albanread

People should zoom right out and think about the whole RISC-V project. When our phones have billions of transistors, are we seriously supposed to believe that RISC philosophy still matters. Personally I greatly prefer the user programmable 68000 family of processors. The marketing of RISC-V is perhaps the most impressive thing about it. Each to their own, I can see why giant SSD manufacturers want to use a license free design and share the cost of compiler development. Is there really anything else?

"Every M1 Mac .. due .. for .. refresh .. "

Great, I look forward to Apple sending me an M2 to put into the CPU socket, or will it be a download to reconfigure my M1 into an M2.

Back in the day I joined evening classes just to get access to the technical college library. Reading books was a thing then. I do see some value in erasing human history and starting again. We have been so comprehensively vile to each other it might be better to erase it all.

If anyone was serious about democracy they would give tax payers the option to select the services they are willing to pay towards. Tick the box to pay towards a new Aircraft Carrier, a new Hospital, Vaccines, Making viruses more deadly etc.

I think the message of They Live; is that our rulers complete lack of empathy for ordinary people means they might as well be aliens. Also I don't think it was a vision of the future; it was about society at the time.

If Microsoft were a person; they would be a rich, lucky, lazy, easily distracted person who takes zero pride in their work, content to leave inconsistent garbage littering a product used by hundreds of millions because they are just too bored by the whole thing to bother fixing it.

There was a short story where children were put behind a wall and brought up to believe that magic was real; at some point it started to work for them.

I think the concept has been explored quite widely.

Indicators might be that groups of physicists believe in new tiny particles and then discover them.

Depending on how powerful the effect is; it might have interesting implications.

Consider that despite all the odds we are still here as a species. For example I sometimes imagine that the world was destroyed by a global atomic war in the 1980s but since we all rejected that bleak reality - we have this current reality instead.

You are right and it is a useful thing to know.

There is a commercial license to help encourage the big well funded customers to pay for the tools they need to compile millions of lines of company confidential ADA.

And a license for only open source software; just in case students or hobbyists want to write their own robust open source rocket guidance system and share it on github.

Any chance the UK can get a refund then?

"Before the end of this decade, the F-35 Lightning will provide the ultimate punch of the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The F-35 is an Anglo-American joint effort, designed by the best and brightest in the two nations’ aircraft industries."

I can confirm for you; that there is no rational reason to assume the authors own MacBook is a new M1 system.

In contrast we have Americans, a people who would never cheat - and perhaps do not even understand cheating as a concept. It must be grand to live in such a country that has no need for laws, police, judges or prisons.

I agree we all learn by example; and by copying.

I remember in the 1970s people used to say that the Japanese could only copy the west; they couldn't create things of their own; their culture or even their different brains prevented them from original creativity.

That was obviously just a load of garbage; it was just a stage their economy was going through.

I think the article is light on historical context.

There are good reasons why catching up with other nations; especially ones that once oppressed you could be regarded as a completely ethical thing to do; by any means necessary; to safeguard your peoples future.

No one would be in any way surprised if Huawei had just said "we are forking Android and our fork will diverge over time; eventually becoming our own unique operating system."

Understanding why they didn't say that is perhaps the interesting thing.

As an alternative to ending free speech for everyone; perhaps users should have to pass a course on critical thinking; before being allowed to use twitter.

I think we would want to visit them; and that's the reason we hope they might like to visit us. And we hope there is some easy shortcut through space; that we might figure out in the next few centuries; so we can visit people while we are still human and still have this motivation.

The current iMac design is really great; there is nothing wrong with bezels on a desktop monitor, what harm do they do? The chin is a good place for the apple logo, it also raises the screen so you don't need a stupidly tall looking wobbly stand and it allows you to change the screen angle without touching the screen. The current iMac stand is very solid; and it almost squats on it; in an extremely stable way. The memory is simple to upgrade, it slides out from its own little door; and the curved shape overall is very stylish in a slightly retro way. The ports on the back are the only pain you need to add a hub. The mock ups of the new iMac that have been shown look like a rather boring monitor.

Try taking a picture of a fast moving object in the sky with your phones camera, it is quite hard to do; even at an air-show where they all line up for you.

I seem to remember that when programming this OS; your app was responsible for almost everything; including things like animating the close button when you detected a user clicked on it; and also the slightest mistake you made would crash the entire computer. So the simplicity was only surface deep.

I think the author underestimates how much this changes things. Assuming we know for certain there is no free will; the way we treat bad behaviour should change - people who behave badly should simply be retrained. There should be no punishment; there is no concept of individual guilt or personal accountability; there are only behaviours that need to be modified to conform with a social norm. There should be no execution of killers; no prison terms, people would be held for as long as it takes (potentially indefinitely) to change unacceptable behaviour. A lot of popular religious concepts also fly out of the window.

It really was the original RISC in a personal computer; you could actually buy one (especially in the UK); and run it at home; the others were things that lived in computer rooms and drove green screen terminals.

"The entire reason palaeontologists make that split is because of a catastrophe that struck 66 million years ago."

True; also the reason we have human people reading websites is partly due to the same catastrophe.

I miss it too; Pascal (Delphi) used to be one of my favourite compilers; until Dennis in tech support refused to reset my version 10.2 license registration limit the other day.. Time to move on I guess.

I think we search for possible explanations of our own very good luck that you outlined above; and partly this search is due to the way our own brains work; we believe there must be a reason; so make up stories.

I agree; and this is why there is not one jot of extra risk in exploring and testing; our simulation could be shut down at any time for some incomprehensible and arbitrary reason; so lets just enjoy reality while it is still there. For all we know; the last fifty million years took place while Sally was away on a long school trip; and when she gets back she is going to be gutted that a disaster scenario killed all her nice dinosaurs; and press quit.

Or that Zeus had sometimes turned up and spoken to them.

This seems worse than classic religion; we seek not just to believe the universe is a creative thought in Gods mind; we also plan to discover how Gods mind actually works; and look for flaws in creation. lets wish ourselves luck with that.

I also thought about Dylan when I heard of this racket direction; and took another look at it; Open Dylan has tremendous documentation (a very enjoyable read.) The compiler has been updated relatively recently to use LLVM; the command line programs run fine on Linux; I ran it on WSL2 and it seemed to work well there; it is a very nice and interesting language.

I suspect luck, timing and fashion have a lot to do with language adoption; perhaps more than technical merit.

This language should be called `Visual Difficult` since it seems to offload memory management to the human; while the compiler aggressively critiques them. It is safe though; as in fool proof.

I am staying subscribed; I don't have the spare time to watch all of their shows; so getting bored of it; is not a problem; I like that they don't have adverts; and you can just play what you choose when you do have the time.

This morning I got a letter from the BBC thanking me for paying my mandatory license fee; for owning a `colour television`.

Netflix is good value; because I actually watch it; and the fact that people can legally cancel the subscription should keep them on their toes.

Not that long ago there were only one or two channels of government propaganda to watch; that displayed a commercial test card transmission through most of the day. Life is good.