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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

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Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#251

Post by clarity20 »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #249
circlefavshape wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if we solve climate change with geoengineering instead of by addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability, many people would feel frustrated or let down by the solution because it would solve the problem without addressing the moral shortcomings that led to the problem. Oof. Now I understand something I didn't before

Are you sure? No offence, but I don't think there's anything to understand here. If we could solve climate change without "addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability" we would all be f'ing _thrilled_. As I type this Hurricane Helene just destroyed a good chunk of inland North Carolina (!!!) and Hurricane Wilton was just upgraded to a "category 5" storm. If we coul…

I don't see why climate change needs "solving" per se, or how it can be "solved." To take your example, there have always been hurricanes. It's not correct to infer there's a human-induced tendency toward destruction that can be reversed by humans, or that yet another hurricane is actually a change to the climate in the first place.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#252

Post by xiphias2 »

bccdee wrote: post #187

> Both early Unix and C compilers had simple structures, are easy to port, require few machine resources to run, and provide about 50%-80% of what you want from an operating system and programming language. > Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. The key argument behind worse-is-better is that an OS which is easy to implement will dominate the market in an ecosystem with many competing hardware standards. Ope…

There are some differences between your examples in my opinion:

Rust started as an experiment of Mozilla team replacing C++ with something that helps them compete with Chrome in developing safe multi-threaded code more efficiently. It took a lot of experiments to get to the current type system, most of which gives real advantages by using affine types, but the compiler is at this point clearly over-engineered for the desired type system (and there are already ideas on how to improve on it). It's still too late to restart, as it looks like it takes 20 years to productionize something like Rust.

As for React I believe it's I believe an over-engineered architecture from the start for most web programming tasks (and for companies / programmers that don't have separate frontend and backend teams), but the low interest rates + AWS/Vercel pushed them on all newcomers (and most programmers are new programmers, as the number of programmers grew exponentially).

HTMX and Rails 8 are experiments in the opposite direction (moving back to the servers, nobuild, noSAAS), but I believe there's lot of space to further simplify the web programming stack.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#253

Post by enugu »

Ironically, the main feature that separates LISP from other modern languages is homoiconicity/macros(now that features like garbage collection are mainstream).

And this leads to an easier implementation - parsing is easier(which is why code transformation via macros becomes easy).

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#254

Post by inglor_cz »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #249
circlefavshape wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if we solve climate change with geoengineering instead of by addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability, many people would feel frustrated or let down by the solution because it would solve the problem without addressing the moral shortcomings that led to the problem. Oof. Now I understand something I didn't before

Are you sure? No offence, but I don't think there's anything to understand here. If we could solve climate change without "addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability" we would all be f'ing _thrilled_. As I type this Hurricane Helene just destroyed a good chunk of inland North Carolina (!!!) and Hurricane Wilton was just upgraded to a "category 5" storm. If we coul…

"we would all be f'ing _thrilled_."

I think the argument is pretty much the opposite: not everyone would be thrilled. The wannabe priest class (think of Greta and her How dare you!), which is always with us, would be frustrated from the lack of something to preach about.

Of course there is always Israel vs. Palestine.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#255

Post by moomin »

clarity20 wrote: post #251
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? No offence, but I don't think there's anything to understand here. If we could solve climate change without "addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability" we would all be f'ing _thrilled_. As I type this Hurricane Helene just destroyed a good chunk of inland North Carolina (!!!) and Hurricane Wilton was just upgraded to a "category 5" storm. If we coul…

I don't see why climate change needs "solving" per se, or how it can be "solved." To take your example, there have always been hurricanes. It's not correct to infer there's a human-induced tendency toward destruction that can be reversed by humans, or that yet another hurricane is actually a change to the climate in the first place.

It isn’t correct to infer that from the fact that hurricanes exist, no.

Nor is it correct to ignore the decades of peer-reviewed research that concludes that we really are causing more hurricanes on the basis that hurricanes have always existed.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#256

Post by lispm »

hayley-patton wrote: post #241
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. Lisp machines still exist. They're just simulated in various Lisp's runtime environments. It turns out that a RISC machine running a Lisp interpreter or an executable compiled from Lisp source tends to perform better than a tagged/cdr Lisp Machine w/ hardware GC. That being said... I've wanted to implement an old Explorer using an FPGA for a while. Maybe if I just mention it here, someone will get inspired and d…

Lisp machines didn't have hardware GC, though they had hardware support for read/write barriers.

