71–80 of 98 posts
I got a book published with a bunch of community and personal findings as an "I wish I had known this earlier" kind of collection.
* Giant disclaimer: Bash is insanely complex, mostly for historical reasons. There are infinite ways of doing basically anything, and all of them have different trade-offs. The big one usually being between the complexity of the code and the kind of situations it can handle.
My girlfriend. Of course it's not a complete understanding, and there's always new things to learn. But that's part of the wonder and enjoyment.
women
Methods of self-organizing DHTs to optimize lookup performance. I had to learn hyperbolic geometry and figure out how to compute Delunay/Voronoi graphs on it, at scale, distributedly.
What did Stross do to you?
Entropy. It was hard for me to understand this arbitrary rule of things becoming less ordered over time. Was this just a fundamental natural law? The answer is no. Entropy is a logical consequence of probability and time. Why do things become more chaotic over time? Because chaotic configurations have a higher probability of occurring. There are far more disordered configurations of things then there are ordered, thi…
In physics we know much more about evolution of systems, for example in classical mechanics model of gas, there are deterministic equations of motion which also conserve some quantities like energy. So not all thinkable chaotic states are accessible, and the evolution of state is not a repeated random choice out of the whole set of states.
The Prime architecture was based on the Multics design from a group of guys hailing from Honeywell and MIT. I worked on Primes for around 12 years, worked for Prime briefly in the 80's, and wrote an emulator that runs many versions of Prime's OS, Primos: https://github.com/prirun/p50em
Prime systems are very much the opposite of RISC, with instructions for:
- process exchange and task scheduling
- procedure call, incl arguments, ring crossing, stack handling, register saves
- decimal arithmetic, incl picture editing for COBOL & PL/I
- string instructions and picture editing
- 6 CPU modes for compatibility with older processors
- DMA, DMC, DMT, DMQ I/O modes for controller access to memory
- 32, 64, and 128-bit floating point
Rather than "understand" I'll talk about complex "accomplishments". I once built a computer. I had Alan Clements "Microprocessor Systems Design" for an undergraduate text and built a 68000 based machine with 64M of RAM and ROM. Using discrete ICs on two big Eurorack wirewrap cards was hard work and needed good eyesight and dexterity. Then I wrote a bootloader and kermit-like like RS232 program loader, and finally has…
Do you think compiling everything on own computer results in noticeable increase in performance? Say, distribution provides binaries built on Intel, but I want to run on AMD, does it make sense to recompile binaries on the AMD?
Genome engineering and how our agricultural system actually functions. Next step is to have an in-depth understanding of the entire value chain of agriculture.
> how our agricultural system actually functions I take "actually" to mean that your understanding differs from that of most people. Care to tell the highlights?
One example is the dichotomous nature of regenerative agriculture and GM crops. The average person generally takes a very argumentative position on this one, when in reality the two are not mutually exclusive.
Another example is how the industry operates in terms of corporate influence, academia, and allocation of funding. Which leads to the discussion of subsidies, staple crops, livestock feed, GHG emissions, and how to realistically transition to a more sustainable system. When folks talk about GHG mitigation, they often get it wrong. There is some great literature available on this topic in Nature Food Journal.
But in general, I wish people wouldn't reduce the topic to a wedge issue. Having a firm understanding of the entire system and its nuance is the only way to come up viable solutions.
I'm happy to try and answer any specific questions that may come to mind.