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The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

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Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#21

Post by Jtsummers »

The_Colonel wrote: post #18
dmd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> way slower than your phone For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second. Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.

> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster. Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.

Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#22

Post by vajrabum »

I spent nearly 20 years fixing computers and other electronics. Repair techs are my original work tribe and it was a fun if sometimes stressful way to make a living. I got away from it because the money went away. That said, I never wanted to fix copiers. They were always finicky, messy and dirty, but this is a really great piece and three things stand out for me.

The article claims that PARC paid for itself (1) through the anthropological sociological studies of copier repair technicians which revealed shortcomings in the engineering of the copiers and resulted in changes to the paper path and handling in newer designs and significantly reduced maintenance cost and difficulty. Two, enabling information sharing between repair technicians over radios and technician created and maintained documentation, saved the company 5-8% of service cost and these innovations were resisted by services management which was invested in the idea that copier repair technicians should be cheap, interchangable monkeys. Three, Xerox management likely left significant money on the table because they fundamentally and willfully misunderstood copier repair and copier repair technicians and the value they were creating for the company. Likely, mostly because repair was seen as a cost center which in an ideal world would be eliminated entirely.

1. It's really astonishing how much and in how many ways PARC paid for itself and yet business literature and likely Xeroxes management often focuses on the money left on the table for others to grab and asserts there was a failure.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#23

Post by The_Colonel »

Jtsummers wrote: post #21
The_Colonel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster. Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.

Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.

That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#24

Post by zifpanachr23 »

The_Colonel wrote: post #23
Jtsummers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.

That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.

This is a good analogy. If you look at a modern mainframe CPU it becomes pretty clear where the differences lie. Fewer, beefier cores with a lot of focus on cache.

Supercomputers tend to use more conventional cores, but way more of them, and connect them in a large fabric. There's a lot more focus on parallelization and horizontal scaling.

Mainframe overall compute is nowhere near a supercomputer, and you probably shouldn't be running a massive physics simulation on a mainframe, but you may get more consistency and reliability for well defined tasks.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#25

Post by com »

gumby wrote: post #19

This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it. I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came fro…

Thank you for this very honest comment. It means more to to me than I was expecting it to when I started reading it.

Were there any moments on the journey of growing up that stick in your mind as being turning points in your path from techno-determinism to whatever you describe yourself now?

I’m really interested in how we can intervene earlier in people’s journey to provide bigger horizons, rather than just waiting for enough experience to build up…

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#27

Post by gumby »

com wrote: post #25
gumby wrote: post #19

This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it. I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came fro…

Thank you for this very honest comment. It means more to to me than I was expecting it to when I started reading it. Were there any moments on the journey of growing up that stick in your mind as being turning points in your path from techno-determinism to whatever you describe yourself now? I’m really interested in how we can intervene earlier in people’s journey to provide bigger horizons, rather than just waiting…

Thanks. I think I mainly developed more empathy.

I married an artist. She knew no physics, no advanced mathematics, but plenty of philosphy and languages as well as the technology and philosophy of representational art. She was a lot smarter than me and we spent a lot of time expanding each others' horizons, not deliberately or didactically but just through living.

Also so many things seem clear when you are young and I was repeatedly humbled by how complicated the real world is compared to academia or research (where I worked on very abstruse subjects, e.g. the denotational semantics of reflexive languages).

I think you see this in a lot of people: libertarianism and even Ayn Rand is more popular with young people ("hey I'm smart and responsible; why are there all these annoying and pointless rules getting in my way?"). I was never a libertarian but back then I was sympathetic to Rousseau. But you have fewer grown up libertarians because many learn to realise that sure, things are imperfect, but we live in a world that evolved (sometimes well and sometimes not) to work with fallable systems and lots of opinions, some well thought out and some...not so.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#28

Post by kragen »

gumby wrote: post #19

This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it. I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came fro…

> the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years?

assuming you mean cryptocurrencies, i think they kept several million people alive throughout the venezuelan civil war, sustained wikileaks through the visa and mastercard blockade, and have made sci-hub and library genesis financially stable; maybe they haven't impacted the people in your direct vicinity, but they've made a huge impact in places like moldova which don't have functional currency

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#29

Post by gumby »

kragen wrote: post #28
gumby wrote: post #19

This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it. I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came fro…

> the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years? assuming you mean cryptocurrencies, i think they kept several million people alive throughout the venezuelan civil war, sustained wikileaks through the visa and mastercard blockade, and have made sci-hub…

Yes, cryptocurrencies not cryptography. Bad of me to use that contraction for anything but the latter.

Have they really made a significant difference? A bit of searching around resulting in a few articles with anecdotes, and if someone's life really was saved this way of course it made a huge difference to them.

But for some macro perspective the best I could find was the "Crypto Adoption Index" (https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2023-global-crypto-adoption...), where VE, or MD don't even register (AR barely does). In fact US is listed as having one of the highest levels of adoption, and it's basically invisible here.

Countries with nonfunctional currency systems usually do better by adopting an existing stable currency like USD or EU (or even better someplace economically coupled with them).

But I'm no expert and I'd be happy to be proven wrong. On a financial macro perspective cryptocurrencies don't even exist.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#30

Post by kragen »

gumby wrote: post #29
kragen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years? assuming you mean cryptocurrencies, i think they kept several million people alive throughout the venezuelan civil war, sustained wikileaks through the visa and mastercard blockade, and have made sci-hub…

Yes, cryptocurrencies not cryptography. Bad of me to use that contraction for anything but the latter. Have they really made a significant difference? A bit of searching around resulting in a few articles with anecdotes, and if someone's life really was saved this way of course it made a huge difference to them. But for some macro perspective the best I could find was the "Crypto Adoption Index" ( https://www.chainal…

pretty much the entire currency black market here in argentina used to run on cryptocurrencies, which is more significant than it sounds given how large a fraction of argentina's employment is illegal (something like a third, last i heard). i think us banks have taken some of that business away from cryptocurrencies in recent years, but every illegal moneychanger still accepts them even if most of their business runs over zelle

as for how countries might do better, while it is interesting to discuss what policies policymakers ought to adopt, argentine (and turkish, venezuelan, etc.) policymakers do not want to adopt the policies they ought to adopt; they want to adopt the policies that serve their political interests. the rest of us are left to figure out how to cope with their terrible policies. and that's the sense in which bitcoin matters; it makes it possible for argentines and venezuelans to do things like save money, leave the country, and send money to their families back home when they're working abroad

on a financial macro perspective, there's currently about 1.1 trillion dollars stored in bitcoin, which is a few days of global gdp. other cryptocurrencies together are something like half a trillion. it's entirely plausible that 80%, 90%, 95%, or 99% of bitcoin's number is owned by keys that were lost in disk drive failures back in the cpu mining epoch, but that's less likely for the other cryptocurrencies. so i don't know that i'd agree that they don't exist on a financial macro perspective. certainly they aren't anywhere near the importance of asset classes like real estate, commercial paper, forex, commodities futures, or stocks, and it's questionable how much real liquidity exists in the market—if satoshi were to start selling off his coins now, how much would it tank the market before he was done?

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