Kind of. A lot of the GC support in the Symbolics 3600 architecture is on the Microcode level (current CPUs usually don't have such operations in Microcode). The word size of the CPU is 36bit. The CPU operations don't deal with the type and gc tags on the instruction level, this is done on the Microcode level. Things like "invisible pointers" are also dealt on the Microcode level.

Ephemeral GC, concentrates on garbage collecting objects in RAM: For example every memory page has a page tag, which marks it modified or not. The ephemeral GC uses this to scan only over changed pages in memory. The virtual memory subsystem keeps a table of swapped-out pages pointing to ephemeral pages. The EGC can then use this information...

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#257

Post by anthk »

Blackthorn wrote: post #219
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a weird take on HN. Lisp should be experimented with if only to appreciate the profound beauty of a small, powerful, cohesive design. It is a wholly different feeling from industry standard languages which are constantly changing. In Lisp, almost all of the language’s power is in “user space.” The ramifications for that are deep and your beliefs as to whether that is good are largely shaped by whether you believ…

Nothing about Common Lisp is small or cohesive. Some schemes, maybe.

CL it's much more cohesive than Scheme. They Schemes are barely compatibles upon themelves with ice-9's on Guile, SRFI's and whatnot.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#258

Post by einpoklum »

adastra22 wrote: post #161
KerrAvon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is misleading -- geoengineering + social change will be necessary. You're not going to Scotty your way out of climate change.

Why not? Really, why not? If we had a profitable way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, to deacidify the oceans, clean up toxic waste, etc., what would be left? How would that not solve the problem?

Because it's a distraction.

Global warming and other environmental crises are unfolding right now. While exploring possible future technological advances which would make coping with it easier is certainly a positive and useful pursuit - it cannot be the _main_ pursuit when facing those crises and challenges. That is:

1. We should not divert the discussion from present to possible fortuitous futures.

2. We must not confuse action with prospects.

3. We must not think of the two as "either-or". We can reduce emissions _and_ do R&D for new tech possibilities.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#259

Post by pjmlp »

Jach wrote: post #175
gpderetta wrote: post #7

> The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++. And 30 years later they show few signs of letting go.

At a certain level, sure, but C++ at least has definitely lost out. In the 90s it seemed like it might really take over all sorts of application domains, it was incredibly popular. Now and for probably the last couple decades it and C have only kept around 10% of the global job market.

Depends on the market, even the C++ wannabe replacements are implemented in compiler toolchains written in C++.

It gets a bit hard to replace something that your compiler depends on to exist in first place.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#260

Post by tovej »

inglor_cz wrote: post #254
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? No offence, but I don't think there's anything to understand here. If we could solve climate change without "addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability" we would all be f'ing _thrilled_. As I type this Hurricane Helene just destroyed a good chunk of inland North Carolina (!!!) and Hurricane Wilton was just upgraded to a "category 5" storm. If we coul…

"we would all be f'ing _thrilled_." I think the argument is pretty much the opposite: not everyone would be thrilled. The wannabe priest class (think of Greta and her How dare you! ), which is always with us, would be frustrated from the lack of something to preach about. Of course there is always Israel vs. Palestine.

I myself am convinced that man-made global warming can't be stopped without changing the way our political economies work, and I happen to believe that Palestinians are people and therefore deserve basic human rights (which they do not currently have). I'm also a researcher.

I _would_ be thrilled if there was an expedient way to solve climate change. But the best systems models for the earth all tell us that there's one way to solve the issue: just leave the carbon in the ground. That's it. Stop extracting it. Nothing else will solve the problem, it's a really simple, really bad, feedback loop.

This characterization of environmental or Palestinian activists as wanting to have the moral high ground is, imo, a knee jerk reaction. The people on the street aren't in it for clout, they're doing it because it is the right thing and they feel compelled to act. What gets me moving is not wanting to feel morally superior (a religious aspect, more at home in right wing politics), but an anxiety for the future, which is projected to include horrible death and suffering due to obvious problems that we could all fix if we just decided to recognize them.

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