[FRIAM] naive question

Sat Oct 22 13:30:21 EDT 2022

On 10/21/22 5:02 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> As for "NeXT machine's software RIP", Rick Rashid, who was central in 
> the development of that software, was my office neighbor.  He left to 
> take a position at Microsoft as VP of Research.  I wonder if the 
> software is RIPing.

So many (technical) careers seem to have been "ended" (lost) by getting 
"promoted" into the big boys' management pastures (Microsoft, Google, 
Apple, etc) over the decades.   I can't list all the promising tech 
people I have known who ended up lost in the upper echelons of those 
companies.   I wonder if the work coming out of those 
behemoth/leviathans is *because of* this or *in spite of this*?

While it was not central to my core mission (it was to peripheral ones 
around developing distributed user interfaces) of RIPing, the promise of 
PS as a full featured (if ideosyncratic) language in NeWS and NextStep 
was awe-some at the time.   Watching all that defer/failover to Java and 
then (painfully) JavaScript was like watching a long slow 1000 car 
accident on a black-iced 8 lane freeway.

By some measure, "nobody got hurt" however... and the kinds of tools 
*living* on/within the Web these days vindicates any idea that these are 
not viable solutions (as awkward and misbegotten as they may seem up 
against their more ?elegant? predecessors).

I don't have the focus (I've tried) to take up Owen's AgentScript or the 
larger RedFish Acequia Architecture which addresses (once again) the 
same issues (and more)...

My copy of Glenn Reid's 1990 Thinking in PostScript 
<https://w3-o.cs.hm.edu/users/ruckert/public_html/compiler/ThinkingInPostScript.pdf> 
sat on my shelf for two decades singing a siren song that wasn't ever 
quite strong enough for me to give it my full attention for the few 
weeks/months I believe it deserved.

Someday (if humanity survives another century, or interstellar visitors 
bother to crack our rusty harddrives) this will all be as much fun as 
the vestigal (aka "junk") DNA we started finding when we started 
ubiquitous DNA/RNA sequencing.  It must all be "good for something"? 
Right?  Clearly was at one time!

Fascinating that anyone (besides me) is even discussing such things 30 
years later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946

As glen has put it before "old man's stories... <sigh>"

Speaking of "old men", Mikhail Kalishnakov 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalashnikov> was probably 
reminiscing on like this right up until his death in 2013 when he moved 
on to the giant soviet wheatfield pasture in the sky-steppe.   I'm 
pretty sure plenty of kids in schools and shopping malls are still being 
mowed down by his innovations as well as rival warlord gangs (and 
starving refugees) in the third world, no matter how much the likes of 
Western Monopolistic companies like Browning (Official weapon of Utah 
btw) or Armalite (nod to Vietnam Vets itchy trigger fingers cum 
insurrectionists) try to out-compete them in that market. You just can't 
beat "free" and "ubiquitous"?

An interesting article on Open Source design and Path Dependent Lockin: 
https://www.wired.com/2007/06/open-source-ak4/ and a more technical 
paper on the global market for Assault Rifles: 
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/266561468141574815/pdf/wps4202.pdf
<https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/266561468141574815/pdf/wps4202.pdf>

Meanwhile, trivial Internet Research discovered that Glenn Reid has put 
*himself* into a rich (but mundane?) pasture designing/marketing 
Marathon <https://glennreid.com/>, an IoT washer-dryer appliance!   I 
wonder if it has a PostScript interpreter embedded in it and is building 
a globe-spanning distributed AI written in PS and spying on humans from 
the laundry room?

