drallison

Sometimes the instructions that come with and IKEA flat-pack are not very obvious except in retrospect.

How do CEO recession expectations actually relate to and motivate the actual state of the economy? Do we have quantitative theories which make forecasts with error bars? Color me dubious.

Interesting timeline of events driven by incompletely thought out policies and rules and the resulting stupidities. He lost my interest and support when his analysis and facts were extended to embrace a political philosophy.

The full article title is "LUMI, Europe’s most powerful supercomputer, is solving global challenges and promoting a green transformation". It's an irrational response, but I find it difficult to trust an article about a computer "solving global challenges" and "promoting a green transformation". The English usage is wrong and that makes me wonder whether the content of the article is correct.

Prancing Pony vending machine at Stanford AI Lab as remembered by Les Ernest:

[1974 Computer controlled vending machine (Prancing Pony), which had a gambling option and automatically billed via email]

The Prancing Pony Vending Machine was evidently the first computer controlled vending machine anywhere in the world. It was created to fill an unmet need.

Given that SAIL was about five miles off-campus and the nearest food source was a beer garden (Zotts) about a mile away, I initially set up a coffee and food room near the center of our facility and it subsequently got named after a pub in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". In fact all rooms in our facility were named after places in Middle Earth and had signs posted on the doors showing their names in both Latin and Elvish alphabets. At some point the Stanford Buildings folks asked me to number our rooms and give them a map. Instead we gave them a map showing room names in both alphabets. Their response was to send out a carpenter with numbered tags, which he nailed on each door.

Meanwhile we took turns buying coffee and food, which was offered for sale on an honor system basis. That worked well for awhile but it suddenly started losing money big time. We then negotiated with Canteen, which had an exclusive contract with Stanford, to put in a couple of vending machines. However we found that they were not restocked often enough and broke rather frequently.

I finally negotiated to rent a machine from Canteen that we could restock. They seemed to like this idea since it would relieve them of making frequent trips out to our distant facility. In fact they never billed us for the rental even though I repeatedly called it to their attention. Meanwhile I got Ted Panofsky to make a connection to our computer so that it could release the doors on the vending machine, thus making it possible to buy either for cash or, though a computer terminal, on credit. I then wrote a program that let people buy under password control and that billed them on a monthly basis via email. It was set up to randomly give away whatever was purchased on 1/128th of the purchases and offered a "double or nothing" option, which had an honest 50:50 outcome. I noticed a cultural difference in that almost none of the computer science students gambled, knowing that they would win 1/128th of the time if they didn't, whereas many of the music students did gamble. In both cases the Prancing Pony vending machine, having taken on the name of the room, seemed quite popular and we organized a team of volunteers to acquire the needed supplies and restock the machine at least twice a day.

The Prancing Pony also sold beer but only on credit and only to people over 21, since it knew everyone’s age. If a youngster attempted to buy beer it responded “Sorry, kid.”

Some years later I found out why the honor system had failed in the Pony. I was the founding President of Imagen Corp., which made the first desktop publishing systems using laser printers, and after awhile there a young woman employee felt obligated to confess that when she was a teenybopper, she and her girlfriends used to ride their horses up to SAIL, then went in and stole candy from the Prancing Pony. Thus, her misconduct contributed to a technological advancement.

Other studies and simulations suggest a more substantial rise in temperature will occur even if we were to stop all emissions today. Already there are reports of local hot spots where the temperature rise is on the order of 5 degrees Celsius.

Expressing temperature rise in terms of a probability or likelihood to an accuracy of 1% seems a little strange.

Finally, the hypothesis is poorly stated. Rather than using "hit" it would be better to say "reached or exceeded".

One of my favorite papers. I was part of a 1960's consulting collective (Polymorphic Corporation) started by Marcus Byruck. Coroutines and the Separable Transition-Diagram compiler pattern were part of our secret sauce.

David Deutsch as well. Chiara Marleto has a nice recent book, The Science of Can and Can't, which discusses briefly the Second Law in the context of constructor theory.

Why don't front end engineers report to back end engineers? It would seem logical since the backend teams are where all the magic happens and frontend teams are responsible for input and output.

Conway's Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law) may explain why there are multiple teams, but it does not explain which team should be diving the design.

