1,803 karma · joined December 14, 2011
I own about that many. Fortunately a large percentage is PDFs. Never the less I have about 200 linear feet of shelf space to hold my books in my "library" and in my home office.
I developed open source software for 25 years even during the stretch when I was living in my car. I never made money from open source.
So tell me why you think this doesn't work.
The best way to cut through this noise is to visit a Tesla dealer and ask for a test drive.
My professional advice is "Don't learn to program".
Your question is like asking... should I learn to shoe horses?
There are 12 stories requested in musical form. The form isn't the issue. The content of the "mattress" section requires telling stories that people can accept as "real".
Math. Especially Linear Algebra
APL. Learn the true power of array-like thinking and strong use of symbols.
Assembler. Learn the language machines speak.
Forth. Learn how to program with self-created, minimal tools to create great things.
Bash. Learn how to use the full power of the machine in a terminal.
Emacs Lisp. It's not a language, it is everything you'll ever need.
C. Because it is everywhere, usually as a glue language between systems.
Python. So you can see how badly a language can be designed.
Verilog. Learn to fashion hardware in a language.
LEAN. Write provably-correct software.
HTML. Because you wouldn't be reading this otherwise.
Javascript. Because you occasionally have to make useful web pages.
Java. Because you can do network programming.
X11/Wayland. Because you can reach out and show things.
Regex. Because you can't parse without it.
Erlang. Because things break and you need to survive.
CUDA. Because you need to know how to write kernels.
SNOBOL. Patterns are programs. Programs are patterns. Plus 3 way branching.
Latex. Because you need to communicate to other meat-things.
SQL. Because databases underlie it all
OCAML. Because Type-correctness matters
Lambda Calculus. Because you need to know how it all works in theory.
Haskell. Because you need to learn a real higher level language.
C++. Because you need to see cancer in its raw form
Swift. Because you can make the stone in your hand do things.
Qiskit. Quantum computers are coming
Of course LLMs are going to make all of these languages so rarely spoken that they will be like COBOL. The future of programming is maintenance programming. Legacy systems won't be rewritten, they will be "maintained". If you know what a PROCEDURE DIVISION you'll always have a job.
I just drove from Pittsburgh to Louisianna to Florida to Pittsburgh without touching the steering wheel. The car planned the route, planned the charging stops, and backed into the charging spaces.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke (I had a career in vision, AI, and robots yet it still feels like magic)
The price of electricity to "fill up" was about 1/4 the price of gas for equivalent miles. "Fill up" times at chargers averaged about 10 minutes.
I have had my car for 15 months. I rotated the tires and added wiper fluid. "Lower total cost of ownership always wins" is basic economics.
And now Grok listens to my trip stops and updates navigation. Talk to Grok, touch "start full self driving" and relax.
"The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed," -- William Gibson
They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"
They retreat into death games and other violence, "hiding their awareness from the terrifying necessities of this moment.
If any human sees a clear choice between life and death, then chooses death, we call that insane. Why do we accept it when it happens on a world scale?
We must shake the sleepers—gently and persistently, saying: "Time to get up."
— FRANK HERBERT
It turns out that it was all a waste of time (but great fun).
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-...
It won't matter. Might makes right.
Note that the "safety driver" is actually in the passenger seat.
I was a systems programmer. In the virtual machine you could issue meta-commands such as 'shutdown' by putting the prefix "#cp shutdown". The prefix "#cp" could be changed at boot.
Being curious I tried booting VM/370 in a virtual machine. The embedded VM/370 could then create sub-virtual machines. Which, of course, raises the question... Will VM/370 boot in one of the sub-virtual machines? Well, it certainly worked. I set the command prompt to be "?cp" in the sub-virtual machine.
Which raises the question... Will VM/370 boot in the sub-virtual machine? Well, it certainly worked. The command prompt prefix was "@cp".
Rise, Repeat... I was 8 levels deep and it still worked. Time to get back to work. So I typed "#cp shutdown" instead of the latest chosen command prompt...
I had absolute priviledge on the real hardware so "#cp shutdown" was executed by the real, main VM/370 image. Which promptly shutdown the real machine.
Of course, only I and my co-worker systems programmer knew what actually caused the outage.
Please cite your sources for your claim since it clearly is not from the public financial data.
A return to local farms, animal labor, barter economics, cooperation, etc. would be the basis for a model. On the other hand we have a lot more refined materials readily available such as aluminum, copper, steel, etc.
This used to be true historically.
I'll look into it further. Thanks.