leoc

To the extent that they are connected it's most likely through Planner: see the OP and the other HOPL2 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766 paper "The Evolution of Lisp" https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf [extended version]. (They also both show up in Donald MacKenzie's Mechanising Proof https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262632959/mechanizing-proof/ https://archive.org/details/mechanizingproof0000mack/ though it doesn't really connect them.)

They have a proven unwillingness over many years to do what it takes to make Steam voice chat work reliably. It seems that their objective with Steam Chat is to do just enough to ensure that all Steam item-trading communication remains on their platform (for the worthy reason of controlling scamming).

It's probably not so bad. (I am not an expert on anything.) The big blocker is probably a roughly single-order-of-magnitude decrease in the cost per MiB of VRAM. (That obviously goes out the window if the LLM frontier people find, in the nearish future, new ways to do more with more: to significantly push up the threshold of diminishing returns from more VRAM or other resources. But that doesn't seem to be waiting to happen.) That's not clearly unachievable, especially given that ASML has apparently already made significant efficiency gains recently while there's no shortage of demand to justify R&D right now. Many customers are also likely to increase their hardware budgets: the kind of organisation that used to pay big money for Sun workstations is likely to consider spending that kind of money again if it saves them several hundred dollars a month in LLM plans.

Here's a pretty good video about a somewhat similar challenge, that of proving your citizenship in ancient Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTt0qwncDXI .

Right. It's probably important to distinguish what the hardware manufacturers' incentives are when their supply is constrained and when it isn't. (I am not an expert on anything.) As long as supply is strongly constrained they're naturally going to sell to the highest bidders, which are the big LLM SaaS players. If and when supply is no longer constrained, though, things will look very different:

1) The LLM SaaS companies are a form of vertical disintegration for the hardware providers, a middleman covering costs and taking profits out of the money that comes from customers to the hardware providers. That changes somewhat if there are no longer good models available for local use at no cost to the hardware guys, but only somewhat

2) The LLM SaaS companies are efficient users of their hardware resources. While supply is constrained this helps to make them top bidders and so attractive customers for the hardware manufacturers. When supply is not constrained this should reverse. Which is the more attractive class of customer to a hardware maker: the company full of people with higher degrees who spend their whole working day fighting to pare back resource usage, or the guy who leaves his laptop idle about 18 hours per day on average?

It's notable that nVidia, for instance, has continued to put significant emphasis on AI compact desktops and laptops. And while no doubt that's partly in the service of better developer relations and good PR in general, it's probably also nVidia eyeing the exit, and preparing for a future transition from selling shovels to the army to selling shovels at Walmart. But of course the future isn't clear and obvious. If the hardware makers, maybe the RAM guys in particular, turn out to have underbuilt future capacity starting in the present then we could be stuck in constrained supply for quite a long time. (Futher) government action could affect things etc. etc. And if the frontier labs soon find new ways to use still larger amounts of memory, GPU capacity etc. that isn't butting up against diminishing returns then they'll likely remain kings for some time, though that does not seem probable now.

Unfortunately there seems to be a lack of easily-accessible information about the current or expected future state of TX-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-0 , a computer of great importance and previously the crown jewel of the Boston Computer Museum, where TX-0 was restored and turned back on in 1983 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDkEjjDumUY&t=229s https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/TCMR-V08.pdf . Now parts of it are in the CHM museum catalogue https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/search-c... , and ???

We're talking mostly about companies which push hardware in the door, here, such as the hyperscaler types which the CHERI people have been showing slide decks to.

The "A Distribution of One" argument seems less convincing than the "The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal" one. I'm no expert, but if you've ever read some of the computing press from the time you'll know that custom software was still rather popular well into the '80s: and unfortunately custom software written for in-house use by a non-software company was the classic venue for all the Software Crisis war stories, which probably has a lot more to do with why it went out of fashion than progammer wages on their own. Whether the main problem was the difficulty of extracting requirements from users and management or the lack of sufficiently good software developers, maybe the arrival of LLM software cannons will be what it takes to fix it, but a hae ma doots.

