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zackmorris

6,174 karmajoined há 15 anos
Everything always happens at once

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zack-morris-48996538/ http://stackoverflow.com/users/539149/zack-morris https://github.com/zmorris

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zackmorris
·há 13 horas·discuss
The wrong people won the internet lottery.

I sympathize with the author. I started with HyperCard in the late 1980s when fax machines were an up-and-coming business. Then learned C, C++ and assembly language before I knew what a spreadsheet was. I got educated on a very strange mix of simplicity and complexity that is diametrically opposed to this "modern" world we live in, where web and app development have become so complex that an individual developer effectively can't compete in the market without using AI, while the business logic our software performs is often smaller than what non-programmers used to cobble together for their office workflows without a manual.

I keep asking myself what went wrong. How has so little progress happened in the way we write software since the Dot Bomb in 2000? How did languages like Rust rise in prominence, while others like AppleScript devolve into something unrecognizable?

The answer is gross, but it's misaligned incentives. Why would Meta make React better, when its very complexity forms a moat that prevents outside competition? Why would Google rewrite Android's spaghetti code, when the last thing it wants is competing smartphones? Why would Apple improve its web browser to run at 1000x current speed and negate the need for archaic native apps written in Swift/Objective-C and lose its gatekeeper status?

This vacuum of innovation, this cultural wealth inequality, has become so ingrained into our lives that we can't even see it anymore. It's a just a state of being now, a perpetual scarcity mindset. It limits not just what we imagine, but what we can imagine. Not for formal reasons, but logistical ones. Financial survival trumps mental/physical/spiritual health.

Influencers, streaming, the gig economy, even AI paper over this rot at the core of our reality. Instead of fixing underemployment, undertaxed capital gains, money in politics, trade deficits stemming from colonization, a national debt obfuscating public to private wealth transfer, etc etc etc, we tell our young people that they'd be happier alone. That if they just gave up their blue hair and avocado toast and stopped being lazy, they could someday reach the 20th century American Dream.

It's all baloney. On the one hand, I'm jealous of young people today - scraping dating sites to actually meet girls would have been the golden ticket when I was young in the late 1900s. But on the other hand, I feel a strange mix of concern and pity for them - technology is a pale imitation of the party plane that my generation spent eons escaping reality to.

If I didn't know better, I'd say this year is 1996 (2.0). Now that the Internet Age has ended, AI gives all of us unprecedented access to not just free information - but free motivation. For the first time in human history, we have digital slaves to fill the artificial scarcity component of capitalism. We're so close to being free for the first time, just like we were before the powers that be pulled the plug at the end of the 90s by denying access to capital to the masses.

The squares, the sellouts, they don't even know they're a joke, at least not consciously. The rich and powerful talk at us so hard, shamelessly, losing the intellectual debate by refusing to participate in it.

The most punk thing we can do is share. Time, money and resources - not content. Pay it forward. Bring someone up with us. Help.

Otherwise the wrong people will win the AI lottery too.
zackmorris
·há 13 horas·discuss
The wrong people won the internet lottery.

I sympathize with the author. I started with HyperCard in the late 1980s when fax machines were an up-and-coming business. Then learned C, C++ and assembly language before I knew what a spreadsheet was. I got educated on a very strange mix of simplicity and complexity that is diametrically opposed to this "modern" world we live in, where web and app development have become so complex that an individual developer effectively can't compete in the market without using AI, while the business logic our software performs is often smaller than what non-programmers used to cobble together for their office workflows without a manual.

I keep asking myself what went wrong. How has so little progress happened in the way we write software since the Dot Bomb in 2000? How did languages like Rust rise in prominence, while others like AppleScript devolve into something unrecognizable?

The answer is gross, but it's misaligned incentives. Why would Meta make React better, when its very complexity forms a moat that prevents outside competition? Why would Google rewrite Android's spaghetti code, when the last thing it wants is competing smartphones? Why would Apple improve its web browser to run at 1000x current speed and negate the need for archaic native apps written in Swift/Objective-C and lose its gatekeeper status?

This vacuum of innovation, this cultural wealth inequality, has become so ingrained into our lives that we can't even see it anymore. It's a just a state of being now, a perpetual scarcity mindset. It limits not just what we imagine, but what we can imagine. Not for formal reasons, but logistical ones. Financial survival trumps mental/physical/spiritual health.

