it. Voting was invented by Reddit in ~2002, social media is a thing from 2007. Can we design a new generation of communities with innovation? A better alternative "filtering mechanism"?

3. I noticed a lot of online communities seems to go downhill. What is going? I have a comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19958700

Two years ago, I've became disillusioned about the current status of web communities and culture. Basically I was thinking that, the web culture, once hailed as the center of out-of-box thinking, creativity, weird subcultures, e.g. Something Awful and early 4chan, was dying. Of course it has the good, the bad and the ugly, but now it seems increasingly boring.

For example, text boards and forums? Mostly dead. Imageboards? Even small sites dedicated to a particular obscure subculture are dying, the biggest ones are mostly ideological nonsense. Blogs? It no longer has a visible and influential blogosphere. Reddit? Primarily newsfeed and links. Also, lots of communities I was interested in was going downhill. Twitter? Lots of interesting things was happening in the beginning, but nowadays it's a mainstream walled garden, etc.

Even Hacker News had:

* I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...

So I asked a friend online. He was once active in a technical community and specialized in writing tropes and jokes, but already stopped posting for a while.

I asked: What are you doing nowadays?

He answered: Busy works.

Then I told him my all of my perceptions I mentioned, and asked him: what the heck is going on for web communities? what is the future? what are the places where interesting things are produced nowadays?

He answered: I think it has returned back to the era of chatrooms.

I've realized his judgement cannot be too correct after seeing this article on HN.

Pretty much. I've heard a lot of activities is now happening on Discord servers, especially for gaming, it's almost the role IRC played in the early 2000s. Telegram also has many interesting groups and those dramas and incidents are coming on a weekly basis! I believe the chatroom would be a breeding group for the next wave of web communities.

In short, I guess we've just completed a full circle.

Unfortunately, what it means to me is:

(1) All the legacy of the previous web communities needs to be thrown away.

(2) It may take years for the new communities to recreate some interesting aspects of the old web communities had, and by the time you've rediscovered it, it would be too late.

(3) Most protocols and services and proprietary. Now a even bigger walled-garden is coming.

(4) I cannot be happy enough to see that Hacker News is still going strong. Registering an account was a correct decision. I think Hacker News is largely playing a role of the Usenet newsgroups, but in disguise as a news website. It may not be as effective as forums, but is working pretty well.

> However, the power in the lie detector comes from its name - "The Lie Detector" - and the common belief that it actually works.

Ha. It reminds me of this hilarious video clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0) from The Wire, S5E01, which Detective William "Bunk" Moreland interrogated DeShawn and made him believe the office copy machine was a lie detector. This plot itself was based on an false urban legend.

> [...] they are also not admissible in court, as the law understands that they don't actually work. But in an interrogation process [...] it is a good arrow in the quiver.

I think the first things come to my mind is: what types of psychological tricks are and aren't allowed in an interrogation process? Is it permissible to use a nonworking "lie detector" as an interrogation technique? What are the potential abuses of this trick, etc? These are some interesting things that can be argued and debated.

I don't have background knowledge any of these subjects I mentioned so I won't start a debate, other interesting may want to do so.

Anyway, interesting perspective. I appreciate your comment, which moved the question from the first layer: "does a polygraph work and whether we should use it", to the next layer: "a polygraph doesn't work, but should we use it anyway?"

I believe they are simply "too big to fail". If you start blocking AWS, lots of people will have problems with Google. As a result, mail sending services are unlikely to be flagged.

> as someone who is planning to host my own email, it is really demotivating me.

The good thing is, I've hosted emails on my personal server for 4 years or so, and I don't have any issue so far, as long as it's not Google, but it's probably not so assuring to you because of this exact reason...

I think buying an Apple ][ missed the point. I think misterman0 meant to say is not the specific issue of teaching his own children to write programs, but accessibility to programming in general (I invited my brother to play a text based adventure game [...] He was eight. I was still ten.), and how the low accessibility has buried many potentially talented children from exploring it by themselves (I have two kids now. 9 and 12. They are brighter than me. [...] My son started his YT channel at the age of 8. Mostly in game footage. He uses down pretty cool sw to edit his clips.).

> Blaming the processor doesn't make any sense.

True, it doesn't. I've expressed this opinion in my further reply in the thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953066, and suggested the cultural shift due to desktop computing is a better angle to view this issue.

I said "you'd better to blame Intel 8086" rhetorically just to pointed out some historical background.

The original discussion was accessibility to programming, and now it's top-down vs. bottom-up programming, which is a different topic. But IMHO, even if you believe top-down is not as good as bottom-up, it's still better than your original parent comment, which explicitly mentioned no programming at all.

I hope you've upgraded your C64 power supply so it won't kill the machine before "dir" even finishes its execution ;-)

Good catch. I should be more careful next time...

> Or, we (as in I) can blame no one and instead, only realize there's no blame to manage.

I agree, I think the problem was not a particular microprocessor, but a greater cultural issue. At the end of home computer era, a PC has became someone's workbench, end users are not expected to learn and write programs anymore. There were bright sides, Xerox Alto, GUI, desktop publishing, multimedia, widely-available programs, no need to repeat those stories, we all know them. Meanwhile, accessibility to programming has largely been lost in this process.

On second thought, it's not all black-and-white, some accessibility to programming still exists. On Unix-like systems, "python", "perl" is one command away, and even on Windows, JavaScript is one browser window away. If the next generation rewrites the computing history today, I wonder what tools/environment would be seen as the 21st century equivalent of 6502 and home computers. I'm sure it would have a dedicated chapter to Raspberry Pi and Arduino devboards at least.