hnthrowaway0315

I have been shielding my 6 years old son from electronics, except 40 minutes of TV twice a week. I have no idea how to grow his patience and perseverance, though. He is like me, who doesn't have a lot of patience to begin with, so I can't really guide him through some of the situations. We have been taking him to some activities as well as reading to him but nothing really sticks.

I just hope eventually he loves reading and learns in a more traditional way instead of from laptops and pads.

I have been wondering how to train my 6-year old son and myself to increase my attention span.

Some rules are obvious -- cutoff mobiles and pads completely (he doesn't have access to them so it's for me), sit in the library and study from books (I believe this is even possible for programming topics as I can write on paper). Basically, cutting off everything electronics definitely helps -- even putting my phone in the bag improves productivity significantly.

But the problem is, my son is unruly. If I put him in the library, most likely he runs around and messes things up, which ends up we leave early without doing anything.

Exactly. I'd argue that all those programming Gods and Gods because they went through that period. Whatever didn't kill them made them stronger. We should replicate that experience by deliberately writing in low level C and assembly for a few years.

I think it's just bad timing.

Yep I wouldn't be surprised. I think Meta had seed $$ from some intelligence-backed VC, too?

I think most ordinary people would say No, but most of us do not have a say in any important things. They put up the facade of voting while all the important stuffs are decided within the circles.

I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle -- they still tolerate us because they need us to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need, but once AI and robots keep up, they can probably get rid of 90% of us.

I used to read a lot about Michele Sindona who was supposed to be connected to the Mafia and the intelligence community. His currency trading firm was one of the first to trade the Eurodollar contracts back in the 60s, IIRC.

I think intelligence and finance really go hand in hand. It makes so much sense -- you see, the intelligence community really hates the congress or whatever to snoop around its operations before approving the budget -- wouldn't it a lot easier to just earn your own $$? And with all the information the intelligence agencies control, it is almost trivial to make quick money in finance. Last but not the least, wouldn't banker be the perfect cover for spies? They wear nice suites, too.

How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.

And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.

I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s

I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.

And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.

The shadow world has its own rules and morals.

Maybe this is part of the shadow money. CIA has been working with business people since the beginning of Cold War and I wouldn't be surprised that they have deep roots in the financial world -- after all both Intelligence and Finance need globalization.

I'm not into them either. I'm more into second-handed bookstores where I might get some pleasant surprises once for a while.

It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.

I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!

I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.

After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.

Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.

I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.

I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.

That's for sure.

Thanks! This is so interesting.

It so happens that on the 80386 chip of that era, the fastest way to get from V86-mode into kernel mode was to execute an invalid instruction! Consequently, Windows/386 used an invalid instruction as its syscall trap.

I also read this part but I wonder how did they benchmark back then?

Schulman’s Unauthorized Windows 95 describes a particularly unhinged one: in the hypervisor of Windows/386 (and subsequently 386 Enhanced Mode in Windows 3.0 and 3.1, as well as the only available mode in 3.11, 95, 98, and Me), a driver could dynamically register upcalls for real-mode guests (within reason), all without either exerting control over the guest’s memory map or forcing the guest to do anything except a simple CALL to access it. The secret was that all the far addresses returned by the registration API referred to the exact same byte in memory, a protected-mode-only instruction whose attempted execution would trap into the hypervisor, and the trap handler would determine which upcall was meant by which of the redundant encodings was used.

And if that’s not unhinged enough for you: the boot code tried to locate the chosen instruction inside the firmware ROM, because that will have to be mapped into the guest memory map anyway. It did have a fallback if that did not work out, but it usually succeeded. This time, the secret (the knowledge of which will not make you happier, this is your final warning) is that the instruction chosen was ARPL, and the encoding of ARPL r/m16, AX starts with 63 hex, also known as the ASCII code of the lowercase letter C. The absolute madmen put the upcall entry point inside the BIOS copyright string.

(Incidentally, the ARPL instruction, “adjust requested privilege level”, is very specific to the 286’s weird don’t-call-it-capability-based segmented architecture... But it’s has a certain cunning to it, like CPU-enforced __user tagging of unprivileged addresses at runtime.)

Also the hardware and software are so complicated, that probably no single person on this earth can carry any 64-bit CPU into his brain -- unlike back in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, good programmers NEED to do that. I think the year 2,000 was sort of the thresh line.

Thanks Joe. Interesting knowledge. I managed to find a FAQ and was surprised that it made to the year 1999.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110708212436/http://www.ctosfa...

Looks like this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operat...

Thanks for sharing, never heard about it before. What was kernel programming back then? Briefly checked the wikipedia and looks like CTOS was kinda big in the government space back in the 80s.

I have always had this itch to work on some real life serious system programming projects, with the most recent wave OS kernels. I completed the MIT xv6 labs (a very small repo) and did a few Linux device driver labs (very large repo and it was the first time I experienced compilation time > 5 minutes).

I got burnt out after a while, so that kinda wrapped up my experience working on large repos.

I have used something like that (mentioned in my original reply ^). It was even worse -- there were about 3-4 plugins available.

Basically that company (a well known social media company, not FB) tried to implement everything on their own. Infra is their own (kinda makes sense because it is so huge), IDE is their own, communication is their own (which has an interesting feature that if someone screen shares an internal doc, other people can click a link to access that doc, too, very useful).

I was very jealous about their tooling team (that's what I call real programming), but nevermind I quit after a few months due to some unrelated reason.

OK, this was probable me telling other people I have never worked in a large repo without telling other people that...

I can't imagine people enjoying web based IDEs. I used to work for a company that has everything made internally, including IDE -- they used the same method OP described -- using VSCode on web. The experience is horrible.

I guess maybe it was fancy back in mid 2010s, but my experience was a couple of years ago.

SWEs do feel the pain, too. Not everyone has a 200K+ gig. Especially for a big family.

The United States is simply an imaginary entity. Some people have been winning for quite a while.

But they are so profitable, and we need them to track people around and create a police state efficiently. Ah let's keep them but just fine them as well for the show.

Yeah, but you still have the choice to stay in the trench. People like Carmack/Cutler do that. But I agree the majority just go high management.

AI can also do alignment and pull from its vast training dataset for design and "thinking" -- because 99% of the problems in this world were already solved, multiple times, maybe not in the exactly same format, but in a very similar format.

I also see that in the future humans will adapt to AI, instead of the opposite. Why? Because it's a lot easier for humans to adapt to AI, than the opposite. It's already happening -- why do companies ask their employees to write complete documentation for AI to consume? This is what I called "Adaption".

I can also imagine that in the near future, when employment plummets, when basic income become general, when governments build massive condos for social housing -- everything new will be required to adapt to AI. The roads, the buildings, everything physical is going to be built with ease-of-navigation by AI in consideration. We don't need a Gen AI -- that is too expensive and too long term for the Capitalist class to consider. We only need a bunch of AI agents and robots coordinated in an environment that is friendly to them.