I started with System 3 on a Mac Plus with floppy disks back in the late 1980s, and ported original C code from around System 7 all the way through modern versions of macOS X. Apple has a long track record of deprecating basically everything, as part of its business model IMHO. That's why I don't target native macOS/iOS anymore.
Nobody is coming to save us. But I think that with AI, we have an opportunity to create a zero-cost runtime layer that provides something like Wine or SDL on all platforms. It could/should be the intersection of all mainstream OS features (a bit like the web), with the option to drop down to native components like how Cordova works.
I've been out of the game too long to know if something like this already exists, but would love to contribute.
Note that the thing to get to the thing is runway. With our currently broken open source software (OSS) funding model, we don't have a way to pay developers a stipend of perhaps $24-48k per year (minimum) for their OSS efforts. So they have to work pro bono. That leads to design-by-committee thinking that stands in the way of getting real work done.
So unfortunately we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. I hope to see the creation of a maker's guild someday, where membership provides the stipend, with proceeds coming from the 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 apps that generate a return on investment, to cover the commercial failures. Like Humble Bundle on steroids.
- digression -
Imagine a corporate model, but without gatekeeping, minimum hours or profit. A pure meritocracy working to manifest a gift economy for all.
I'm not aware of an automation-based (instead of artificial-scarcity-based) economic model like this. Solarpunk is more of a cultural revolution, but comes close. Some examples of how it might work:
- Abandoning patents, copyrights and other intellectual property rights in favor of a commons owned by everyone
- Funding drug research but giving away the resulting medication for the cost of production or free
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) or its cousin Universal Basic Capital (UBC) that provides the resources for labor to participate in the exponential gains of capitalism (the missing ladder that the wealthy currently pull up behind them)
China is well on its way to achieving these goals and more by 2049 under its Second Centenary Goal. Meaning that the US is/has been left behind. You can feel it in every way: widespread underemployment, the collapse of our social safety nets, the return of prejudice, our national debt higher than our GDP, CEOs getting compensated hundreds of times more than workers, the upcoming crowning of the first trillionaire. Times 1000 other injustices.
Solving the thing that gets to the thing is akin to solving all things.
Edit: I was wrong about intellectual property (IP) in China. It sounds like they will instead pursue high-value IP to fund their economy, a bit like the UBI funding model. I don't think that's an equitable path, so am suggesting something above and beyond what they're attempting.
I want to do an engine swap in my 1980s Toyota pickup (like on Back to the Future) from a 100 hp 22r to a 150-250 hp fuel injected inline 4 or turbodiesel to raise the thermodynamic efficiency from 20-25% to ~40% to nearly double fuel economy.
Unfortunately, most modern engines are transverse mounted. They can fit any transmission with an adapter plate, but then they're set too far back into the firewall to access stuff like the high-pressure fuel pump (which is often mounted on the transmission side for easy access on front wheel drive vehicles). I feel that's by design for planned obsolescence.
So I really wish that someone would offer a 4-6" thick 100-200 hp (100 kW) axial flux motor insert between the engine and transmission. Optionally with a simple battery management system (BMS) storing perhaps 5 kWh to provide up to 15-20 miles of electric range and hybrid fuel economy with regenerative braking.
If anyone knows of one, please let us know! If not, then those of you who won the internet lottery could make a killing investing in a novel product that everyone wants but doesn't know it yet.
something like a BMW 330e drivetrain has that (as do most German RWD hybrids), the biggest issue there is going to be the inverter and control software.
We randomly chose magenta as our transparent pixel for shareware games too!
I consider 1993 the last "good" year of the pre-internet age. The web didn't go mainstream until around 95, and 94 felt like a liminal year (dunno why). In 93 one could still wrap a plaid shirt around one's waist without fear of ridicule. Grunge and alternative music hadn't quite landed in rural America yet, although we didn't know what we were missing. The Telecommunications Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, USA PATRIOT Act, and so many other regressive/draconian laws hadn't passed yet to create the wealth inequality consuming the American Dream today. Although the Grand Upright Music vs Warner Bros decision had happened in 91 in an attempt to destroy hip-hop for racist reasons under the guise of protecting copyright. The Rodney King beating had happened the year before, but the OJ trial was still 2 years away. We were blissfully ignorant of the very ignorance and hate that would put us on this alternate timeline. It was like living in the Shire before the War of the Ring.