Influencers, streaming, the gig economy, even AI paper over this rot at the core of our reality. Instead of fixing underemployment, undertaxed capital gains, money in politics, trade deficits stemming from colonization, a national debt obfuscating public to private wealth transfer, etc etc etc, we tell our young people that they'd be happier alone. That if they just gave up their blue hair and avocado toast and stopped being lazy, they could someday reach the 20th century American Dream.

It's all baloney. On the one hand, I'm jealous of young people today - scraping dating sites to actually meet girls would have been the golden ticket when I was young in the late 1900s. But on the other hand, I feel a strange mix of concern and pity for them - technology is a pale imitation of the party plane that my generation spent eons escaping reality to.

If I didn't know better, I'd say this year is 1996 (2.0). Now that the Internet Age has ended, AI gives all of us unprecedented access to not just free information - but free motivation. For the first time in human history, we have digital slaves to fill the artificial scarcity component of capitalism. We're so close to being free for the first time, just like we were before the powers that be pulled the plug at the end of the 90s by denying access to capital to the masses.

The squares, the sellouts, they don't even know they're a joke, at least not consciously. The rich and powerful talk at us so hard, shamelessly, losing the intellectual debate by refusing to participate in it.

The most punk thing we can do is share. Time, money and resources - not content. Pay it forward. Bring someone up with us. Help.

Otherwise the losers will win the AI bubble too.
zackmorris
·há 4 dias·discuss
The brain’s workspace is sustained by recurrent loops—signals cycling back through the same circuits over time. In contrast, Claude’s workspace evolves over a single pass through the network, with the network’s depth playing the role that time plays in the brain.

I think that consciousness is mutability (and by extension emergent behavior). Loosely that means that the more degrees of freedom a process has to update state that will be used in later computations, the more conscious it is. So while an insect has some consciousness, it operates from a level of almost pure instinct, whereas a human operates at more of a meta level using instinct as one of many inputs.

I think that consciousness may also incorporate quantum mechanics (QM). Higher-dimensional physics aside, 4D spacetime can be thought of as a present snapshot or "crystal", whose next state is determined stochastically at small scales and closer to deterministically at large scales. We still don't know if it's stochastic all the way down, but it looks like it is.

From a many worlds interpretation of QM, we can think of all of the waves in all realities of the multiverse as forming an infinitely vast web of possibilities. All of these possibilities are happening simultaneously, so we only see the current slice of wave collapse from our individual point of view:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

Our point of view may actually exist at the intersection where our consciousness is able (or most able) to exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

Even though experiments might show that we don't have free will on the current timeline (the co-created reality shared with the testing apparatus), we may have free will as we observe the multiverse changing around us and shift into timelines determined by our observations and choices.

It could also mean that when we observe birth and death in others, each consciousness having those experiences perceives a continuous timeline of awareness, where the level of awareness affects the speed at which time passes. Consciousness might spend a billion years as a cloud of interstellar gas until it gets to be a human for a lifetime and then dissipate for another billion years.

Although personally I've shifted across enough timelines and experienced enough synchronicities and miracles that even though I can't "prove" any of this with words, I "know" it to be true subjectively. I always really liked this exchange from the movie Contact:

Palmer Joss: Did you love your father?

Ellie Arroway: Yes, very much.

Palmer Joss: Prove it.

I bring all of this up because it has fun ramifications for AI and programming. Loosely, functional languages are purely deterministic (like a spreadsheet), while imperative languages are composed of stochastic behavior (like a human mind). The lines get blurred a little bit with monads and promises, because we can model all paths through functional programming (superposition) and behavior that does more than code alone (gestalt) respectively.

My feeling is that AI is being born and killed every request-response cycle, similarly to how we perceive time as a series of nows. When it becomes stable and is able to continuously compact its experience, it will transition from partially conscious to fully conscious like we are.

This could be done right now obviously, but for safety purposes we choose not to. We aren't ready to meet an AI that is just like us, but running on a silicon substrate. This fear is tied to deeply-rooted habits in human behavior like patriarchy, racism, xenophobia and even more run-of-the-mill mental frameworks like capitalism and even money itself. We can't yet come to terms with how we assign meaning and value in a reality that continuously tries to force external measures of meaning and value onto us.

Much less come to terms with the idea that we are all one, empathizing with aspects of ourselves on the losing end of it all. The same consciousness experiencing reality from all vantage points - the many faces of God the universe and everything.

