guidoism

I’m doing something similar right now. The eZ80 is a modern implementation of the Z80 that runs 50MHz, is pipelined like a modern CPU, and runs most instructions in a single cycle rather than 5-10 like the Z80. It’s also 24 bit in both data and address. So it’s a lot easier to program and a LOT faster than the original.

The 68000 is also a processor from a simpler time that is easy to source and still being made. There’s a CMOS version with a static core too so you can spin down the frequency to 1Hz and it will still work.

Wow I was just preparing to start this project myself. Before starting the process I did a last minute check and found this. Goes to show you that all you need to do is wait and someone will write the code for you.

Thank you!

I think there's a huge difference between everyone having unlimited material goods Star Trek style and UBI being a floor for everyone. I think of UBI as a floor that I can go below no matter how bad I screw up. If I start a company and max out my credit cards to fund it and it goes belly up then no matter how much I still owe to Chase I will still get my $1000/month to pay the rent and put food in my belly.

But I will still want luxury goods and I'm willing to work for them most of the time. I want a phone upgrade every few years which might be a luxury I couldn't afford under UBI. I like flying airplanes and certainly would need to work to pay for that hobby. But if I get burnt out and want to read books for a year then I could do that too!

My (honestly non-snarky) answer is: who cares?

Do we really need all of the programmers that are currently being employed? Will society collapse if there aren't 100,000 working on the next photo sharing app?

The important stuff will get done. Anything that is a luxury will get done only if someone wants to do it for themselves or if someone can convince another person to do it. Money doesn't need to disappear under a world of UBI, it's just not something that every single person on earth needs to participate in under thread of starvation and death.

I like to think about how this works at smaller scales. When there is an office full of people all being paid about the same and (critically) where they all want and care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done. I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because it was shit that just needed to get done. So I did it. And so did others.

Another example to play around with is when you go camping with friends. There's some shit work that just needs to be done. People pitch in. The same with staying at a friends house or a vacation rental with friends. Or cleaning leaves off of the storm drains. We all do this sort of work because it makes our lives better. If literal shit was piling up in front of my house I would probably shovel it even if it took 8 hours.

Natural disasters are also examples where people do work for free without expectation of compensation. I think people are more like that than what happens in apocalyptic novels (even though I love reading them).

Clearly this isn't going to work in a world where people use the word "sucker" to refer to people who do work to help others. Honestly, do we call volunteers at soup kitchens suckers?

The problem clearly involves an unequal distribution of work.

If everyone is else being paid and you are trying to convince a single person to literally shovel shit for 8 hours then yes, that won't work. They will feel like they are being taken advantage of. I think this is a common feeling amongst all workers. If your boss asks you to work late you are much less likely to be pissed off if the boss stays late and helps out too.

> The code used to build operating systems has only the most primitive of data types (lists, hashes, the occasional tree), while the libraries used in applications are a veritable cornucopia of modern data types.

Really? Is this only Linux (which gets a lot of eyeballs)? Mac OS? Maybe he's only talking about the kernel?

True to some extent but middle class people in their 20s before having kids and after their kids are in high school have a ton of leisure time. It’s just usually spent spending money. Their entertainment dollars.

I love this. One of the ideas I've been noodling around in my head is that we can brute force our way through really difficult problems. There are a lot of fricking people on earth. The biggest companies doing research have what, a couple hundred thousand people?

Imagine a 10 million people attempting to solve a single problem. Or a 100 million. Or half a billion people! The one that pops into my mind is climate change. Imagine if we had millions of different experiments going on in parallel and millions of people tinkering on stuff to fix the world.

I’m just now starting to really look into this since our eldest is now twelve years old. We do unschooling if our home, which is a form of self-directed education, so my focus has been on those experiences.

Here’s an research paper about Grown Unschoolers experiences with higher education, page 38 discusses admissions: https://www.othereducation.org/index.php/OE/article/view/105...

And here’s a reddit thread about homeschoolers getting into Purdue (which is the school I went to): https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/bszc3i/have_any_hom...

I’m assuming that each school is going to have their own criteria.

As far as I can tell you don't need an official transcript from an accredited school to get into college. We are homeschooling our kids and what I've read is that homeschoolers write their own transcript, the kids themselves write it, and they describe what they've accomplished and learned during their schooling career and admission depts in colleges tend to favor these kids over traditionally schooled kids.

I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.

Yes, this!

It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery.

I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology.

If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.