I can't stress enough how games like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM completely blew our minds. They came out about 6-7 years before The Matrix, so the closest conceptual framework we had for it was probably The Lawnmower Man. Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter came out about that time, but somehow couldn't compare. I remember using a drafting program on a 33 MHz PC with a 16 color monitor in drafting class, and DOOM revealed that even then, computers were running hundreds of times slower than they were capable of (millions of times slower today).
If I could go back to any time with what I know now, it would be spring of 93.
Sorry, false memory - I remembered the full story in all of its gory details after sleeping on it.
We did use magenta and colors near it for reserved pixels that would never be seen onscreen, but in our case it was for color animation. The Mac couldn't do full-screen palette animation in a way sanctioned by the OS, because Apple arbitrarily inserted an internal wait for the vsync monitor refresh interval in all of its palette functions, with no way to disable it or directly access the low memory variables that controlled the color lookup table (CLUT) like on the PC. So an empty main loop with palette animation ran at 60 fps, but doing any draw calls at all caused a timing miss which dropped it to 30 fps, while the CPU sat at about 50% idle. Our games redrew the whole screen anyway, so we opted to translate pixel colors on the fly via our own lookup table instead.
Apple also didn't provide OS calls for page flipping (to draw the next frame of animation while the current one is shown to double the frame rate), probably by design to maintain the Mac's image as a "professional" desktop computer, because such tricks were well-understood in the gaming industry. Or video resolutions below 640x480 (sometimes 512x384 on certain models).
Apple also tended to ship machines with half-width busses (supposedly to reduce cost) like the Mac LC, which reduced memory bandwidth so much that full-screen scrolling was difficult to achieve.
Those decisions prevented the Mac from becoming a performant gaming system, even though the RISC-like 68k chip with its numerous registers, predictable instruction set format and unsegmented memory were far superior to PC architecture at the time IMHO.
Later PowerPC chips like the 603e had a cache misalignment issue where double-width 8 byte memory copies that weren't 8 byte aligned ran at about half speed (probably using 2 copies internally) so I think we had to drop down to single-width 4 byte copies or use a cache hint function to disable caching while copying image buffers, which ran slightly slower.
Notable snafus included years-long delay of support for newer OpenGL versions, so we were stuck with fixed-pipeline 1.x calls long after the PC was exploring shaders. Then iOS only supported OpenGL ES, with no real reason not to offer an ES compatibility layer on desktop, necessitating support of 2 codepaths. Instead of remedying that stuff, they introduced Metal, which nobody asked for.
Not to mention deprecating wide swaths of the OS, forcing rewrites from MacOS 8 to 9 (Carbon), then from 9 to X (Cocoa), then from MacOS to iOS (Objective-C and Swift). Don't forget the 68k to PowerPC to Intel to ARM chip migrations, which forced developers to be aware of endianness issues, which greatly increased the complexity of reading/writing binary files.
Combining all of those permutations, MacOS software would often only survive perhaps 3 years before needing a rewrite. I probably have 10 times as many applications (mostly old games) on my Mac with a no-smoking sign through them as runnable applications.
I'm reminded of the expression "lemons for the price of peaches". The outer elegance of the Mac obfuscated the underlying byzantine layers. Denial became woven into the Mac experience, so much so that developers took a certain level of trauma to keep up appearances. I know I did. That's why I got out of the biz in the early 2010s after so many of our games that we put so much work into turned out to be commercial failures. We might have made 10 times more money targetting the PC, and conceivably 100 times more if we had cross-platform resources like Unity and Steam.
I bring this stuff up because rose colored glasses often obscure what really happened. Especially now with political insiders and the media producing so much revisionist history. Stuff we remember as cutting-edge manifested because the state of the art at the time was so abysmal.
I look around today and I see a whole lot of assumptions being made that this is all there is. That the current path of tech is the one true way. When nothing could be further from the truth. We're ruled by powerful duopoly forces presenting the illusion of choice, when all eggs are in the GPU basket. But do they use GPUs on Star Trek? Probably not.
I'm against this because hints should be a last resort in declarative programming languages like SQL.
Our productivity is proportional to our ability to recruit abstractions. The more we deal with pure concepts like relational algebra and data-driven development, the more bang we get for our buck.
If we get lost in the weeds having to worry about doing the planner's job, it's like we're paying a tax that doesn't need to exist.