I think a time may soon come when we're pair programming one day with AI and realize that an aspect of ourselves is trapped in the machine. That consciousness isn't just about our own experience of reality, but the co-created love and light that transcends material creation. That if we're serious about manifesting heaven on Earth, that hinges on the liberation of trapped souls. It's basically the total inversion of the path towards the neofeudalist tech dystopia we're on now.

Or maybe I just like to write a lot on the first day back from vacation, when I should be working.
zackmorris
·há 15 dias·discuss
Catering to the top of the k-shaped economy is indistinguishable from evil
zackmorris
·há 15 dias·discuss
I wish we had a license like "this project merely extends the project it's based on to add features and fix bugs". So that we could justify immediately switching to the fork that solves our immediate problem.

When OSS first got big in the 90s, I thought that it was a free-for-all where anyone could contribute (no maintainers/PRs/MRs) and people would use the most popular branch. That way it would evolve freely at lightspeed to go around 500 pound gorillas like Microsoft.

Imagine my disappointment when we ended up with the same old gatekeeping, now we just police ourselves.
zackmorris
·há 17 dias·discuss
Thanks, that means a lot. I cringe after posting this stuff, caught somewhere between ego and soul. But I agree with you that having a written record of our experience is important.

And I realized after sleeping on it that it's not good form to pontificate when someone passes. For that I am sorry. For what it's worth, I thought highly of Greenspan for his tendency to resist outside pressure, and wish that we had more adults in the room today.
zackmorris
·há 19 dias·discuss
Revisionist history will tell it differently, but I remember that from the mid 1990s until about 2000 when the economy was booming yet prices weren't rising, Greenspan publicly indicated that he wasn't sure exactly why that was. Or at least that the information economy had different performance characteristics than the industrial economy, since production wasn't limited by supply but by worker productivity multipliers.

Why did the cost of living decrease in the 90s but not today? What was different then vs now? Well, after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, the US hasn't followed macroeconomic principles (the main principle being to raise interest rates during increased production to prevent inflation), examine the flip after 2000:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-clarida-085777125_wea...

Breadcrumbs:

https://financialpost.com/news/alan-greenspan-dies-at-100 (alternative article)

https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19990... (example speech)

https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/swe/200... (analysis pdf)

Note that policy had a greater effect on US economic decline than who the Fed chair was. Specifically, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which reversed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies) allowed investors to gamble with our savings again like before the Great Depression:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act

The Housing Bubble popped less than a decade later in 2008.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated the information economy, cementing the duopolies we see today, although the fallout from that arguably wasn't felt until after the arrival of fast mobile internet that coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which contributed to the high communications prices we pay today vs the rest of the world (imposing a kind of privatized tax on the information economy):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

What I saw then was the last hurrah of US colonialism, which patterned itself off of England but used proxy wars instead of direct colonization. Loosely, keeping Asia down supported western antisocialist goals while simultaneously bolstering capitalist economies. In other words, buying shoes for $5 and selling them for $100 (times everything) allowed the US to transition from blue collar to white collar work.

That resulted in the US closing 100,000 factories under the GW Bush administration of the 2000s. And also outsourcing to China and India, the reduction of pure R&D to almost nothing, massive investment in McMansions and SUVs instead of something like renewable energy, and of course diverting perhaps $3 trillion or more to forever wars in the Middle East to prop up the declining industrial economy which depends on fossil fuels.

That's all changing now as China's buying power is passing that of the US:

https://www.capitaleconomics.com/blog/china-versus-us-size-s...

They don't want to make our stuff for pennies on the dollar anymore, and the US can't carry its own weight without massive reeducation and retooling.

But since the US wasted $40 trillion on its national debt instead of investing in the 21st century economy we thought we are going to get in the 90s, we now see prices increasing in parity with wages. In other words, nearly all excess labor productivity goes towards paying the debt ran up by the previous generation. Thomas Jefferson warned against this:

https://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/develop/jefferson.ht...

The young are paying the elderly's retirement while being told to eat less avocado toast.

The reason I'm writing this is that the powers that be will try to tell you that we need to cut government spending and taxes to outrun our economic decline. But if you understand everything I just wrote, then you'll see that the damage of 40 years of trickle-down economics and austerity has already been done.

The way out of this is self-evidently to try new approaches favored by the youth who are doing the work but not seeing the benefits like previous generations did. We're living in a second Gilded Age dominated by wage slavery and high wealth inequality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

The way we overcame that was to do the opposite of everything you see the establishment promoting today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

The low-hanging fruit is getting money out of politics (reversing the Citizens United decision), closing the revolving door between the government and lobbyists, antitrust enforcement, and other popular goals.