At the manufacturing level it largely isn't, no, though as others have pointed out Apple at least still has the ability to explore options outside China. But Apple represents a lack of vertical integration for its big Chinese suppliers like Foxconn, an American middleman taking a big slice of the revenues and profits which come from the customer. One thing to note is that Android isn't all that different, as phone makers still have to tithe to Google.

One factor (mentioned at https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3mqubnh... for instance) is Western distrust of the Chinese government and the regulatory barriers erected from both sides. TikTok's probably a good case study. There was a conspicuous lack of Chinese software companies having success in the Western consumer market before TikTok. Building TikTok involved creating a new product aimed at RoW which was separate from its original Chinese model, Douyin. And then after TikTok Western success was still elusive, to some extent, as the US government snatched away Bytedance's toy.

Though even beyond tech and other politically sensitive areas China's generally been pretty slow at generating RoW-consumer-facing products and brands. There's also the slightly remarkable fact that historically (and even to some extent still today) GUIs have been extremely, mysteriously hard for large companies worldwide to do well. The main exception have tended to either be called "Apple" or have dedicated themselves to copying Apple's homework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221 .

(I am not an expert on anyhthing.)

Things like the Dessau Bauhaus and the German Pavilion in Barcelona were built in the 1920s. Post-war Modernism was a bit of a second wind.

Most likely not: “The Little Book of …” has been a publisher’s standby since the nineteenth century (at least).

But no-one's claiming that the techniques which have been widely deployed already are bad or unworthy or haven't made a positive difference. (Certainly I'm not!) However it's evident that they haven't made a sufficient difference (and while they have an overall low cost compared to other approaches all that effort to patch and make do isn't free either).

Right: unfortunately it really is a bit much to dismiss CHERI as a no-hope effort to boil the seas if the alternative plan is to rewrite everything in formally verified C (even if you'd also try to move some of it into GC languages instead).

It's a lot better than things apparently used to be, but what CHERI really needs to develop a grassroots is a board that runs CheriBSD ( https://www.cheribsd.org/ ) and is actually available for a few hundred US dollars cash down, not a board of which you can apply to, maybe, have a single unit eventually allocated to you if you are deemed worthy. Even taking for granted that they only have a small supply which has to be allocated on a non-commercial basis for now, they should be beating down the doors of guys like Jeff Geerling and Wendell Wilson from Level1Techs and thrusting eval boards in their hands, not sitting on their throne waiting to hear entreaties.

Right: it's not clear whether the availability of some $300 US CHERI SBCs would be enough to carry CHERI to glory, but it would obviously generate a significant pop of awareness, support and grassroots activity. For their part the antis could then transition seamlessly from "nobody wants it lol" to "all these enthusiasts are so annoying and out of touch with reality lol" as is traditional. Instead, AFAICT, the CHERI leadership seems to be convinced that the next step is to present the business case for CHERI to people at or just below CxO level https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJhS2i7KVtI . Imagine how far Rust (or, earlier and further afield, Linux) adoption would have got if it had relied solely on having an academic-led consortium present a business case to CxOs, instead of being pushed along by internal pressure from mid-level technical staff who had used it themselves and were crazy about it.

Oh no, not again.

No Judge Dredd (which dates back to 1977) or anything else from 2000 AD?

Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.

See also the late Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s... , with a 2017 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350059 .

Lucas Reilly's Mental Floss article on Clair Patterson https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... is a much better piece. I'll also recycle https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo 's old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 on this article from its 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 (again, what follows is his or her work not mine!):

Two beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...

So "inference scaling is required to scale capabilities" doesn't mean that we're reaching the top of the S-curve in intelligence.

On its own it wouldn't. But that article came before the later article https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents which adds the claim that inference (along with everything else being employed at present) is scaling poorly with increasing task lengths. Now maybe the December 2025 claim is wrong, or maybe things will change soon, but the February 2025 article surely doesn't establish either of those.