This is why the syntactic sugar of Ruby, the async design patterns of JavaScript, the footgun avoidance best practices of C++, even the impure workarounds of functional languages, (all meant to improve developer and/or execution performance) don't really do it for me. They hint at avoidance of deeper understanding. Once we learn higher abstractions like copy-on-write, compare-and-swap, higher-order methods, etc, we start to see that languages pass the cost of their externalities on to us.
I'd prefer that Postgres move the opposite direction. For example, databases need a universal index that turns as many operations as possible into O(1) at the cost of memory, since resource prices tend to always fall on a long enough timescale. Stuff that works more like a content-addressable memory for ludicrous scaling. In other words, whatever it takes to make planner hints obsolete, is what Postgres maintainers should be putting their efforts into.
I guess a stopgap might be to have an automated way to profile an app during testing and generate planner hints for the main use cases. Or maybe be able to cache them to avoid cold start latency. But if my work ever requires me to deal with them directly, I'll be treating that as a code smell.
-
After writing this out, I realized that performance is an orthogonal concern to conceptual correctness. So a more appropriate phrasing might be that the planner is none of SQL's business. So technically, anyone's opinion on it is valid. In which case, we should choose the path of kindness. If allowing access to the planner saves someone's bacon, than we should allow it. But work to alleviate whatever pain necessitated its use in the first place.
I think it's endocrine disruption from microplastics. Hormones act like relays in the body, so when one system goes, a cascade of failures often follows (the most famous being diabetes). The body goes into maladaptive modes of operation to survive, which aren't sustainable, so epidemic changes kick in, eventually creating a breeding ground for tumors.
Forever chemicals like PFAS are a runner-up. The fluorocarbon tail mimics lipids, so the body tries to use them, which damages/kills cells. They circulate around the body endlessly like allergens. Cancer happens after cells have split too many hundreds of times trying to heal damage. So accelerating damage accelerates cancer.
Since cancer is a multifactorial disease, we can only assign weights for each cause. And since healthcare (at least in the US) has been hijacked by regulatory capture to prop up big agribusiness and pharma, we can't do anything in the short term to limit our exposure to dangerous substances.
Meaning that we're left with diet and exercise as the main preventatives. I don't buy that drinking/smoking/drugs or other lifestyle choices are the main causes of cancer (although they certainly contribute) since they've been around for hundreds of years and we have solid data on those risk factors. I look at it more as, a body functioning healthily can recover from abuse better than a body on the brink of failure. Yet we have created a way of life around chronically elevated cortisol and mental health drugs to combat systemic burnout, then wonder why we're all dying. It's so weird.
Like with most problems today, I blame the rich and powerful for abdicating their spiritual duty to help others since they have the means to do it. Instead, they pull up the ladder behind them, or even participate in malfeasance since it profits them and their cronies. Imagine what a few billion dollars put towards mRNA vaccines, CRISPR and pure research would do for cancer. Yet our titans of industry have their sights set on space or bunkers or whatever, actively working to cut government spending on research. It's so weird..
A way forward is maintaining the body so we're ready for anything on a personal level, while working towards systems change on the public level. Otherwise, what are we good for?
I got downvoted for mentioning PFAS, but I think that is a huge part of it. There are so many kids with cancer or debilitating ulcerative colitis in my town, including my teenager. My neighborhood has a slurry of PFAS and GenX chemicals in the well water that we just discovered a couple of years ago. My neighbor's PFOS reading was 144 ppt!!! The high school had a mix of forever chemicals too, over 50 ppt for PFNA.
This warning on freshwater fish is perhaps the saddest thing I have read in an endless stream of stories on the profit-driven destruction of our environment:
Ya I forgot to mention that the reason I chose microplastics and PFAS is that those are relatively new compared to when Gen X was growing up in the 70s and 80s. We had BPAs and leaded gasoline etc, but those effects were well-understood and we finally transitioned off of them.
Also I learned recently that 10% ethanol has the same antiknock effect of tetraethyllead (TEL), but they suppressed it because the fossil fuel industry didn't want biofuels to eat into their profit margins. Better to shower the world with lead and reduce IQ levels, evidently.
Loosely that just means that if you work somewhere with a lot of employees, you'll hear that the same job in a neighboring state pays 1.5-2 times as much. And that they have a harder time firing you. And that you'll be more likely to get compensated if you get hurt or whatever. Etc etc etc because unions.