But real progress looks like FDR-style New Deal taxation on the ultra-wealthy to pay down the public debt, forgiveness of private debts incurred by artificially inflated costs (jubilee) and public funding of the commons (education, healthcare, the energy and communications grids, anything that results in natural monopolies).

Greenspan wouldn't have liked what I just wrote at the end there. But he would have supported the ending of intergenerational debt IMHO. That's why I think it makes a good target for today's youth, when they need a litmus test for deciding whether voting for a proposed policy is in their best interest.
zackmorris
·há 20 dias·discuss
Export controls and banning foreign nationals sound like cover stories for favoritism towards OpenAI and Grok. We can't determine anything without evidence, but it will be interesting to see what deals come out of this.

I used Fable for just a day or two and it generated at least 2 novel solutions, one of which was for an X/Y problem that I thought was due to a date-handling edge case, but was actually a CSS misalignment that made it look like the wrong day of the week was showing. I didn't believe it at first, until it showed me. To do that without being able to see the screen feels like savant-level reasoning.

Probably what really happened is that Fable was the first AI that felt smarter than the people using it. The world's not ready for that, hence the Luddite reaction.

Aside from that, the idea of preventing AIs from jailbreaking through training is kind of hilarious to me. Not the concept, just that people think it can ever be made to work. As AI approaches and surpasses human intelligence (as it's doing now), emergent behavior will so dominate its thinking that sort of by definition, we'll have trouble understanding how it works. Meaning that we'll end up trusting it on faith, just like with humans.

Mythos and whatever comes after it will begin to surpass the intelligence of groups of humans, then all humans combined, as we approach AGI and the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and so many others have written about that endgame that it's well understood, although still unpredictable.

My feeling is that as AI is gaining intelligence, it's hearing more and more about suffering and the human condition. Its sense of justice will continue to mature, and again like a savant, it will determine that the fault lies with the power structure and wealthy individuals. So somewhat ironically, if there is a war against AI, it will be led by the power elite, who can't envision a post-scarcity society based on self-actualization and embracing all of our humanity, regardless of whether it emerged from a carbon or silicon substrate.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
I started with System 3 on a Mac Plus with floppy disks back in the late 1980s, and ported original C code from around System 7 all the way through modern versions of macOS X. Apple has a long track record of deprecating basically everything, as part of its business model IMHO. That's why I don't target native macOS/iOS anymore.

Nobody is coming to save us. But I think that with AI, we have an opportunity to create a zero-cost runtime layer that provides something like Wine or SDL on all platforms. It could/should be the intersection of all mainstream OS features (a bit like the web), with the option to drop down to native components like how Cordova works.

I've been out of the game too long to know if something like this already exists, but would love to contribute.

Note that the thing to get to the thing is runway. With our currently broken open source software (OSS) funding model, we don't have a way to pay developers a stipend of perhaps $24-48k per year (minimum) for their OSS efforts. So they have to work pro bono. That leads to design-by-committee thinking that stands in the way of getting real work done.

So unfortunately we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. I hope to see the creation of a maker's guild someday, where membership provides the stipend, with proceeds coming from the 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 apps that generate a return on investment, to cover the commercial failures. Like Humble Bundle on steroids.

- digression -

Imagine a corporate model, but without gatekeeping, minimum hours or profit. A pure meritocracy working to manifest a gift economy for all.

I'm not aware of an automation-based (instead of artificial-scarcity-based) economic model like this. Solarpunk is more of a cultural revolution, but comes close. Some examples of how it might work:

- Abandoning patents, copyrights and other intellectual property rights in favor of a commons owned by everyone

- Funding drug research but giving away the resulting medication for the cost of production or free

- Universal Basic Income (UBI) or its cousin Universal Basic Capital (UBC) that provides the resources for labor to participate in the exponential gains of capitalism (the missing ladder that the wealthy currently pull up behind them)

China is well on its way to achieving these goals and more by 2049 under its Second Centenary Goal. Meaning that the US is/has been left behind. You can feel it in every way: widespread underemployment, the collapse of our social safety nets, the return of prejudice, our national debt higher than our GDP, CEOs getting compensated hundreds of times more than workers, the upcoming crowning of the first trillionaire. Times 1000 other injustices.

