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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/21/22 6:50 PM, Marcus Daniels
wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:8FA9F28D-DEF2-4BE8-AE29-5ACAD01104A4@snoutfarm.com">
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Ok, I don’t normally like celebrity stories, but that is neat.<br>
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<p>Then you had to have *hated* my riff on Glenn Reid and Mikhail
Kalishnikov!</p>
<p>On another irritating tangent:</p>
<p>If Mikhail Kalishnakov, Sam Colt, and John Browning can flood the
world with "peacemakers" and "equalizers" so amazing that <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting">one
man in a Vegas Strip Hotel </a>could take out 60 people and
wound over 400 in just a few minutes, surely something "better"
(more humane?) can be done with this kind of
proto-self-replicating tech?</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.academia.edu/88948574/Open_source_decarbonization_for_a_sustainable_world?email_work_card=view-paper"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.academia.edu/88948574/Open_source_decarbonization_for_a_sustainable_world?email_work_card=view-paper</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Pearce (not *the* Pearce) is a fan of RepRap
self-replicating printers among other things... <br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Society"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Society</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some here may have noted, of course, that the most "humane" thing
humanity can do for/to itself is get a good collapse going ASAP
while others (Musk) consider it antithetical to their personal
vision of a vibrant future of humanity (without regard to the rest
of life in the Solar System?).</p>
<p>I think ?Glen? has referenced the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.effectivealtruism.org/">Effective Altruist</a>
movement before... I find them paradoxically well-intentioned and
at-risk of helping us optimize exactly the wrong thing(s)... one
of the (many?) risks of technophilic/hyper-intellectual approaches
to life, the universe and everything... Where is Douglas Adams
when we need him (RIP 2001)? We will have to settle for the
reflective insights of <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://xkcd.com/2688/">Russel Munroe</a>, I suppose
(tribute to Lee Smolin?)<br>
</p>
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cite="mid:8FA9F28D-DEF2-4BE8-AE29-5ACAD01104A4@snoutfarm.com">
<div dir="ltr"><br>
<blockquote type="cite">On Oct 21, 2022, at 4:03 PM, Frank
Wimberly <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:wimberly3@gmail.com"><wimberly3@gmail.com></a> wrote:<br>
<br>
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</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="auto">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.<br>
<br>
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">---<br>
Frank C. Wimberly<br>
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>
Santa Fe, NM 87505<br>
<br>
505 670-9918<br>
Santa Fe, NM</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:08
PM Steve Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
FWIW, I dipped into the higher levels of
real-time-systems development <br>
several times in my career. The earliest being a control
system (circa <br>
1981) for the LANL Proton Storage Ring where one naturally
can't afford <br>
anything *but* failsafe implementations, etc. The stakes
are just too <br>
'ffing high and the coupling to electrooptomechanical
systems quite <br>
intimate.<br>
<br>
The "digital" components of such systems might have had
the opportunity <br>
to ignore timing issues and simply "execute the same
steps" regardless <br>
of timing. But in fact many software-driven (sub)systems
represented <br>
time-critical processes and sometimes were up agains the
timing limits <br>
of the analog components which had no leeway in their
"execution".<br>
<br>
There are all kinds of analogies in federated
(distributed) simulation <br>
environments which Glen (and others here) probably know
much better than <br>
I, where different "clocks" matter, and different levels
of <br>
synchronization and reproducibility are in play. The
Postscript <br>
interpreters, printers, and film recorders were also
pseudo real-time <br>