The answer to your question, "Does anyone know the current status ?", is obviously "YES". Most of us do not know what the answer is, but someone does.

Precision in asking questions is often helpful in eliciting information.

Jim Grey is always worth reading. (I do wish he were still around. His disappearance Jan 20, 2007 coninues to be a mystery.)

Of course, what constitutes "worst" is a difficult question.

Signetics made the 2650, a nice processor with a highly regular architecture with a condition code register. After every arithmetic operation including loads and stores the ALU updated the condition code register.

The National 32032 processor was a wonderful part with a clarity of design that made it a great choice for a workhorse processor. Unix running the machine was stable and efficient except that every few weeks there would be disastrous crash. With a tremendous amount of effort the source of the problem was found: a race condition in the interrupt control logic that returned from the wrong stack and scribbled over memory.

The Intel i860 exposed the internal computational pipeline to the programmer. Context switching was complicated by the conflict of real-time operating performance requirements and a deep pipeline with no way to grab the context and drain the pipeline. Eventually a dedicated team got a Unix OS running on the part, but it peformed poorly.

The Maspar MP-1 was a SIMD machine. It was cool to test new library functions by seeing if, say, sqrt(x)*sqrt(x)==x for all floating point numbers. Customers wanted the Maspar machine to be timeshared, but the architecture made it difficult to do since the CPU state was very large and memory was not mapped.

Intel's 8048 (and simplified versions like the 8021 and enhanced versions like the 8051) did not perform as well in terms of speed or code size as many of the competing micro controllers. The competition offered very simple asymmetric complex architectures which could be programmed (possibly with external hardware assists) to accomplish embedded tasks with significant effort and several days or weeks of effort. The Intel part was not quite as efficient in memory use and speed, but could be programmed in an afternoon. And another engineer/programmer could look at the code and understand it without much deep thought.

The Motorola 68000 was a wonderful machine with a clear instruction set. But the original 68000 could not support virtual memory.

There have been all sorts of different architectures tried which seen strange today but came about because the architecture was thought to provide an engineering solution to an immediate problem. There was a time when register machines were thought to be a bad architecture, far inferior to a simple stack architecture.

Stanford EE380 lecture, Livestreamed. See http://ee380.stanford.edu.

Ted Nelson's vision and inventive genius helped create today's Internet. Englebart and the Augment Project at SRI made some of the vision real.

A project to design, build, fly, and deploy a prototype shadecraft satellite will be the focus of the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium today, Wednesday, May 4, 2022. http://ee380.stanford.edu.

You might be TOO OLD if you believe the pundits who are telling us that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence based systems have (nearly) reached the point that a user can simply ask for what they need and the ML & AI system will program it for you. These folks believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace programmers completely and there will be on need for professional programmers. They are wrong.

This video memorializes a conversation between John Markoff and Paul Saffo at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, March 24, 2022. John's biography of Stewart Brand, Whole Earth, has just been released. See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/technology/stewart-brand-... for a teaser chapter. Amazon or your local independent bookstore for a copy of the real thing.

Whole Earth is more that a biography (unusual because it is a biography of a living person), more than a paean to the Whole Earth Catalog, more than a memoir of the 1960s and 1970s, more than the history of a photograph of the whole earth. John captures the essence of Stewart Brand the catalytic personality who initiated and encouraged many of the best things that emerged from the counterculture. The image that comes to mind it that of a bee flying from flower to flower, pollinating and then flying on.

Full disclosure: These folks are my friends. I was there in the 1960s and 1970s. I shopped at the Truck Store. I ran the People's Computer Company.

Back when figuring out software engineering and systems design was all the rage, Mel Conway's paper was a fave. His observation--that system designs tend to mimic the social structure of the development team--was critical when it came to understanding systems and their development. Now, I suspect that, 52 years later, the observation (based upon longitudinal studies) still holds and that the ways committees invent are still not understood.

Mel wrote an influential paper on coroutines and compilers, "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which included the first published explanation of the concept proposed organizing a compiler as a set of coroutines. Several compilers based upon his approach were built in the early 1970s at SRI and at consulting firm Polymorphic.

Mel also applied for and received US Patent 6272622, Dataflow Processing With Events, which expired in 2019. The patent is very broad and insightful.