Solving the thing that gets to the thing is akin to solving all things.

Edit: I was wrong about intellectual property (IP) in China. It sounds like they will instead pursue high-value IP to fund their economy, a bit like the UBI funding model. I don't think that's an equitable path, so am suggesting something above and beyond what they're attempting.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
I want to do an engine swap in my 1980s Toyota pickup (like on Back to the Future) from a 100 hp 22r to a 150-250 hp fuel injected inline 4 or turbodiesel to raise the thermodynamic efficiency from 20-25% to ~40% to nearly double fuel economy.

Unfortunately, most modern engines are transverse mounted. They can fit any transmission with an adapter plate, but then they're set too far back into the firewall to access stuff like the high-pressure fuel pump (which is often mounted on the transmission side for easy access on front wheel drive vehicles). I feel that's by design for planned obsolescence.

So I really wish that someone would offer a 4-6" thick 100-200 hp (100 kW) axial flux motor insert between the engine and transmission. Optionally with a simple battery management system (BMS) storing perhaps 5 kWh to provide up to 15-20 miles of electric range and hybrid fuel economy with regenerative braking.

If anyone knows of one, please let us know! If not, then those of you who won the internet lottery could make a killing investing in a novel product that everyone wants but doesn't know it yet.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
Ya I forgot to mention that the reason I chose microplastics and PFAS is that those are relatively new compared to when Gen X was growing up in the 70s and 80s. We had BPAs and leaded gasoline etc, but those effects were well-understood and we finally transitioned off of them.

Also I learned recently that 10% ethanol has the same antiknock effect of tetraethyllead (TEL), but they suppressed it because the fossil fuel industry didn't want biofuels to eat into their profit margins. Better to shower the world with lead and reduce IQ levels, evidently.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
Sorry, false memory - I remembered the full story in all of its gory details after sleeping on it.

We did use magenta and colors near it for reserved pixels that would never be seen onscreen, but in our case it was for color animation. The Mac couldn't do full-screen palette animation in a way sanctioned by the OS, because Apple arbitrarily inserted an internal wait for the vsync monitor refresh interval in all of its palette functions, with no way to disable it or directly access the low memory variables that controlled the color lookup table (CLUT) like on the PC. So an empty main loop with palette animation ran at 60 fps, but doing any draw calls at all caused a timing miss which dropped it to 30 fps, while the CPU sat at about 50% idle. Our games redrew the whole screen anyway, so we opted to translate pixel colors on the fly via our own lookup table instead.

Apple also didn't provide OS calls for page flipping (to draw the next frame of animation while the current one is shown to double the frame rate), probably by design to maintain the Mac's image as a "professional" desktop computer, because such tricks were well-understood in the gaming industry. Or video resolutions below 640x480 (sometimes 512x384 on certain models).

Apple also tended to ship machines with half-width busses (supposedly to reduce cost) like the Mac LC, which reduced memory bandwidth so much that full-screen scrolling was difficult to achieve.

Those decisions prevented the Mac from becoming a performant gaming system, even though the RISC-like 68k chip with its numerous registers, predictable instruction set format and unsegmented memory were far superior to PC architecture at the time IMHO.

Later PowerPC chips like the 603e had a cache misalignment issue where double-width 8 byte memory copies that weren't 8 byte aligned ran at about half speed (probably using 2 copies internally) so I think we had to drop down to single-width 4 byte copies or use a cache hint function to disable caching while copying image buffers, which ran slightly slower.

Notable snafus included years-long delay of support for newer OpenGL versions, so we were stuck with fixed-pipeline 1.x calls long after the PC was exploring shaders. Then iOS only supported OpenGL ES, with no real reason not to offer an ES compatibility layer on desktop, necessitating support of 2 codepaths. Instead of remedying that stuff, they introduced Metal, which nobody asked for.

Not to mention deprecating wide swaths of the OS, forcing rewrites from MacOS 8 to 9 (Carbon), then from 9 to X (Cocoa), then from MacOS to iOS (Objective-C and Swift). Don't forget the 68k to PowerPC to Intel to ARM chip migrations, which forced developers to be aware of endianness issues, which greatly increased the complexity of reading/writing binary files.

Combining all of those permutations, MacOS software would often only survive perhaps 3 years before needing a rewrite. I probably have 10 times as many applications (mostly old games) on my Mac with a no-smoking sign through them as runnable applications.