The very first substantial order for the Digital PDP-1 was for use in ITT’s torn-tape messaging operation! https://www.eejournal.com/article/gordon-bell-1934-2024-gran...

Things like https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents and https://www.tobyord.com/writing/mostly-inference-scaling seem in line with other accounts like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR20FWCCjAs ?

Oh, I have no expectation that Page or Brin would do something like this, let alone do it openly. But Page did seem to care about Books access at one point, and I find the image of him secretly leaking the Google Books corpus amusing.

Just do it and be legends, Larry. ;)

I missed the free potatoes in Berlin https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/4000-tons-o... , and now I'm missing this? Once again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618898 all the action eludes me.

I'm not quite sure what the expectations of semi-privacy are here, but he's talked about it on the TC Discord, in the #development-branch-feedback channel (a search for 'unprofessional' should find it).

The Turing Complete dev was pretty unhappy with them and ended up leaving again despite having been accepted and making it onto the GOG store.

There's an odd wrinkle in the early history of BASIC. From a 2002 interview with Thomas Kurtz https://exhibits.library.dartmouth.edu/s/AdventuresomeSpirit... (direct link to PDF: https://exhibits.library.dartmouth.edu/files/original/961732... )—the summer in question is 1959:

Just one little story…I remember…The name Bob Hargraves [Robert F. “Bob” Hargraves, Jr. ʻ61] should come up somewhere in this business because he was the class I think of 1962, but he was a physics major at Dartmouth. He went on to get a Ph.D. in physics. He came back to Dartmouth as associate director of the computer center many years later. At any rate, he was one of those that worked on the LGP-30 that first summer and he devised a simple higher-level language program. By todayʼs standards, it was pretty crude, but it was FORTRAN-like, you know – sort of – in just six weeks.

The HOPL BASIC paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800025.1198404 has more about this language:

One student, without any prior background in computing, prepared a simple higher level language and language processor he called DART (Hargraves, 1959). Obviously influenced by FORTRAN, but wishing to avoid scanning general arithmetic expressions, he required parentheses around all binary operators and their operands. Hardly earth-shaking, but one conclusion was inescapable: a good undergraduate student could achieve what at that time was a professional-level accomplishment, namely, the design and writing of a compiler. This observation was not overlooked.

But at the same time Edgar T. Irons https://dl.acm.org/profile/81100268091/ is in town working on ALGOL syntax, and when Kemeny and Kurtz grab the wheel back they steer language development at Dartmouth towards more syntax (Kurtz assigns four undergraduates including Hargraves to implement ALGOL 58, resulting in ALGOL 30) and more lumpen, assembler-like semantics (Kemeny's DOPE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Oversimplified_Progr... in particular is a pseudo-assembler.) It was definitely DART that got Kurtz interested in implementing ALGOL on the LGP-30 in the first place though—see pp. 1-2 of the ALGOL 30 report ("ALGOL for the LGP-30"): https://people.csail.mit.edu/garland/publications/Reprints/1... : "It should be mentioned that our becoming involved in this project was a direct result of Hargraves’ having devised a complete language system (DART) during the summer of 1959."

But back to the point ... an interpreter (surely) for a high-level programming language relying on explicit parentheses, written in Dartmouth, in the summer of 1959? How much did Hargraves know about at that point about the IBM 704 implementation of LISP, finished by March 1959? To be sure, I doubt that DART was anything much like a full implementation of even LISP 1, but just the idea of doing a simple interpreter for FORTRAN-like nested mathematical expressions by requiring parentheses everywhere seems familiar. (McCarthy himself was still trying to do LISP as a FORTRAN extension as late as mid-1958 https://interlisp.org/history/bibliography/gi8mchkf .)

The story about cheating at Scrabble bears a fairly close resemblance to the episode in the Tintin comic Flight 714 https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Flight_714 in which megarich industrialist Laszlo Carreidas cheats at Battleship while flying on his private jet https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1i6cv... . If the Scrabble incident really did happen then it's uncomfortable how close it comes to a fictional detail deliberately written to make Carreidas look unscrupulous and a bit ridiculous.