lebuffon

Nobody has mentioned low-level programming in a REPL. Not as common to be sure. Forth works this way and even has REPL Assembly Language. It's been there for over 40 years.

Testing Forth and ASM code snippets in the REPL before committing to them helps eliminate those nasty assumptions about what "should" work.

My evil side makes me wonder what myths we have today that will be de-bunked in 100 years. :)

Since 23andMe can figure out your geographic origin from your DNA there must be differences. Studying the nature of these differences might make some people uncomfortable but just as with subtle male/female differences, these studies could lead to amazing improvements in medical treatment.

"There is power in restraint. The less a language does, the more can be done to it."

Assembler

Something that I wonder about is the intersection (if any) of programming languages and natural languages.

It could be that as in natural languages the final arbitration on what is used is the masses and all the academic discussion in the world can't change it much. As I write this it occurs to me that an Artist (Shakespeare) and the King James Bible, had a significant effect on consolidating what became modern English.

If computer languages follow natural languages then a continuous evolution of existing languages will occur over time whether we like it or not. I think we can see some evidence for that in the oldest computer languages that we have. It would also follow that some languages disappear over time ...

In natural language development I have read that it takes about 1000 years for a language to become unintelligible if separated from its mother tongue. What is the equivalent in CL? You can't compile/interpret the program? A human can't understand the code?

There might be some room for cross discipline research here. English faculty and Comp. Sci on the same papers?

(I'd love to be fly on the wall at those meetings) :)

RISC V Assembler :)

Yes. It is used in the sense of the English statement:

IF you go to the store get some butter THEN come right back.

So THEN is where the program continues on a false condition. Typically Forth. It uses an alternative way of looking at things.

Opto-isolators are an ideal way to interface to 20mA TTY IMHO. Keeps the old stuff away from the new stuff.

Open collector transistor connected by light only. Love it.

I am wondering if something like GTP-3 (or GPT-3+x) which has the beginnings of writing code from human language descriptions will be a useful thing.

Creating working code to expand upon can be a significant part of the process of new software creation.

"...that will wipe out the Australian ecosystem as we know it"

You mean like Homo sapiens? :-)

One of the simplest interpreters that also has a compiler built-in is Forth. It is somewhat heretical to conventional computer science but it can be fully understood top to bottom by normal humans due to it features or lack thereof. :)

A quick search found this repository of JonesForth which is a literate programming version of a Forth system that describes the code as it goes along. There appears to be source for various targets.

https://github.com/phf/forth

It is a very interesting exercise that shows you a kind of bare minimum requirement way to make a language and provides insights for what is missing to build more conventional languages.

Wow is slow frequency speed variation. Flutter is fast speed variation.

To an audio person they are distinct sound artifacts. It was common to listen to recordings of pianos in the past to hear these because the piano was the only common instrument that had very solid pitch. (invariant frequency(

The need to raise the BASS and reduce the Treble makes me think that the setup was missing the RIAA equalizer. If the AMP did not have a "phono" input that would be the case.

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

Or as you might call them in parts of South Africa... gravel.

I know nothing about this area but this statement;

"...the progression of Alzheimer’s disease is driven by a vicious cycle of the protein amyloid β (Aβ) inducing hyperactivity at the neuron level."

makes me ask wouldn't it be valuable to know what triggers this change from normal activity to hyperactivity?

The use of this drug treatment should it even be effective to your point seems a bit like insulin. It keeps the patient alive but doesn't find the root cause.

Perhaps I expect too much from biological science at this stage of our development.

I didn't get the 40 tons of fuel makes 120 tons of CO2. The optimum fuel/air ratio is 14.5:1 for a diesel fuel. Is bunker C fuel burnt at 3:1 ratio? Sounds wrong.

There are classes of relays that worked like that in old portable broadcast video recorders. Essentially a coil around a magnet and the coil was used to strengthen or weaken the flux with a pulse of current. The armature was spring loaded but not strong enough to release from the permanent magnet unless a pulse of "buck" current was applied.

Old timey stuff.

"pre-Roman Empire peoples"

Do you mean the Bible?

"Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you,...? Deut. 20:16..

To your point about transmissibility versus Flu there is this report: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm

It looks like our protections for Covid-19 were very effective against Flu transmission at least that is the assumption.