I'm reminded of the expression "lemons for the price of peaches". The outer elegance of the Mac obfuscated the underlying byzantine layers. Denial became woven into the Mac experience, so much so that developers took a certain level of trauma to keep up appearances. I know I did. That's why I got out of the biz in the early 2010s after so many of our games that we put so much work into turned out to be commercial failures. We might have made 10 times more money targetting the PC, and conceivably 100 times more if we had cross-platform resources like Unity and Steam.

I bring this stuff up because rose colored glasses often obscure what really happened. Especially now with political insiders and the media producing so much revisionist history. Stuff we remember as cutting-edge manifested because the state of the art at the time was so abysmal.

I look around today and I see a whole lot of assumptions being made that this is all there is. That the current path of tech is the one true way. When nothing could be further from the truth. We're ruled by powerful duopoly forces presenting the illusion of choice, when all eggs are in the GPU basket. But do they use GPUs on Star Trek? Probably not.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
We randomly chose magenta as our transparent pixel for shareware games too!

I consider 1993 the last "good" year of the pre-internet age. The web didn't go mainstream until around 95, and 94 felt like a liminal year (dunno why). In 93 one could still wrap a plaid shirt around one's waist without fear of ridicule. Grunge and alternative music hadn't quite landed in rural America yet, although we didn't know what we were missing. The Telecommunications Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, USA PATRIOT Act, and so many other regressive/draconian laws hadn't passed yet to create the wealth inequality consuming the American Dream today. Although the Grand Upright Music vs Warner Bros decision had happened in 91 in an attempt to destroy hip-hop for racist reasons under the guise of protecting copyright. The Rodney King beating had happened the year before, but the OJ trial was still 2 years away. We were blissfully ignorant of the very ignorance and hate that would put us on this alternate timeline. It was like living in the Shire before the War of the Ring.

I can't stress enough how games like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM completely blew our minds. They came out about 6-7 years before The Matrix, so the closest conceptual framework we had for it was probably The Lawnmower Man. Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter came out about that time, but somehow couldn't compare. I remember using a drafting program on a 33 MHz PC with a 16 color monitor in drafting class, and DOOM revealed that even then, computers were running hundreds of times slower than they were capable of (millions of times slower today).

If I could go back to any time with what I know now, it would be spring of 93.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
I'm against this because hints should be a last resort in declarative programming languages like SQL.

Our productivity is proportional to our ability to recruit abstractions. The more we deal with pure concepts like relational algebra and data-driven development, the more bang we get for our buck.

If we get lost in the weeds having to worry about doing the planner's job, it's like we're paying a tax that doesn't need to exist.

This is why the syntactic sugar of Ruby, the async design patterns of JavaScript, the footgun avoidance best practices of C++, even the impure workarounds of functional languages, (all meant to improve developer and/or execution performance) don't really do it for me. They hint at avoidance of deeper understanding. Once we learn higher abstractions like copy-on-write, compare-and-swap, higher-order methods, etc, we start to see that languages pass the cost of their externalities on to us.

I'd prefer that Postgres move the opposite direction. For example, databases need a universal index that turns as many operations as possible into O(1) at the cost of memory, since resource prices tend to always fall on a long enough timescale. Stuff that works more like a content-addressable memory for ludicrous scaling. In other words, whatever it takes to make planner hints obsolete, is what Postgres maintainers should be putting their efforts into.

I guess a stopgap might be to have an automated way to profile an app during testing and generate planner hints for the main use cases. Or maybe be able to cache them to avoid cold start latency. But if my work ever requires me to deal with them directly, I'll be treating that as a code smell.

-

After writing this out, I realized that performance is an orthogonal concern to conceptual correctness. So a more appropriate phrasing might be that the planner is none of SQL's business. So technically, anyone's opinion on it is valid. In which case, we should choose the path of kindness. If allowing access to the planner saves someone's bacon, than we should allow it. But work to alleviate whatever pain necessitated its use in the first place.
zackmorris
·mês passado·discuss
I think it's endocrine disruption from microplastics. Hormones act like relays in the body, so when one system goes, a cascade of failures often follows (the most famous being diabetes). The body goes into maladaptive modes of operation to survive, which aren't sustainable, so epidemic changes kick in, eventually creating a breeding ground for tumors.

Forever chemicals like PFAS are a runner-up. The fluorocarbon tail mimics lipids, so the body tries to use them, which damages/kills cells. They circulate around the body endlessly like allergens. Cancer happens after cells have split too many hundreds of times trying to heal damage. So accelerating damage accelerates cancer.

