63,701 karma · joined June 19, 2010
Previous lives:
gnu hacker (e.g. co-founder of Cygnus back in '89) Pharma developer (Talima) Distributed solar thermal systems (Terrajoule) MIT AI Lab/PARC/MCC/Rodin consumer tabletop AR (CastAR) Etc...
remove-everything-up-through-last-dash-gumby@brachiate.org
So if you have a treatment for moles, and a patient (trial participant) has a mole on their back treated and then falls down the stairs or is run over by a trolley the agency wants you to do an analysis to see if the treatment might have had something to do with getting run over or not taking the lift.
Note: this is not an exaggeration. I have written phase I and phase II clinical trial protocols earlier in my career.
In general, whatever else one can say about Apple, it’s hard to see them having a monopoly in anything. Apple phones are about 1/3 of all phones in use; Apple laptops are well less than 20% of all laptops (bigger than I would have guessed), their VR headsets in use might crack three digits (OK, an exaggeration, but could there be more than 100K actually in image? I doubt it), etc.
Same is true in software and services (does anyone use iMessage outside the US?), and every place that takes Apple Pay takes Google too, nd most also take Samsung; many countries just use QR codes.
Nowadays I rarely carry a charger. On the either hand I am carrying several devices that are right on the knife edge of catching fire at any time
And every time you want to get angry at the petroleum companies remember that they saved the whales.
Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.
And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?
Back in the early days of laptops, I went to Oracle to give them a quote; while cooling my heels in the lobby I looked round, realized I was being an idiot, and so opened my laptop and increased the prices across the board.
So yes, from very early in the design process.
The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!
But what’s with the obsession of sending humans?? Robots already do the important space science (at least the data collection parts) and are well adapted to working in space, unlike humans who have to drag a chunk of Earth around with them everywhere. Robots are leaving the solar system, while no human would be interested in such a journey, no matter how interested they are in the data.
Frankly, the people who act as if it’s important to have humans in space, as rather embarrassing.
On the other hand, I’m perfectly supportive of human spaceflight for tourism and recreation. But let’s not pretend that humans should be involved in the important work out there, except from Earth.
Never send a human to do a machine’s job.
It could be a URN that used the DNS as a back end (though that’s a lot like a URL) so better would be something more abstract with multiple possible resolvers and a signature.
All of these machines booted into an environment that had OS, networking, windowing etc in a single address space (where your software ran too). The D-machines booted into Smalltalk, Interlisp, or Cedar/Mesa environments. All were deeply networked: they didn’t have local file systems, for example.
The downside of these environments was the complete lack of security: not just the old password situation but a bug could bring the whole system down (OTOH whem so,etching went wrong you immediately entered the debugger with all state in place, sort of like ITS. No core dumps). Then you could just reboot of course. Commonly, people would just save their entire memory image and restart it later; I worked with one person who had been using the same memory image (saving it each day) for years.
Nowadays we can do more sophisticated things than we could 40 years ago. Maybe a machine that boots into a polyglot interpreter for Python, JS, C++, that also took compiled code.
I’ve never been as productive as the years I worked on then lispm. LLMS would have supercharged it…but they didn’t exist: we were working on AI back then!
I wouldn’t call myself a rockstar but I did get a job after a summer internship which I mostly spent touring with the Grateful Dead. At the end of the summer I was in the office and the head of the research division said he hadn’t seen me much(!). I said I’d been thinking and had some ideas on how the group’s research plan was flawed and how to do it better. I then filled his whiteboard with off the cuff ideas.
I spent the next several years with a team implementing the whiteboard.
I like to think things work better these days, AI or no AI
But I haven’t heard of it happening with the wild-west Android NFC payments, much less widespread problems with the essentially unconstrained use of QR code payments on SE Asia (e.g. Alipay).
So as an iPhone user I’m happy for Apple’s lockdown going away. I just hope it doesn’t mean that in future I’ll need to install a dozen payment apps and have to figure out which when I buy things.