It was pitched as a way to avoid paying union dues and possibly make it easier to move around the job market. And especially avoid working with "those" people.
If you sensed the ick factor there, that's why I think it's hard to have a rational debate around unions. It's become a divisive word like liberal due to deep-rooted disagreements going back to the founding of the (cough) union.
I prefer to use a term like representation. Do we want an advocate between us and the bosses when the next round of layoffs comes? Of course. Do we want our own form of human resources (HR) that has real teeth when something violent or inappropriate happens to a coworker? Of course. Do we want to have our voices heard when it comes to the quality of our work environment? Of course.
When people agree on principles but not on the umbrella term that covers them, it makes them vulnerable to political manipulation so that they can be divided and convinced to vote against their own interests.
I understand that a free market where people can switch jobs easily might be seen as more ideal than unions. But do we live in that market really? How many cities in America have a handful of large companies propping up the local economy? How many of those companies would take us in if we got fired from the other companies? How often do we hear about people moving to another city because they can't find a job?
There seems to be quite a discrepancy between the ideal and the actual. Another way to make people vulnerable to political manipulation.
I think maybe it comes down to how we see ourselves as blue collar or white collar. I understand how unions might be against the interests of white collar workers who tell blue collar workers what to do. What I can't understand is why blue collar workers would be against unions. What is the rationale there, really?
Without logic, we're left with bad faith arguments. Unions don't exist much these days for the same reasons that people on food stamps vote for billionaires. There's an irony there that their hope for opportunity gets used against them in a negative reinforcement loop. It's plain to see, and yet no help is coming.
If companies decide who gets hired instead of the people doing the work, that would seem to open the door to corruption and prejudice. So it's interesting that we might associate unions with mob activity, but not the existing corporate status quo. Why is that?
If anyone wants breadcrumbs, I just did a deep dive and there are a couple of promising technologies that could terraform Venus on roughly a human timescale of 100 years:
* Sun shade/sail near L1 tipped up to 35 degrees to remain still: 5 micron polymer film (1.5-3.5 billion tons or 10-25 million SpaceX Starship launches at 150 tons each) or 50 layer graphene (15 thousand tons or 100 launches). Liquid CO2 ocean forms at 31 C or 88 F, or dry ice glaciers at -78 C or -108 F result in nitrogen atmosphere dropped from 92 times pressure to close to Earth's pressure. Shade rotation can simulate a 24 hour day.
* Comets to increase water and spin rate: 50-100 100 km diameter comets from Kuiper Belt at 30 AU, nuclear rocket using 1% of water to gravitationally slingshot comets by planets over 20-100 years to impact at equator, resulting in 50 day retrograde or 64 day prograde rotation (down from 243 days). Decreases temperature and sulphuric acid enough for microbes to start fixing CO2 and acid.
The "hard" parts are getting bots into orbit to blow graphene bubbles to form a honeycomb, and inventing open-ended fusion rockets to avoid containment issues.
I think the sun shade is probably how we'll slow global climate change until we can plant the 1-10 trillion trees it will take to reverse it (mechanical carbon capture can't be scaled enough practically), but I digress.
Note that the blocker is actually getting to low Earth orbit (LEO) since delta V is straightforward with ion engines. That will arguably be a solved problem once big "dumb" rockets like Starship scale. I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace's airship to orbit concept and other magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) craft, but it's unclear if they will be able to achieve heavy lift. Aerospike engines and exotic rockets are being evolved by AI currently.
Spitballing here, you might be able to use some sort of floating wind turbine, and trail it out on a long enough cable to catch a different windstream. There's all sorts of reasons why it's a pretty terrible idea.
Forgotten: genetically modified algae-like organisms that would float at the habitable-ish altitude due to having a gas bubble. These organisms should consume sunlight and transform gaseous substances into something more solid/liquid to rain it down onto the surface, thus making the atmosphere less thick and more transparent. Bonus points for binding and removing chlorine and leaving oxygen intact.
Has anyone made a sandbox site running every type of container and presenting a shell where users can try to break out of any uncompromised ones remaining?
It's self-evident that we should only run containers that haven't been pwned yet.
I suspect that with all of the CVE-20XX exploits, Heartbleed, Meltdown, Rowhammer, Spectre, etc, that we're all living in a fantasy and there simply are no secure containers.
Seems a good place to repeat a quote from Theo de Raadt:
You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.
