jonjacky

A later activist group with some similarities:

CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility) 1983 - 2013

http://cpsr.org/about/history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Professionals_for_Soc...

RAND previously on HN: What is a think tank? (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829796

Yes! More information about the book: http://www.fredkaplan.info/wizards.htm

Today (Tues Jun 11 2024) the HN black bar appeared in memory of Lynn Conway. Among her many many achievements, she was the administrator of the Strategic Computing Initiative for a while in the 1980s while she was working at DARPA.

Acme, the combination editor, shell, and window manager. Influenced by Oberon, which another comment mentioned.

http://acme.cat-v.org/

Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum. It's a true classic.

Weizenbaum wrote the first AI chat program, Eliza, sixty years ago. I read his book shortly after it came out in 1976, and several times since, most recently last year after ChatGPT etc. arrived. I was impressed again how pertinent and prescient it is.

A fifty year old book about AI is still relevant because it is mostly about peoples' motivations for building and using AI, their expectations for it, and their responses to it. These haven't changed in fifty years and don't depend on the technology in the AI, or what it can actually do.

Weizenbaum recognizes that making and using computer technology has moral and ethical consequences and isn't afraid to say so. He argues that computers should not be used for some purposes, whether or not they can be made to work.

Typing 'MIT Senior House' in the HN search box brings up these, and others. Some of the comments are pertinent to your question.

Senior House at MIT Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges (2017) (wired.com) 112 points by aj7 on Sept 23, 2018 | 54 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18044066

MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges (wired.com) 225 points by MrsPeaches on Sept 11, 2017 | 205 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15217112

MIT acts to change “Senior House” dorm counterculture (cambridgeday.com) 2 points by ilamont on June 19, 2017 | no comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14587692

MIT is “fixing” its low-income, LGBT-friendly dorm by kicking everyone out (qz.com) 16 points by gentoo on June 15, 2017 | 1 comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14563985

MIT Needs the Weirdos: What’s Really Going on in Senior House (medium.com/incognito.jones) 5 points by sweettea on June 11, 2016 | 1 comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882240

Possibly pertinent: PyModel, a modelling system and model checker in and for Python --- the models are coded in standard Python. In addition to analysis, the system can be used as a test case generator and test runner for offline testing and "on the fly" testing (where a long-running test case is generated as the test executes).

https://jon-jacky.github.io/PyModel/www/

https://github.com/jon-jacky/PyModel/

The PyModel in that repository is written in Python 2 and has not been maintained for more than ten years.

This fork is in Python 3 and was last revised two years ago:

https://github.com/zlorb/PyModel

The best description of PyModel is the talk at SciPy 2011:

Slides: https://jon-jacky.github.io/PyModel/talks/pymodel-nwpd10.pdf

Paper: https://jon-jacky.github.io/PyModel/talks/pymodel-scipy2011....

PyModel's model checking is explained on p. 3 in the paper in the sections titled Analysis and Safety and Liveness.

The original classic in this genre is Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, about Tom West and his team at Data General designing and building a new model minicomputer in the 1970s. It won the Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in 1982.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

Another early classic is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. There is a long initial section on the early years of the AI Lab at MIT in the 1950s and 60s, then the scene shifts to California for the start of the personal computer and computer games industries in the 1970s, then back to MIT in the early 1980s for the start of the Free Software movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...

There is also Joy of Computing

https://joy.recurse.com/

There is already a former church in Barcelona that now houses a supercomputer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Supercomputing_Cente...

George Orwell called it "one of the most hideous buildings in the world." (I don't agree, but I see his point -- it's certainly one of the most eccentric, and it's huge.)

Also, the Empire State Building is more recent, built 1930 - 1931. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, the first picture in the article, was built 1925 - 1926.

Date? None on the report. The most recent reference (in the GC section) is 1996.

Forth's niche was embedded control using small 8- and 16- bit computers with from 8 or 16 kilobytes up to 64 kilobytes of memory. Its heyday was the 1970s and 80s when those were the largest, most powerful computers that were economical for embedded control applications. As larger, more powerful computers with more elaborate software became affordable, Forth's niche shrunk away and the language became an obscure curiosity.

In its heyday Forth delivered impressive functionality on very small systems. You could have an interactive development system with a command interpreter, editor, assembler, compiler and the application on an 8 bit microcomputer with less, sometimes much less, than 64 kilobytes of memory.

A start on something like this might already exist. Curlie [1] is a hand-built directory or table of contents to the web, something like the the old DMOZ Open Directory Project [2].

