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Gordon Moore has died

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Re: Gordon Moore has died

#231
post #223
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect lines of code and number of developers are strongly enough correlated that it's hard to get any additional predictive power from the latter!

I think that's true when the source is first written. But # of devs only ever goes up during maintenance lifecycle, while loc may not change much.

Maybe. In my experience it's common for developers who were not part of the original effort to maintain by addition, because they are worried changing the existing code might break stuff. So with increased maintainer count the code size grows too.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#234

Wow, we have lost a true legend. As I get older, I marvel a bit at the giants I once shared time on the earth with. Sometimes it feels like we don't have giants in the 21st century in the same way.

I sometimes make myself a mental list of famous people who are expected to die soon. The following people will all die in the next few years: Jimmy Carter (98), Henry Kissinger (99), Dick Cheney (82), Pope Francis (86), Paul McCartney (80), John Williams (91), William Shatner (92), and Ali Khamenei (83).

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

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#235
post #165

I have never had any brush with the giant. But I have my own little story to share. Way back in 1998, I was a newly minted engineer in India and was visiting Bangalore. While roaming around on MG Road, I picked up a book named “Inside Intel”. It is through that book that I learned about Gordon Moore. On the 48 hour train journey back to Delhi, I devoured the book. It left an impression and I was in awe. It also ignit…

Blossom book house <3

In 1999 on MG Road, it was more likely a roadside vendor with pirated books, Higginbotham, or unlikely, Gangarams. Blossom’s (Church St) wasn’t yet open IIRC.

Late 90s and early 2000s, I recall that Intel Inside, Lee Iacocca’s book, Who Moved my Cheese, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, Jack Welch’s book, etc were commonly sold, in addition to the latest novels. I even remember buying Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind (was popular because of the movie then) from a roadside vendor.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched Some Like It Hot (1959) a few weeks ago. Great comedy, looks phenomenal in 4K

I watch old ones, too, but always by myself. Nobody else wants to. It's always "eww, black and white!" Often they're right. They'd be much more watchable with an AI that could sharpen the picture and colorize it.

A kid in this house has started an appreciation for the original Twilight Zone, and enjoyed Casablanca before that. Gotta start early I guess. TV is scarce in this house, which promotes reading and feeling lucky to see a great movie, no matter the era.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#237
2500 points. Wow. I haven't seen upvotes like this... ever.

Unmentioned so far- I was watching the University of Utah's 50th Anniversary of CS sessions[1], and- apologies I forget who- someone mentioned that it was Carver Mead who largely promoted "Moore's Law" as an idea. Just some random trivia, to highlight how such a strong piece of identity around such a more dynamic & wide-ranging man came about.

Hopefully not the "Douglas Engelbart: creator of the mouse" identity.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUFp6sjKbkE

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched Some Like It Hot (1959) a few weeks ago. Great comedy, looks phenomenal in 4K

I watch old ones, too, but always by myself. Nobody else wants to. It's always "eww, black and white!" Often they're right. They'd be much more watchable with an AI that could sharpen the picture and colorize it.

I think it'd take more than picture quality to make classic films accessible. Acting styles and pacing especially have changed a ton since the b&w era. It's not to say they're not good, but they're a bit of an acquired taste.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#239
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the spirit of Moore's Law (the context in which it is most often used) is better referred to as the Law of Accelerating Returns [1] [2] (e.g. by Ray Kurzweil). Moore's Law is a sub-section (in time and technology) of the Law of Accelerating Returns. [1] https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns [2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4_...

Naw, this is from a quarter century after Moore’s predictions, and Moore’s law had already started slowing down by then. Kurzweil was also selling snake oil (immortality) here, and the proof is in the final figure in the article, it’s 100% misleading and has left me with mistrust for all the rest of what Kurzweil said. Why did he leave out all the population data between 1920 and 2000, data which we have available at…

Really? I thought the exponential growth of calculations per second per dollar was rather well-established at least from 1900 through 2010 [1], a period of time that is much broader than Moore's Law?

[1] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*vlmZ_Y3a-PGsK0S...

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#240
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw, this is from a quarter century after Moore’s predictions, and Moore’s law had already started slowing down by then. Kurzweil was also selling snake oil (immortality) here, and the proof is in the final figure in the article, it’s 100% misleading and has left me with mistrust for all the rest of what Kurzweil said. Why did he leave out all the population data between 1920 and 2000, data which we have available at…

Really? I thought the exponential growth of calculations per second per dollar was rather well-established at least from 1900 through 2010 [1], a period of time that is much broader than Moore's Law? [1] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*vlmZ_Y3a-PGsK0S...

Yes really, there is no law of accelerating returns as far as I’m concerned. Kurzweil clearly tried to opportunistically generalize Moore’s law and take credit for what he thought was a bigger idea, but sadly doesn’t produce a compelling argument, given that 1) Moore’s law died a decade ago, it no longer holds, and cost of calculations per second is no longer decreasing exponentially, and 2) Kurzweil claimed that things like US GDP and human life expectancy are evidence of his so-called law, and these claims are clearly bullshit. And not just wrong but intentionally misleading, that’s the part that bothers me. Did you look at the final figure? It’s not possible to make that diagram or write the accompanying text without knowing you’re lying. How about the first or second ones, wtf even are they? The majority of plots in Kurzweil’s piece, some 20-odd figures, are direct byproducts of Moore’s law from after Moore observed/predicted it, and nothing more.

In case you missed it, my point is not that flops didn’t increased exponentially for most of the last century, it’s that Kurzweil wasn’t the first to observe it, and didn’t add anything rigorous to what Moore & others had already done. Kurzweil only made a mockery of it by fabricating some of the data and using the larger argument to claim we’re headed toward immortality, joining an illustrious list of people who get attention by hawking the fountain of youth.

BTW feel free to re-read Kurzweil’s predictions about computation growth in the article and ask yourself whether they’re true. One of his scheduled predictions is up this year. He’s off by a few orders of magnitude according to his own definitions, and furthermore his definitions are off by a few more orders of magnitude according to other researchers, and on top of that his claim that enough flops equal human brain capability are, to date, false. These things put the remainder of his predictions really far behind schedule, and possibly slipping at an exponential rate, which kinda undermines the whole point, right?

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