Funny (old) energy efficiency story that used to be published on- line but I can't find it.

It's about the first handheld scanner for a large shipping company. The hardware was engineered and nailed down and a team was contracted to write the software. They got about 1/2 way completed and said the box didn't have enough ROM to handle all the features in the spec. The company contracted Forth Inc. to try and salvage the project and that was possible because they used their proprietary Forth VM and factored the heck out the code so they could reuse as much as possible and got it all to fit. (Common Forth trick)

10 Years later, a new device was commissioned and management was smarter! They made sure their was a lot more memory on board and a new contracted team finished the job. In the field however the batteries would not last an entire shift...

Forth Inc was called again. They made use of their cooperative tasking system to put the machine to sleep at every reasonable opportunity and wake it from user input.

Maybe it ain't the language that matters as much as the skill and imagination of the designers and coders. Just sayin'

It was not planned. I was extracted from the cubicle at the small company by the head of sales because I kept challenging the founder on what projects were important to make money. :-) Was moved to managing sales and marketing when the web became practical and shifted all efforts to online marketing. (We made products for engineers so that was a no-brainer strategic shift)

The move to Fortune 500 was because of an old friend a glass of wine and accidentally saying the right things. He took a chance on me for a marketing role. After that I had to deliver the goods which meant motivating a team of people, innovating the product (within corporate limits) and good luck due to a need for the service.

So not all me. Luck and "who you know" played a role too.

Those are the parts of it. In a perfect world finance is a strategic partner. Tracks and manages the use of money. Sets projections for future revenues. Manages tax minimization. Optimize the cost of loans. Negotiate with bankers. Creates business cases for sales on big projects.

I moved from the cubicle as a coder with a 30 person company to senior executive in a Fortune 500. Here is what I have found.

You are correct that after the product is ready the rest is ALL sales (closing deals) and marketing (getting the word out).

Sales people are a unique breed of human. You can tell them to F off and they will show up the next day with coffee, just the way you like it. :)

My recommendation is do the job yourself to bootstrap the company, get some revenue coming in but then transition to find an experienced person who can be your "head of sales". Then you can focus on product and general management. (Unless you want to become a sales professional). A good bonus structure for bringing in new deals is essential. Sales people are motivated by the hunt and payout for success.

There are some good inexpensive cloud CRM tools so that you can stay on top of your sales people, who they are visiting and what they are saying. Weekly meeting with checkups against their sales commitments and their "pipeline" of sales reviewed and pruned by you, is also essential but then let them run.

Small business is like a three legged stool made of Product, Sales (which is external relationship management) and Finance. Almost no founder has all three strengths. Make a team that compliments you and make lots of money.

As a official member of the "old fart" society I have a memory of something from 50ish years ago, probably in Time magazine, that documented the fact the US military found cases of rickets associated with low vitamin D levels in personnel stationed at the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line, a group of radar stations in the high arctic. The cases were among people with darker skin. So there's some old evidence correlating Vitamin D, skin shade and sunlight exposure. Wish I could remember the source...

Now more than ever because you can define it code. Here is a CPU written in 200 lines of Verilog.

https://excamera.com/files/j1.pdf

Wild guess here but his compiler probably can recognize that it can replace sy*128 with a bit shift instruction. :-) (thats what I would want)

It can't know that with a named constant.

(Same would be true for any value that's a power of 2. Usually a real speed up.)

I have read that in the 1800s the upper crust were being told to not allow their children to pursue a career in Physics. The commonly held view was that Newton had uncovered all the good bits and there was really nothing left to discover.

Then someone asked "What are those blue sparks I see when I take off my jumper (sweater) in a dark bedroom?"

We just need to find the next sparks. :)

How does it compare to liquified air storage? It might have a sweetspot somewhere but liquid air uses a lot of off-the-shelf technology.

https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/liquid-air-storage-o...

You might want to peruse the C sources for GForth which has been under continuous development for 20 years or so. It introduced a concept called super-instructions that speeds things up quite a bit. I am not an expert on the internals, just a casual user.

The TI-99/4 was Uppercase only. I think the lower case font for /4A was a rush job but I don't know that for certain. For the hobbyist playing with the machine today there are many 10s of different fonts that have been developed and it doesn't take much to load them in BASIC, Forth, C or Assembler.