1. https://curlie.org/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

Sure, that's fine!

Surely you shouldn't have to install guix and info-reader just for this. SICP in info format (just a text file) has been available for many years from several sites (use any search engine). Then you can just read it in emacs, which is already installed in many Unix-like systems including many Linux distros and Mac OS X.

Daniel Gackel and Scott Bell in "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News", Aug 8 2019. (Yes, that's dang)

Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat in "The Friendship that Made Google Huge", Dec 3 2018

Geoffrey Hinton in "Why the Godfather of AI Fears What He's Built", Nov 13 2023

Jensen Huang in "How Jensen Huang's Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution", Nov 27 2023

The Loyal Heights neighborhood in Seattle is named after the developer's daughter, Loyal Graef Treat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyal_Heights,_Seattle

I would say: when the existing offerings completely prevent you from doing what you want to do, or require ugly workarounds that are not consistent with your goals, or when future changes in those dependencies might compel you to do extra work just to keep your own system running.

One more reason to start from scratch: to get the functionality you want from an existing offering, you would also have to include a lot of other stuff you don't need, resulting in unnecessary complexity and resource consumption.

This project reminds me of the approach at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Alan Kay wrote [1]:

(At PARC we avoided) putting any externally controlled system, in- house or out, on one's critical path. ... Thus, virtually all the PARC hardware ... and software ... were completely built inhouse by these few dozen researchers.

This sounds disastrous, (because) in programming there is a widespread first order theory that one shouldn't build one's own tools, languages, and especially operating systems. This is true --- an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down these ratholes. On the second hand, if you can build your own tools, languages, and operating systems you absolutely should because the leverage that can be obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to fix other people's not quite right tools) can be incredible.

1. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf

Don't overlook books that are critical of engineering as it is often practiced and how it fits into our society:

Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Weizenbaum wrote Eliza, the first AI chatbot, almost sixty years ago and was appalled at the reception. This book is still very pertinent, especially the Introduction, Chapter 1 On Tools, chapter 9, Incomprehensible Programs, and chapter 10, Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason. Chapter 4, Science and the Compulsive Programmer, is one of the first written accounts of the hacker culture.

Weizenbaum's original paper on Eliza (1966) [0] is still very pertinent to the present generation of chatbots, especially the introduction and discussion.

Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1973) [1]. Influenced recent work by the computer scientists Steven Kell [2],[3] and Kartik Agaram [4].

Computation and Human Experience, Phil Agre (1997) (excerpt at [5]). Agre got a PhD in AI at MIT in the 80s and 90s and became very critical of the field. I think his shorter writings [6][7] are a better introduction, especially the personal memoir at [6]: "about how I became (relatively speaking, and in a small way) a better person through philosophy."

0. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168

1. http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf

2. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19de-es...

3. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19softw...

4. http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf

5. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/che-intro.html

6. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/notes/00-7-12.html

7. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html

It might not be possible anymore, due to security issues. This was pointed out here in 2018, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17194937 :

... Engelbart's system was a completely shared space in which everyone lived and was trusted, then of course our systems are inelegant by comparison. ...

That whole post, and the thread where it occurs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17194456 are worth re-reading.

Kartik Agaram [1], The paper about his Mu project [2] presents a rationale for a particular kind of minimalism, and its realization.

1. https://akkartik.name

2. https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf

Compare these pictures to the "West Side Story" movies - both the original 1961 version, contemporary with these photos, and the 2021 version, where they tried hard to reconstruct this look, especially the cars and clothes but also the shops on the street.

This one anticipates ChatGPT, LLMs etc:

92. The computer is the ultimate polluter: Its feces are indistinguishable from the food it produces.

Sidewalk Dances: 14 Moondog compositions arranged by Joanna MacGregor, played by the Britten Symphonia and others, recorded in 2006

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-s3gc2pdV19MwYJJTe...

Some other git-in-python projects include Dulwich [1], gittle [2], wyag [3], pygit [4], and zit [5]

1. https://www.samba.org/~jelmer/dulwich/docs/

2. https://github.com/FriendCode/gittle

3. https://wyag.thb.lt/

4. https://benhoyt.com/writings/pygit/

5. https://github.com/jmou/zit

I'm not listing these to criticize the poster's project. It is interesting to compare these projects. git-like programs form a whole category which provides opportunities to experiment with design ideas and programming style.

In this same spirit, there are also several (many?) vi-in-python projects.

Possibly pertinent: Stonebraker et al DBOS, Database Oriented Operating System:

https://dbos-project.github.io/