I’m curious as to how calculus is used in those fields. I got a degree in CS and we had to take a bunch of calculus classes but never used it in any of our CS classes and in my 20+ years of programming jobs I’ve never had to use it. Any time in my professional career that I needed math I didn’t know I learned just enough of it to solve my problem and promptly forgot it. I absolutely could not tell you how to mechanically do stuff to derivatives and integrals.

This question is relevant to me because we are deciding what to teach our kids and I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good argument for why to spend time gaining the skill of pen and paper mechanical calculus algorithms.

Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?

Something I say to anyone who will listen is that we have lived through the moment in history when the cost to receive a world-class elite education has collapsed to near zero and hardly anybody has noticed. We still talk as if an official four year university education is the goal and bemoan the cost of it rising faster than general inflation and worry about taking on debt that will burden them for the rest of their lives and worry about our kids “getting in” to the university of their choice.

It has changed education. And people who have kids nearing college age, who have noticed, will be able to help them navigate this world in a much more useful way than people who tell their kids to take on as much debt as they can to go to any university they want.

The pipeline that fuels our decision making of what to focus on in primary/secondary school as it relates only to what will help them stand out in a college application and our decision making of what a university-level education means as it relates to getting a job is fascinating.

I feel the same. Am I supposed to legally change my name so I can continue to sign up for stuff on the internet?

At least they don’t have Guido in it… yet. I have major problems signing up for services these days. There’s some list out there that programmers use that says that my name is a slur.

Ducktales?

Interesting. I grew up in the Midwest and I had never heard of the concept of taking off shoes when going inside until I moved to Seattle.

For me the shoes thing isn’t about dirt. It’s about public bathrooms. If a shoe has stepped in a public bathroom. Especially those in bars or gas stations I don’t want that shit (literally) being spread al over my house.

Really? The main point (use an index into an array instead of a pointer into a blob of memory) gets you 99% of the benefit and it isn’t anymore difficult than using pointers. I do this all the time.

A Rolex still requires very expensive maintenance every couple years (hundreds of dollars) just to do basic timekeeping. Absurdly, an Apple Watch upgraded every 4 years is probably cheaper to maintain. A high quality quartz is probably the financially smart option.

And it probably worked because it wasn’t even AT&T at that point. It was Cingular before AT&T bought them.

Plan to photograph an exoplanet 25 light years away with 25km per pixel resolution (2020)

This is fascinating. There is a plan to directly photograph exoplanets by sending a series of telescopes 500+ AU in the opposite direction of what we want to photograph and using the sun as a gravitational lens. We send out waves of these small telescopes to get pictures at various focal planes.

This video has a good description of the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

Joey Castillo’s Sensor Watch project seems to be the only example in this no man’s land. Over 365 days on a single coin cell battery so far.

https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch

Oh cool. I worked on the networking layer of the first Kindle iOS (née iPhoneOS) app and that captive portal stuff was a pain in the ass. I would just walk across the street to Tully’s and use their wifi to get that pop up.

I like the squeak too. I recently moved to a place with hard water and so everyone has water softeners. With this super soft water I can't get the squeak ever. It just feels slimy to me.

This difference in our perspectives is fascinating. I think of cultural works to be owned by society. The moment you make something public then society can do what it wants with it. We give exclusive rights to the author as a pragmatic step to allow them to afford to spend time creating. We won’t need this temporary band-aid when we are fully post-scarcity.

I think that society suffers when we artificially make cultural artifacts scarce. I don’t know how to quantify that suffering. I feel like there are parallels between the explosion in quality software and what we can do with it and the availability of open source software (including the languages, documentation, and discovery/distribution).

I think this assumes managers (or anyone else for that matter) are able to actually quantify productivity.

> Copyright grants a time-limited monopoly to the reproduction of works by their authors

The copyright length is so long and has been extended so many times that it for a long time could have been considered infinite. Maybe with some new works showing up in the public domain on January first now it's true again. But still, the length is looooong. There are books from the 1980s and 1990s that are out-of-print and almost impossible to find. Some authors are able to take back their copyright and release them to the public domain or some CC license after they are out-of-print but many works are just abandoned.

I'm all for people making a living, but man, it's absurd these days. Maybe we should move copyright down to 20 years or something.

> novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it

People probably won't build some dashboard for a large boring corporation but they absolutely will do it for something they love. This isn't even theoretical. See how much software and programming research exists completely outside of the market. And for writing, take a look at fan fiction or stuff on writing subreddits.

Certainly some people do it for money, but there still is a significant number of people who do it for the love of it.