Steve Hanna introduced me to Christopher Alexander's work. I was consulting at Intel, writing the Intel 4004/4040 native code assembler for the Intellec Microcomputer Development System. Steve and I shared a fascination in how systems and program get designed. Steve got me to read Notes on the Synthesis of Form and I was hooked. Somehow I'd missed it when it appeared in the Whole Earth Catalog. It certainly influenced my thinking. Years later, I got to know Christopher Alexander, the creative mind, and was continually surprised at how similar architecture and computer systems design are to each other. Christopher came to Stanford and gave talks. He was inspiring and exciting.

DAVE Boggs and Ron Crane worked at Stanford on the original IMP which was implemented on a PDP-11. When I went to Stanford to teach in 1976, I inherited the PDP-11 for use in the EE288 laboratory. The PDP machine was unstable, crashing frequently when using the aftermarket Systems Industries disk. i was told that to make things run at all, the Unibus clock had to be throttled down. Investigation showed that someone, presumably Boggs and Crane, had modified the hardware configuration of the Unibus to overlap transactions for speed but had never thoroughly tested it with a disk. Adding the disk to the Unibus changed the timing on the bus just enough to cause occasional failures. The engineering solutions: low down the clock on the bus.

It is sad to learn that David Boggs has passed. Sadder still, ethernet dominates his acknowledged legacy. Pupnet at Xerox PARC was the test bed for modern networked computing. John Shoch and Jon Hupp, He did the measurements that made improving ethernet possible.And his code made worms possible; see The "Worm" Programs Early Experience with a Distributed Computation, which appeared in CACM 25:3 (March 1982).

February 16, 2022

Join live stream (4PM-6PM Pacific 2/16/2022)

https://ee380.stanford.edu

Speakers: Dmitri Kyle Brereton, Danny Sullivan

EE380 will meet online today, 16 February 2022 at 4PM Pacific

Speakers: Dimitri Kyle Brereton, Danny Sullivan Title: Google Search Is Dying

Yesterday, February 15th, Dimitri Brereton blog link was posted to Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com). The comment, Google Search is Dying, garnered a large number of comments and responses.

http://dbr.io made #1 on Hacker News frontpage. http://news.ycombinator.com as of 0:21 Pacific 2/16/2022 Google Search Is Dying (dkb.io) 3428 points by dbrereton 23 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1489 comments

Today's EE380 is to discuss Dimitri's observations about Google Search. Danny Sullivan, Google's Public Liaison for Search will address Dimitri's concerns. Some additional panelists have been invited but are not yet confirmed.

Speaker Bios:

     Dmitri Kyle Brereton is a software engineer at Gem, and the founder of BlogSurf – a directory of personal blogs. He graduated from UCLA in 2019 with a B.S. in Computer Science. He has been doing independent research on the question of how to organize information on the internet since 2020. He is currently working on a search engine for blogs.


    Danny Sullivan is Google’s Public Liaison for Search. His role is to help the public better understand how Google Search works and to engage with the outside community to hear feedback on how search can be improved.

While aew porn sites to be legally required to verify user's age? Presumably so access to porn will be prohibited for the young. Why is such a ban a good thing? Who benefits from such a ban? Why is keeping sexual knowledge hidden, secret, and dirty a good way to build a healthy society? Why do som many people worry about other people's sex lives?

Is there research which studies user's response to porn and sexuality as a function of age where social pressures can be factored out and kids grow up in a state of nature without their preconceived notions about what is "normal"?

So methane control is a significant handle to control global warming. It is not a solution but it will buy time if we globally "burn" methane to COP2. See BlueDotChange.org.

Fred was a friend and a colleague. Smart and enthusiastic. A creative and versatile engineer. PhD under Edward McCluskey at Stanford on building reliable and fault tolerant systems. A good manager. A teacher. A pilot and flying instructor. A Workshop organizer for the iconic Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop (amw.org), A UNIX partisan who brought the operating system to HP. Now, at 77, he is gone. He will be missed.

"Simulator", the term, is misused in this post. In common usage, an implementation of a programming system is not called a "simulation". For example, the"cross-platform Visual Basic clone" mentioned by rgovostes in the comments is not called a "Visual Basic simulation". For common usage, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation and the associated disambiguation page. Consult Google for alternative usage. Language is dynamic, fluid, and occasionally fickle, but for effective communication we need to stick with commonly accepted usage unless there is good reason to depart from same.