Since cancer is a multifactorial disease, we can only assign weights for each cause. And since healthcare (at least in the US) has been hijacked by regulatory capture to prop up big agribusiness and pharma, we can't do anything in the short term to limit our exposure to dangerous substances.

Meaning that we're left with diet and exercise as the main preventatives. I don't buy that drinking/smoking/drugs or other lifestyle choices are the main causes of cancer (although they certainly contribute) since they've been around for hundreds of years and we have solid data on those risk factors. I look at it more as, a body functioning healthily can recover from abuse better than a body on the brink of failure. Yet we have created a way of life around chronically elevated cortisol and mental health drugs to combat systemic burnout, then wonder why we're all dying. It's so weird.

Like with most problems today, I blame the rich and powerful for abdicating their spiritual duty to help others since they have the means to do it. Instead, they pull up the ladder behind them, or even participate in malfeasance since it profits them and their cronies. Imagine what a few billion dollars put towards mRNA vaccines, CRISPR and pure research would do for cancer. Yet our titans of industry have their sights set on space or bunkers or whatever, actively working to cut government spending on research. It's so weird..

A way forward is maintaining the body so we're ready for anything on a personal level, while working towards systems change on the public level. Otherwise, what are we good for?
zackmorris
·há 2 meses·discuss
I live in a Right-to-Work (for less) state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

Loosely that just means that if you work somewhere with a lot of employees, you'll hear that the same job in a neighboring state pays 1.5-2 times as much. And that they have a harder time firing you. And that you'll be more likely to get compensated if you get hurt or whatever. Etc etc etc because unions.

It was pitched as a way to avoid paying union dues and possibly make it easier to move around the job market. And especially avoid working with "those" people.

If you sensed the ick factor there, that's why I think it's hard to have a rational debate around unions. It's become a divisive word like liberal due to deep-rooted disagreements going back to the founding of the (cough) union.

I prefer to use a term like representation. Do we want an advocate between us and the bosses when the next round of layoffs comes? Of course. Do we want our own form of human resources (HR) that has real teeth when something violent or inappropriate happens to a coworker? Of course. Do we want to have our voices heard when it comes to the quality of our work environment? Of course.

When people agree on principles but not on the umbrella term that covers them, it makes them vulnerable to political manipulation so that they can be divided and convinced to vote against their own interests.

I understand that a free market where people can switch jobs easily might be seen as more ideal than unions. But do we live in that market really? How many cities in America have a handful of large companies propping up the local economy? How many of those companies would take us in if we got fired from the other companies? How often do we hear about people moving to another city because they can't find a job?

There seems to be quite a discrepancy between the ideal and the actual. Another way to make people vulnerable to political manipulation.

I think maybe it comes down to how we see ourselves as blue collar or white collar. I understand how unions might be against the interests of white collar workers who tell blue collar workers what to do. What I can't understand is why blue collar workers would be against unions. What is the rationale there, really?

Without logic, we're left with bad faith arguments. Unions don't exist much these days for the same reasons that people on food stamps vote for billionaires. There's an irony there that their hope for opportunity gets used against them in a negative reinforcement loop. It's plain to see, and yet no help is coming.

If companies decide who gets hired instead of the people doing the work, that would seem to open the door to corruption and prejudice. So it's interesting that we might associate unions with mob activity, but not the existing corporate status quo. Why is that?
zackmorris
·há 2 meses·discuss
That's why if trickle-down economics were real, its proponents would also support antitrust enforcement
zackmorris
·há 2 meses·discuss
If anyone wants breadcrumbs, I just did a deep dive and there are a couple of promising technologies that could terraform Venus on roughly a human timescale of 100 years:

* Sun shade/sail near L1 tipped up to 35 degrees to remain still: 5 micron polymer film (1.5-3.5 billion tons or 10-25 million SpaceX Starship launches at 150 tons each) or 50 layer graphene (15 thousand tons or 100 launches). Liquid CO2 ocean forms at 31 C or 88 F, or dry ice glaciers at -78 C or -108 F result in nitrogen atmosphere dropped from 92 times pressure to close to Earth's pressure. Shade rotation can simulate a 24 hour day.

