An OS is a virtual machine meant to be shared among programs. Sure the central examples expose most of an ISA that they run on themselves, but there are also examples like Inferno, Taos, AS/400.
Aside: the example question ("What is the intuition that two reflections gives a rotation?") could have a more intuitive answer involving flipping an actual flashcard over twice, funnily enough...
I don't know, I'm not very chemical, but fwiw: a friend and I were favorably impressed with Linus Pauling's general chemistry textbook. It tries to supply enough of the physics for the chemistry to make sense. We only studied for a few weeks before moving on, though, and it's a big fat book.
There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any complication or unfamiliarity is a problem in multiple ways. (Score voting goes from checkbox to a 1-5 stars or whatever.)
I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.
Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite codebase.
> libertarian fantasy
You can see it that way... though the Prof was not expecting uptake for those proposals, he didn't get them, and the protagonist at the end is thinking of emigrating to the Belt. The U.S. was a libertarian fantasy before its founding.
Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
Heh, unintentional. Another term shorter than spelling out "orders of magnitude" is "decades", but I figure that's less familiar and even more confusing here. "Memory price started out falling two decades per decade..."
1979 to 2009 in the OP graph has a pretty steady drop from 10^7 to 10^1 USD/GB: 6 OOMs in 30 years. Then till before the recent spike it was around 1 OOM in 15 years: 1/3 the rate of progress on a log scale.
When it comes to CPU progress we blame the end of Dennard scaling several years before the knee in this memory curve. I'd guess the story of memory is similar in also hitting technical difficulties, but I don't know.
It's funny, in the 8-bit days a lot of us learned programming for its own sake without much expectation it'd be lucrative. Took ~50 years to get back to that spirit as the default.
Permission should be in the form of a capability, which need not end up on the built-in OS network capability. If an app insists on your car's steering wheel, you can be like "sure, kid, here's your Help Daddy Drive(TM)".
If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.
(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)
I only spot-checked the section "Problems with Scheme" in the motivation doc and got a similar impression. The last three short paragraphs were reasonable on why not Scheme for this, but they were preceded by a greater bulk of confused or vague complaints. (E.g. "nil being mixed with '()" -- what nil?)
> like transcriptions of vibes derived from AI discussion
I was wondering whether a human wrote it too.
Quite possible this section was unrepresentative! I hope so.