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The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

books.worksinprogress.co

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Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#41

Post by vaxman »

What the...

I open the article and it is not about "maintaining" the old Data General and DEC machines (the original "The Should of a New Machine" was about the race to create the first 32-bit minicomputer --between DG and DEC. DG was a former group of DECies --spoiler: THEY LOST! It was a hell of a lot more worthy a battle than Qualcomm vs Apple, which is almost the same situation.) The old XEROX machines were boring as they competed with IBM in the business space whereas DG and DEC were more focused on Science and Engineering. The XEROX Star was pretty cool, but not nearly as cool as History has recorded it to be (apparently because Steve Jobs, who later became an icon of sorts himself, once saw a demo and rushed to recreate it using microprocessors in his poorly implemented Lisa/Mac system). I developed on all of these machines (though I only used the Star to write documentation for my VMS internals code hahah) and these are MY opinions.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#42

Post by vaxman »

dmd wrote: post #12
Taniwha wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in my mainframe days (late 70s) we ran a large mainframe, the only one in the local uni - way slower than your phone, a couple of Mb of core, ran payroll and 30 terminals. We had a dedicated local engineer who had his own onsite office. In the south of NZ we were a really long long way away from his home office in the US, he was expected to be able to fix anything, and mostly he could. But one time the machine s…

> 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.

I think we need to put it in terms of smart watches now, soon smart rings.

Hope we remaining masters can stop the delusional tech bastards running around convinced they're a new and more powerful Steve Jobs (oblivious that his success came from leveraging microprocessors to put millions of formally educated tech people with families out of work in a disorderly manner by disrupting the market) from further inflating the public stock markets (again) and distorting energy capX over AI hype. AWernerS is clearly losing the battle against them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#43

Post by vaxman »

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.

This table will help you, but it stops way back in 2021 at 346,350 MIPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second

Looking forward to the Apple A18 Pro reported to be 4GHz x2 and 2GHz x2 +/- thermal conditions.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#44

Post by momojo »

neilv wrote: post #13

The latter half has a lot of criticism of allegedly boneheaded management (from the perspective of the writer and researchers they quote).

The author paints a very vivid picture of mismanagement, but I wish he had fortified that picture with some quotes or anecdotes. The "management" people remain this fuzzy, dark force throughout the essay.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#45

Post by bigstrat2003 »

gumby wrote: post #27
com wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

One of the interesting insights I've had recently (in my late 30s) is that young people always assume that the older generation is out of touch and can't see the obvious solutions to all of life's problems. But it seems to me now that the truth is rather different - the older generation often has the experience to understand why those solutions are not going to work, whereas the young don't yet have that hard-won experience (cause it takes time).

I myself have been (and still am tbh) fairly libertarian. But the older I get and the more I see, the more I start to understand that there are flaws in the idea. Not everyone is going to do the right thing (for various reasons), and sometimes you simply have to intervene because the cost of not doing so becomes too high. I do think that our government tends too much towards nanny-ism, but at the same time I kinda get why.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#46

Post by GarnetFloride »

I grew something very like that in a company once. That was a glorious time. I was working as tech support and began writing down the answers to problems I was solving with customers because I noticed multiple calls on the same subject and I wanted a cheatsheet, because while I liked solving problems, I only like doing it once. I repurposed my engineering schooling into technical writing. And I also made the whole team way more effective because I shared that.

Also I found areas where the product could be and needed to be improved and my manager went to bat for those changes and they made huge differences. 40% shorter support calls, 60% less calls, and a performance increase of 35x because I brought up things that looked like that would help customers.

It drives me nuts how management and engineering can't seem to relate to how customers actually use the product and actively refuse to want to learn. Not all companies, of course, but in most cases when I introduced a developer or engineer to a customer and they discussed or watched how the product was used, there's often a huge gap but at least a bridge was formed sometimes.

I am beginning to think that how a role is compensated can totally overwhelm what the company wants done. Sales people will make the sale promising the product can do something when it can't. Managers will do things that cut costs when a small increase will produce massive dividends.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#47

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jocoda wrote: post #39
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…

tangential ... without marketing (e.g. gmail I would hard disagree that there was no marketing. gmail had one of the first really successful guerilla marketing campaigns imo. Google made the initial phase by "invite only". By making it exclusive, a whole ecosystem developed around getting invites so that you could have that @gmail.com account. By the time of the official launch they had captured what could losely be…

I wouldn't say that word of mouth from satisfied users counts as marketing. Google didn't need to drum up interest, people did that by themselves. It was mind-blowing at the time to get a whole GB of storage space for email. People would've been banging down their doors with or without an invite-only system.

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#48

Post by microtherion »

the customer must be initiated into the technicians’ community of discourse,”6 complete with an understanding of how the machine worked, how to recognize the noises it made at the various stages of copying

I'm reminded of how an anthropology professor, under the name "Xerophonics" released an album "Copying Machine Music" consisting purely of sampled photocopiers

https://music.apple.com/us/album/copying-machine-music/60110...

Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

#49

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #36
gumby wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on a financial macro perspective, there's currently about 1.1 trillion dollars stored in bitcoin, which is a few days of global gdp You need to compare like to like. $2T of cryptocurrencies is about 2% of all the world’s stock exchanges (after the recent fall). Or compare it to total world fungible assets: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

that seems like the right kind of comparison, yeah, although it's surprising the world's stock exchanges aren't worth more.† the infographic article is excellent, though i guess now cryptocurrencies would be more like 15 squares instead of three 2% is far from insignificant! argentina's gdp is less than 1% of the world's—as are each of switzerland, taiwan, belgium, israel, south africa, pakistan, new zealand, nigeria…

an interesting additional data point is https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/bitcoin-market-data-exchang... — while i don't trust chainalysis in general i suspect that they are probably telling the truth when they say

> As of June 2020, roughly 18.6 million Bitcoin has been mined. (...) Another 20% hasn’t moved from its current set of addresses in five years or longer. We consider this lost Bitcoin.

which suggests that the amount of lost bitcoin is at most 20% rather than the 90% or 95% i was suggesting

also, in talking about its historical impacts, it seems like probably we really should mention ransomware and darknet markets for, mostly, illegal drugs

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