We can restore the earth's climate if we want to -- and we should (part of the Stanford EE380 Computer Systems Colloquium)

David Henkel-Wallace is a 30+ year valley veteran, hands-on technologist, and entrepreneur. He has worked on everything, pioneered open source and Internet companies. In 2021 he co-founded Blue Dot Change to remove anthropogenic methane from the atmosphere

[Abstract] We are all busy engineering the planet to make it inhospitable to most species, including us. Although there has been plenty of scientific work on addressing these problems, with few exceptions actual public policy has ranged from indifference to kicking the problem down the road. This talk is on the subject of climate restoration, which might even be achievable within the next few decades if public will would support it.

The first half of this talk will be on climate restoration, or repair: what are the biggest problems and what are some plans to address them. The second half will zoom in on the problem of atmospheric methane and what our team is working on to address it specifically.

Livestreamed at 4PM Pacific Wednesday, January 26th. Use the link at http://ee380.stanford.edu which will be available at 3:45PM or so. If you miss the livestream, it will be available later on YouTube on the Stanford EE380 channel and on Stanford Canvas. While you are at it, you might consider joining the EE380 announcement mailing list.

This roundtable is part of the Stanford EE380 Computer Systems Colloquium. The first single chip microcomputer is generally acknowledged to be the Intel 4004. Stan Mazor who, along with Frederico Faggin and Ted Hoff, was one of the architects of the processor, will provide some context and background. Hap Walker, Tom Pitman, Ed Lee, and Dennis Allison will share war stories from the days when a word was 4-bits and and memory was not free. The Colloquium talk will be livestreamed today, Wednesday, January 19, at 4 PM.

Understanding Software Dynamics (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) 1st Edition by Richard L. Sites (https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Software-Addison-Wesley...)

This is a recent book and I have not completed reading it but I know already is it destined to become a classic. If you are serious about learning how to understand and improve code, this is the book for you. (Full disclosure: Dick is a long-standing friend and one of the brightest and insightful guys around.)

Writing Efficient Programs (Prentice-Hall Software Series) 1st Edition by Jon Louis Bentley (https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Efficient-Programs-Prentice-H...)

This book is out of print but I believe it's a better read that Jon's Programming Pearls books. C is a great (and permissive) programming language. Jon shows how the language can be exploited for gain performance. Evil but effective.

Hacker's Delight 2nd Edition by Henry Warren (https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-2nd-Henry-Warren/dp/0...)

The Hacker's Delight is exactly what Hank Warren intended--a collection of tricks and facts that programs can exploit. It's informative on many levels. It uses deep knowledge of how numbers (and other mathematical objects) work to compute useful information. And it shows how seemingly arcane information can be useful. For a programmer excited by the fabric of programs, it is a continual delight.

The first edition has a clarity and compactness that I find appealing. The second edition has additional material. When you get through all of the Delights you can read Knuth Volume 4 which embeds more arcane and useful knowledge.

This article is a hatchet job by a self-declared "skeptic" intended to convince the reader that a popular Swedish book about personality types, Surrounded by Idiots, is without scientific basis or value. The language of the article, independent of the content, conveys the negative message.

These days we are immersed is a sea of falsehoods and half-truths. Storytelling and lyrical metaphoric depictions of reality have been replaced by downright lies and malicious intent. Opinion articles which violate rhetorical rules and utilize deceptive and fallacious argumentation are not a good resource to mine for facts.

We are "Surrounded by Idiots", individuals whose weltanshanguung embraces fantastical concepts supported by pseudoscientific argumentation and assertions without evidence. Much of the richness of human culture is captured by wrong ideas and conceptions. Consider creation myths, fables with morals, religions, moral systems, astrology, political systems, cold fusion, Meyers-Briggs personality tests, and so forth. Finding a balance between the factual, the fictional and the speculative is difficult.

Words, facts, and expression do matter. The title, for example, states that Swedes were "fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time" is wrong. There is no evidence that people were "fooled", the book and theory are not a "bluff", and there is no partial ordering of bluffs so "biggest" is hard to identify.