systems since some of the timing components were in fact
software <br>
controlled (for example, the film recorders were "stroke"
devices with <br>
software driving D-A converters to "sweep" out vectors and
"clip" the <br>
on/off of the beam with appropriate analog component
delays/biases/gains <br>
needing to be calibrated for. Fortunately failures in
this step did <br>
not (usually) damage anyone or risk anyone's health and
safety (like the <br>
beam in the PSR did).<br>
<br>
Regarding identity and equivalence, I prefer the phrase:
"close enough <br>
for who it's for"...<br>
<br>
<br>
On 10/21/22 11:18 AM, glen wrote:<br>
> Ha! If we're going to argue about words, then let's
stick with the <br>
> word "identity" and skip the "metaphor" nonsense. You
and Frank seem <br>
> to be using the word in a weird way. Identity means
"the exact same <br>
> particular thing over any differencing available" or
somesuch. I mean, <br>
> it's used that way in phrases like "identity theft"
as well as <br>
> mathematical identity. It's equivalence sets all the
way down. I just <br>
> can't imagine any working computationalist would ever
say anything <br>
> like "executed identically" unless ... well ... the
exact same <br>
> process, with the exact same steps, happened.<br>
><br>
> I suppose there are deep philosophical intuitions
pried at by the <br>
> words "emulation" versus "simulation". And one can
argue (again with <br>
> help from Christian List) about whether there exist
fully closed <br>
> ontological walls like we try to create with things
like Jails, <br>
> HyperV, Docker, VM's like Java's, etc. But "execute
identically" is a <br>
> phrase that would only be used by someone who worked
*way* above such <br>
> levels (assuming levels even exist at all). It's a
bit like talking to <br>
> the kids programming websites these days, with access
to infinite disk <br>
> space, infinite memory, steeped in continuous
delivery, etc. [⛧]<br>
><br>
> Layers of abstraction are fine. Use 'em when you need
'em. But we <br>
> shouldn't posture by invoking things like
"instruction sets" and <br>
> "execute identically" in the same breath. (Not that
you did that ... <br>
> just sayin'.)<br>
><br>
><br>
> [⛧] Rant: This is a good talk <br>
> <<a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s</a>>.
But I get super
<br>
> irritated when people use *toy* code in their
rhetoric and leave large <br>
> scale deployment as an exercise for the reader. Yeah,
fine. The REPL <br>
> is cool and all. But when my simulation takes a
fvcking WEEK to <br>
> execute, it's difficult to sympathize. I've recently
been playing <br>
> around with VSCodium, which is pretty cool. But
whatever, man. I still <br>
> have to upload the code somewhere and execute it. Get
off my lawn!<br>
><br>
> On 10/21/22 09:24, Steve Smith wrote:<br>
>><br>
>> As a counter-example, we ran film recorders
whose "guts" were built <br>
>> by Ed Fredkin's Information International company
and were built to <br>
>> the spec of Dec PDP-11 (I think 11?) and it was
anecdotally agreed <br>
>> among the user community (of a few thousand
delivered units in the <br>
>> world?) that these PDP-clones *never* failed to
execute the code <br>
>> identically to the machines they were patterned
after. I don't <br>
>> remember the details of implementation of these
70's era hardware <br>
>> designs, but I understood that they III designed
their own PCBs but <br>
>> (obviously?) used the same CPU chips... I don't
know about all the <br>
>> other support components... A likely answer to
this pondering is that <br>
>> these machines did not run a general purpose OS
and the III <br>
>> software/system people probably made up for any
differences in <br>
>> Software/Timing/Error Handling?<br>
>><br>
>> If Owen is listening in here, I think he was
there for more than a <br>
>> little of this from inside Apple/Sun?<br>
>><br>
>> - Steve<br>
>><br>
>> PS. To concede/confront glen's sentiment that:
" 'Metaphor' is an <br>
>> evil word, used only by manipulators and
gaslighters", I would <br>
>> offer that the use of *conceptual metaphor* is
to thinking as noise <br>
>> is to simulated annealing, and his point about
"tighter or looser <br>
>> equivalence" might well be the best argument
*for* the use of <br>
>> metaphorical thinking? I can't believe I'm
stirring/kicking this can <br>
>> of worm-hornets down the street again...<br>
>><br>
><br>
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