[FRIAM] Open Source/Design/Society and Sustainability and Collapse

Sat Oct 22 14:13:42 EDT 2022

On 10/21/22 6:50 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Ok, I don’t normally like celebrity stories, but that is neat.

Then you had to have *hated* my riff on Glenn Reid and Mikhail Kalishnikov!

On another irritating tangent:

If Mikhail Kalishnakov, Sam Colt, and John Browning can flood the world 
with "peacemakers" and "equalizers" so amazing that one man in a Vegas 
Strip Hotel <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting>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?

    https://www.academia.edu/88948574/Open_source_decarbonization_for_a_sustainable_world?email_work_card=view-paper

This Pearce (not *the* Pearce) is a fan of RepRap self-replicating 
printers among other things...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Society

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?).

I think ?Glen? has referenced the Effective Altruist 
<https://www.effectivealtruism.org/> 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 Russel Munroe 
<https://xkcd.com/2688/>, I suppose (tribute to Lee Smolin?)

>
>> On Oct 21, 2022, at 4:03 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> 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.
>>
>> ---
>> 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...
>>     >>
>>     >
>>
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