A cute example of the idea that the state provides basic services, and individuals/companies are free to make money out of doing it better. Water, Comms, transport & housing anyone?
My argument is that verilog is to FPGAs as assembler is to pdp11s, and C is closer to assembler than Java or prolog. High level languages are easier for programmers, but interestingly, the high level language Haskel readily compiles to FPGA. What's happening here?
Well c does look much like the hardware of a PDP11 and verilog LUTs look like FPGA hardware. But my wife (a. CS prof) says the same: programming is what programmers do.
Okay. I like this article and I've thought about it regularly since it last made the rounds here.
1) C is a low level language for a PDP11, or for a single core on a GPU.
2) But what would a low level language look like for an FPGA? Probably verilog.
3) The point worth pursuing however is whether there might be a Hardware agnostic "low level language".
4) yep Haskel by the looks of things. If only I could find the reference.. :-/ There's a set of slides from a crew in Edinburgh doing the history of functional languages. Does any one remember something similar?
Some friends and I are having a conversation about "caring" - not necessarily for others but care in what you do. Wim Wenders 2023 film "Perfect Days" is relevant here.
I'm not sure the situation has changed for AI. For a real scientific agenda we need to at least attend to the things a demo can't do, not just what they can. The trouble with such analysis of current ai systems is that the negative examples are instantly included in the training data.
Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set up the production line to make one small one, and the next one better. Repeat.
This is a far better approach with developing tech, and applies to power provision. The challenge is to get a market for the early versions when we all know the next will be better. Saying LiPo suck, and Chinese Tech is bad? Just part of the PR sales pitch to get us to try the better alternative. I'd bet on non rechargeable mag-air batteries made with sea water and off peak wind power myself :-)
The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to small web stuff.
I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.
There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the automated control means this is not a boat but something else wonderous.
I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't want that "made better".
I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!
From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would include the reader. More interesting for the journalism for some.
I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.
Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)
I used gopher before mosaic! And yes the issue is not the tech, but the social engineering of a community. Git(hub) has a community; IMHO GitHub users need to put more cool things on there like blogs.. perhaps..
Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"?
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Basically without open source, the rest of the world will have to keep paying a tithe to American companies, and hence tax in the USA.
The point is the opportunity created by trump's tariff policy. Saying do what I want or I'll burn your house down, and then burning your house down - you no longer need to do what is demanded. An opportunity has appeared.
Fair. The background reading is the EMCA stuff - conversation analysis cf Sacks etc at, and Ethnomethods (Garfunkel). And Vygotsky cf Kozulin. People such as Robert Moore at IBM and Lemon at Herriot-Watt work in this space but there is no critical mass in the face of LLM mania.
There are two things happening here. A really small LLM mechanism which is useful for thinking about how the big ones work, and a reference to the well known phenomenon, commonly dismissively referred to as a "trick", in which humans want to believe. We work hard to account for what our conversational partner says. Language in use is a collective cultural construct. By this view the real question is how and why we humans understand an utterance in a particular way. Eliza, Parry, and the Chomsky bot at http://chomskybot.com work on this principle. Just sayin'.
Programming languages were originally designed by mathematicians based on a Turing machine. A modern language for FPGAs is a challenge for theoretical computer science, but we should keep computer literate researchers away from it. This is a call out to hard core maths heads to think about how we should think about parallelism and what FPGA hardware can do.
The real reason it won't end up in a park is not the engineering. The problem is the same one as NPCs in computer games: synthetic characters are, to date, just really transparent and boring. The real research question is why.