</careening tangents>

>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:08 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>     FWIW,  I dipped into the higher levels of real-time-systems
>     development
>     several times in my career.  The earliest being a control system
>     (circa
>     1981) for the LANL Proton Storage Ring where one naturally can't
>     afford
>     anything *but* failsafe implementations, etc. The stakes are just too
>     'ffing high and the coupling to electrooptomechanical systems quite
>     intimate.
>
>     The "digital" components of such systems might have had the
>     opportunity
>     to ignore timing issues and simply "execute the same steps"
>     regardless
>     of timing.  But in fact many software-driven (sub)systems represented
>     time-critical processes and sometimes were up agains the timing
>     limits
>     of the analog components which had no leeway in their "execution".
>
>     There are all kinds of analogies in federated (distributed)
>     simulation
>     environments which Glen (and others here) probably know much
>     better than
>     I, where different "clocks" matter, and different levels of
>     synchronization and reproducibility are in play.   The Postscript
>     interpreters, printers, and film recorders were also pseudo real-time
>     systems since some of the timing components were in fact software
>     controlled (for example, the film recorders were "stroke" devices
>     with
>     software driving D-A converters to "sweep" out vectors and "clip" the
>     on/off of the beam with appropriate analog component
>     delays/biases/gains
>     needing to be calibrated for.   Fortunately failures in this step did
>     not (usually) damage anyone or risk anyone's health and safety
>     (like the
>     beam in the PSR did).
>
>     Regarding identity and equivalence, I prefer the phrase: "close
>     enough
>     for who it's for"...
>
>
>     On 10/21/22 11:18 AM, glen wrote:
>     > Ha! If we're going to argue about words, then let's stick with the
>     > word "identity" and skip the "metaphor" nonsense. You and Frank
>     seem
>     > to be using the word in a weird way. Identity means "the exact same
>     > particular thing over any differencing available" or somesuch. I
>     mean,
>     > it's used that way in phrases like "identity theft" as well as
>     > mathematical identity. It's equivalence sets all the way down. I
>     just
>     > can't imagine any working computationalist would ever say anything
>     > like "executed identically" unless ... well ... the exact same
>     > process, with the exact same steps, happened.
>     >
>     > I suppose there are deep philosophical intuitions pried at by the
>     > words "emulation" versus "simulation". And one can argue (again
>     with
>     > help from Christian List) about whether there exist fully closed
>     > ontological walls like we try to create with things like Jails,
>     > HyperV, Docker, VM's like Java's, etc. But "execute identically"
>     is a
>     > phrase that would only be used by someone who worked *way* above
>     such
>     > levels (assuming levels even exist at all). It's a bit like
>     talking to
>     > the kids programming websites these days, with access to
>     infinite disk
>     > space, infinite memory, steeped in continuous delivery, etc. [⛧]
>     >
>     > Layers of abstraction are fine. Use 'em when you need 'em. But we
>     > shouldn't posture by invoking things like "instruction sets" and
>     > "execute identically" in the same breath. (Not that you did that
>     ...
>     > just sayin'.)
>     >
>     >
>     > [⛧] Rant: This is a good talk
>     > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s>. But I get super
>     > irritated when people use *toy* code in their rhetoric and leave
>     large
>     > scale deployment as an exercise for the reader. Yeah, fine. The
>     REPL
>     > is cool and all. But when my simulation takes a fvcking WEEK to
>     > execute, it's difficult to sympathize. I've recently been playing
>     > around with VSCodium, which is pretty cool. But whatever, man. I
>     still
>     > have to upload the code somewhere and execute it. Get off my lawn!
>     >
>     > On 10/21/22 09:24, Steve Smith wrote:
>     >>
>     >> As a counter-example,  we ran film recorders whose "guts" were
>     built
>     >> by Ed Fredkin's Information International company and were
>     built to
>     >> the spec of Dec PDP-11 (I think 11?) and it was anecdotally agreed
>     >> among the user community (of a few thousand delivered units in the
>     >> world?) that these PDP-clones *never* failed to execute the code
>     >> identically to the machines they were patterned after.   I don't
>     >> remember the details of implementation of these 70's era hardware
>     >> designs, but I understood that they III designed their own PCBs
>     but
>     >> (obviously?) used the same CPU chips... I don't know about all the
>     >> other support components... A likely answer to this pondering
>     is that
>     >> these machines did not run a general purpose OS and the III
>     >> software/system people probably made up for any differences in
>     >> Software/Timing/Error Handling?
>     >>
>     >> If Owen is listening in here, I think he was there for more than a
>     >> little of this from inside Apple/Sun?
>     >>
>     >> - Steve
>     >>
>     >> PS.   To concede/confront glen's sentiment that: " 'Metaphor'
>     is an
>     >> evil word, used only by manipulators and gaslighters",   I would
>     >> offer that the use of *conceptual metaphor*  is to thinking as
>     noise
>     >> is to simulated annealing, and his point about "tighter or looser
>     >> equivalence" might well be the best argument *for* the use of
>     >> metaphorical thinking?  I can't believe I'm stirring/kicking
>     this can
>     >> of worm-hornets down the street again...
>     >>
>     >
>
>     -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>     FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>     Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
>     https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>     to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>     FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>     archives:  5/2017 thru present
>     https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>       1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoomhttps://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru presenthttps://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>    1/2003 thru 6/2021http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20221022/ff53028e/attachment.html>