He'd probably say the same about container architectures.
I've been looking for 200+ hp engine swaps for my 100 hp, 125 lb-ft of torque lifted 1986 Toyota pickup with 31" tires (like the one on Back to the Future but 1 year newer and not extended cab).
For comparison, my 2013 Nissan Leaf has 107 hp, about 200 lb-ft of torque, weighs the same 3300 lbs, and does 0-60 mph in about 7-10 seconds depending on the weather.
So even accounting for the 300-500 lb weight of the 22r engine and accessories vs 1000+ lbs of electric motor and batteries, doubling the hp would be ludicrous speed (0-60 mph under 6 seconds), by all but 2010s era EV times.
I just looked up the price of Nissan Leaf battery swaps:
24 kWh (refurbished): 84 miles of range, $3,500-$5,000
40 kWh (upgrade): 125 miles of range, $6,500-$8,000
62 kWh (advanced upgrade, requires reshaping): 195 miles of range, $12,000-$14,500
Labor: Approximately 5-7 hours of labor at $100-$150/hour, adding $500-$1,500 to the total.
I'm part of the "radical center" politically (the opposite of centrist/moderate, popularized by Thom Hartmann and others), so this disappoints both sides of my sensibilities.
An electric motor is far easier to build than a gas engine, so should cost less than a crate engine (which are typically $2,000-7,000). Of course that's limited by copper and aluminum prices (not to mention lithium for batteries). Edit: wouldn't want to forget rare earths like neodymium either!
I believe that the decades-long delay in EV manufacturing (see Who Killed the Electric Car) was a supply chain problem, not a tech problem, since we've known how to do this since the 1980s and arguably for more like a century since the first cars were EV/biofuel powered and we've had nickel-iron and sodium-sulfur batteries forever that could have done the job, but I digress.
If/when the economy crashes in 2027/2028, and after voters demand better, I'd expect a cottage industry to open up again that builds EV parts for 1/2 price or less.
It remains to be seen what they actually end up selling for, but it seems like Slate intend to offer a 200 hp motor, 52 kWh battery ... and the rest of a whole vehicle for $28k. That makes $27k for this "eCrate" package (which, granted, comes with 14 kWh more battery) seem like an absolutely terrible price.
Nobody is coming to save us. But I think that with AI, we have an opportunity to create a zero-cost runtime layer that provides something like Wine or SDL on all platforms. It could/should be the intersection of all mainstream OS features (a bit like the web), with the option to drop down to native components like how Cordova works.
I've been out of the game too long to know if something like this already exists, but would love to contribute.
Note that the thing to get to the thing is runway. With our currently broken open source software (OSS) funding model, we don't have a way to pay developers a stipend of perhaps $24-48k per year (minimum) for their OSS efforts. So they have to work pro bono. That leads to design-by-committee thinking that stands in the way of getting real work done.
So unfortunately we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. I hope to see the creation of a maker's guild someday, where membership provides the stipend, with proceeds coming from the 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 apps that generate a return on investment, to cover the commercial failures. Like Humble Bundle on steroids.
- digression -
Imagine a corporate model, but without gatekeeping, minimum hours or profit. A pure meritocracy working to manifest a gift economy for all.
I'm not aware of an automation-based (instead of artificial-scarcity-based) economic model like this. Solarpunk is more of a cultural revolution, but comes close. Some examples of how it might work:
- Abandoning patents, copyrights and other intellectual property rights in favor of a commons owned by everyone
- Funding drug research but giving away the resulting medication for the cost of production or free
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) or its cousin Universal Basic Capital (UBC) that provides the resources for labor to participate in the exponential gains of capitalism (the missing ladder that the wealthy currently pull up behind them)
China is well on its way to achieving these goals and more by 2049 under its Second Centenary Goal. Meaning that the US is/has been left behind. You can feel it in every way: widespread underemployment, the collapse of our social safety nets, the return of prejudice, our national debt higher than our GDP, CEOs getting compensated hundreds of times more than workers, the upcoming crowning of the first trillionaire. Times 1000 other injustices.
Solving the thing that gets to the thing is akin to solving all things.
Edit: I was wrong about intellectual property (IP) in China. It sounds like they will instead pursue high-value IP to fund their economy, a bit like the UBI funding model. I don't think that's an equitable path, so am suggesting something above and beyond what they're attempting.
reply