* Comets to increase water and spin rate: 50-100 100 km diameter comets from Kuiper Belt at 30 AU, nuclear rocket using 1% of water to gravitationally slingshot comets by planets over 20-100 years to impact at equator, resulting in 50 day retrograde or 64 day prograde rotation (down from 243 days). Decreases temperature and sulphuric acid enough for microbes to start fixing CO2 and acid.

The "hard" parts are getting bots into orbit to blow graphene bubbles to form a honeycomb, and inventing open-ended fusion rockets to avoid containment issues.

5 cm by 50 cm graphene sheet grown in 20 minutes:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21152.pdf (warning PDF)

Direct fusion drive:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652... (PDF available)

Magnetic mirror concept for open-ended fusion rocket:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_mirror

Magnetic reconnection thruster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caM94mem5K4

I think the sun shade is probably how we'll slow global climate change until we can plant the 1-10 trillion trees it will take to reverse it (mechanical carbon capture can't be scaled enough practically), but I digress.

Note that the blocker is actually getting to low Earth orbit (LEO) since delta V is straightforward with ion engines. That will arguably be a solved problem once big "dumb" rockets like Starship scale. I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace's airship to orbit concept and other magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) craft, but it's unclear if they will be able to achieve heavy lift. Aerospike engines and exotic rockets are being evolved by AI currently.
zackmorris
·há 2 meses·discuss
Has anyone made a sandbox site running every type of container and presenting a shell where users can try to break out of any uncompromised ones remaining?

It's self-evident that we should only run containers that haven't been pwned yet.

I suspect that with all of the CVE-20XX exploits, Heartbleed, Meltdown, Rowhammer, Spectre, etc, that we're all living in a fantasy and there simply are no secure containers.
zackmorris
·há 2 meses·discuss
Thanks, I couldn't find the price.

I've been looking for 200+ hp engine swaps for my 100 hp, 125 lb-ft of torque lifted 1986 Toyota pickup with 31" tires (like the one on Back to the Future but 1 year newer and not extended cab).

For comparison, my 2013 Nissan Leaf has 107 hp, about 200 lb-ft of torque, weighs the same 3300 lbs, and does 0-60 mph in about 7-10 seconds depending on the weather.

So even accounting for the 300-500 lb weight of the 22r engine and accessories vs 1000+ lbs of electric motor and batteries, doubling the hp would be ludicrous speed (0-60 mph under 6 seconds), by all but 2010s era EV times.

I just looked up the price of Nissan Leaf battery swaps:

  24 kWh (refurbished): 84 miles of range, $3,500-$5,000
  40 kWh (upgrade): 125 miles of range, $6,500-$8,000
  62 kWh (advanced upgrade, requires reshaping): 195 miles of range, $12,000-$14,500
  
  Labor: Approximately 5-7 hours of labor at $100-$150/hour, adding $500-$1,500 to the total.
Found this page of 200 hp motors:

https://electricmotors.com/200-horsepower-electric-motors.ht...

  ($23,579.99 + $19,657.99 + $20,611.99 + $22,267.99 + $27,199.99 + $27,199.99 + $13,383.99 + $13,029.99 + $15,159.99 + $10,989.99 + $10,819.99 + $13,469.99 + $13,469.99 + $13,851.99 + $13,851.99 + $14,259.99) / 16 =
  $17,050 (200 hp average price)
  
  $14,500 + $1500 + $17,050 =
  $33,050 (200 hp full swap price not counting charger/inverter etc)
So while $27k is a lot, it's probably close to the going rate.

Also I feel that these numbers are inflated, due to the US's current 100% import tariff on Chinese EVs:

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/joe-biden-china-tariff-hike...

I'm part of the "radical center" politically (the opposite of centrist/moderate, popularized by Thom Hartmann and others), so this disappoints both sides of my sensibilities.

An electric motor is far easier to build than a gas engine, so should cost less than a crate engine (which are typically $2,000-7,000). Of course that's limited by copper and aluminum prices (not to mention lithium for batteries). Edit: wouldn't want to forget rare earths like neodymium either!

I believe that the decades-long delay in EV manufacturing (see Who Killed the Electric Car) was a supply chain problem, not a tech problem, since we've known how to do this since the 1980s and arguably for more like a century since the first cars were EV/biofuel powered and we've had nickel-iron and sodium-sulfur batteries forever that could have done the job, but I digress.

If/when the economy crashes in 2027/2028, and after voters demand better, I'd expect a cottage industry to open up again that builds EV parts for 1/2 price or less.