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jonjacky

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From the article:

"... Working a corporate job had enough drudgery to begin with, but the last year it has become more necessary than ever to have a place of accomplishment which is simple and fun. ... Having a project where I can directly use my skill on distinctly human tools is a breath of fresh air that has kept me sane and happy.

If you feel like me, I highly recommend thinking about how your tools and craft can be distilled so that other people can pick them up, use them and eventually modify them. Keep them distinctly human. Even before AI, us software developers loved to add complexity to solve problem like scale, "performance", and things the "user" would need. Build like you are the only user and most complexity will melt away. Write your tools to be fast for O(H), where H is human use only. The editor I write in is pure-lua and yet has zero latency despite asynchronously syntax highlighting the file. I've designed it to be able to load and edit million line files using only KiB of added memory. Sometimes problems seem harder than they really are. ..."

John Von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death by Steve Heims (1982) Out of print but libraries have it.

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (2005)

Weiner himself wrote some autobiographies, including Child Prodigy and I Am A Mathematician.

I wonder what a hobby OS would have looked like it if it assumed nothing, that is, as a thought experiment ...

There are some hobby OS projects that do this. The best known example is Terry Davis' TempleOS.

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

If you only want to please yourself, you can dispense with all that legacy stuff. You can stay busy and enjoy yourself in your own world. Some of the hobby OS listed here look like they might be standalone worlds:

https://github.com/jubalh/awesome-os

In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel The Idiot, about a naive Harvard student, her not-really-a-boyfriend Ivan, a math student, enthuses to her about Emacs. The book is set in 1995.

I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Particles accelerating in a cyclotron at sufficiently high energy reach relativistic speeds. You have to account for their relativistic mass increase to get the cyclotron to work. Figuring this out was a big issue in cyclotron design in the 1930s. The remedy is to strengthen the magnetic field near the outer edge of the cyclotron where particles move fastest, by adding coils there to carry more current. I don't recall what the energy is where this becomes necessary - it is certainly needed at tens of MeV.

Plutonium was first synthesized in a cyclotron by Lawrence's group at Berkeley. I don't know what energy they used so I don't know if they needed the extra coils, but they did know of the effect and must have considered it.

Also, U235 was separated at Oak Ridge using machines called Calutrons invented by Lawrence that might have encountered the same problem -- at least they must have considered it.

I haven't seen it mentioned here or in the obituaries, but Peter started the RISKS Digest in 1985 partly in response to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, "Star Wars") which proposed a space-based anti-ballistic missile system run autonomously by computers [1]. Another response was the formation of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilty (CPSR) [2]. Peter was an early member, and many early RISKS submissions were by CPSR members.

Peter's letter to readers about the creation of RISKS in Issue #1.01 [3] mentions SDI and CPSR (it's long, scroll down)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Professionals_for_Soc...

3. https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1.01.html

"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)

This is a remarkable, very unusual project. It looks well thought out and is surprisingly complete -- it even includes an end-to-end ML training and sampling program as an example!

Is there a writeup somewhere that explains more about the motivation and history for this project?

Starfleet Academy is some woke fever dream ...

This is entirely in keeping with the Star Trek tradition. It had a multiracial cast and female officers in 1966, when that was quite unusual in a TV show.

Rob Pike, one of the Unix developers, observed people turning away from their philosophy back in 2001:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

"What Unix does well isn’t what people want. ...

People prefer integrated environments and browsers. ...

Perhaps people don’t want to think about problem solving this way. Maybe Unix got it wrong. (Even within Unix, the tool approach is losing ground.)"

A newer book, from 2016, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/

An interesting revelation here is that, although ENIAC was not originally conceived as a stored program computer, it was quite early converted to one. They repurposed a lookup table intended to calculate functions to store instructions instead. Many of the well-known ENIAC calculations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, were programmed in this mode.

Tony Hoare has died 4 months ago

Mr. Hoare (yep not a Dr.)

Hoare's undergraduate degree from Oxford was in Literae Humaniores, nicknamed Greats - ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Latin, Ancient Greek, and philosophy. In the US, this course of study is usually called "Classics". According to Wikipedia, "It is an archetypal humanities course."

Hastings affected the wider politics of Europe, not just England. For centuries before Hastings, England had been involved with Scandinavia, especially Denmark and Norway. After Hastings it was totally entangled with France, pretty much forever.