Love this (and really, all of Devine and Rek's work tbh). "A Shining Place Built Upon The Sand" was absolutely beautiful, as are their discussions of Permacomputing, etc. They (and their site,...
Love this (and really, all of Devine and Rek's work tbh). "A Shining Place Built Upon The Sand" was absolutely beautiful, as are their discussions of Permacomputing, etc.
They (and their site, etc) are a huge inspiration in a number of ways and have been for me for a while.
I have always been fascinated by how different my computing preferences are from 100r's despite starting from what seems like the same principles. I seem to value all of the same things -...
I have always been fascinated by how different my computing preferences are from 100r's despite starting from what seems like the same principles. I seem to value all of the same things - efficiency, fun, platforms that can be held entirely in one person's head, not actually liking computer-touching so much as just making stuff.
But then I follow where that takes me and I arrive at a totally different place, one with register machines, type systems, memory safety, and structured control flow. The computer can handle all of these things with minimal effort on its part; why not let it, so I can focus on making the thing I want to make?
The affinity for live coding systems (both the modern kind and the lisp/smalltalk image-based kind) among permacomputing people is also pretty weird to me. I want to make things and know that they will persist as I made them. That's a big part of the point of permacomputing to me. Editing a running application makes me instantly worried that I am creating a state that I will not be able to easily reproduce later.
I suspect a large part of the difference is that last value I ascribed to them: perhaps they're far less jaded on computing than I am, and still enjoy it for its own sake. I'm glad they're doing what they do, regardless. The world needs more of this weird stuff that doesn't scale.
I think that's a big drive for the people who arrive at a more extreme position as well. The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 (referenced in the page above) was really illuminating for me to understand...
I want to make things and know that they will persist as I made them
I think that's a big drive for the people who arrive at a more extreme position as well. The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 (referenced in the page above) was really illuminating for me to understand more of their perspective.
Personally, I don't think we'll one day wake up in alien planet Kin-dza-dza where we lost a gap of knowledge that makes it impossible for us to run old programs--but there's still value in building low-power and more sustainable computing platforms.
My thoughts on software that stops working is that there are two major problems that should be solved on a societal level First is that the software and hardware we are using is proprietary. This...
My thoughts on software that stops working is that there are two major problems that should be solved on a societal level
First is that the software and hardware we are using is proprietary. This means that the source code is a secret and in some cases may not exist because all copies have been lost. Even if it were public to change the code to work in modern systems would likely be illegal in most countries. So if the hardware or software dependencies go away for whatever reason, things built on top of it stop working. We can apply this to cloud services and license management as well.
The second one is an obsessiveness over novelty by programmers and project managers. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself; it could be argued that this is where innovation comes from. But it does have downsides. Software written on top of software that is in a constant state of flux is going to need to be able to change itself as that dependency changes.
One way to think about this is that software written for the Commodore 64 still works on Commodore 64 computers today. The problem is that the Commodore 64 isn’t being made today. But in this case we have a lucky break because we have engineered drop-in replacements for all of the components and now surprisingly we do have new Commodore 64 computers being made now. We can do this because people have made the details of how the computer works in the public domain so these efforts could bare fruit.
There are a billion and one things people consider when they are trying to build software solutions, but I genuinely think the world would be a better place if we built everything to be open and modular, and generally (but not always) to work with established standards.
The original duration for copyright in the USA was 14 with 14 renewable. I think that may have been close to perfect. I think that we'd be in a lot better space if everything before 1997 was...
The original duration for copyright in the USA was 14 with 14 renewable. I think that may have been close to perfect.
I think that we'd be in a lot better space if everything before 1997 was public domain. The first Harry Potter novel would be entering the public domain next year instead of the first Nancy Drew novel. We'd be getting "Men in Black" instead of "All Quiet on the Western Front".
And that's presuming renewal. There's a decent chance everything that flopped in 2011 wouldn't get renewed.
I guess we can look forward to 2050 (in US law) when the first people without millions of dollars can make a Lord of the Rings videogame.
Or perhaps 2102 when some random schmo can make a Kill Bill MMO.
Ugh, maybe in 2050 millions of dollars won't even be worth that much. The money bit in Back to the Future 2 was funny at the time, I'm finding it less so now.
Ugh, maybe in 2050 millions of dollars won't even be worth that much.
Overall, I found this article very insightful. It had littered throughout some very impactful quotes. In general, while some of the technical details was something that was hard for me to follow,...
Overall, I found this article very insightful. It had littered throughout some very impactful quotes.
Stop trying to be liked by everybody
you don't even like everybody
Douglas Adams said that, "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."
In general, while some of the technical details was something that was hard for me to follow, the philosophy behind it all was even more interesting.
Love this (and really, all of Devine and Rek's work tbh). "A Shining Place Built Upon The Sand" was absolutely beautiful, as are their discussions of Permacomputing, etc.
They (and their site, etc) are a huge inspiration in a number of ways and have been for me for a while.
I have always been fascinated by how different my computing preferences are from 100r's despite starting from what seems like the same principles. I seem to value all of the same things - efficiency, fun, platforms that can be held entirely in one person's head, not actually liking computer-touching so much as just making stuff.
But then I follow where that takes me and I arrive at a totally different place, one with register machines, type systems, memory safety, and structured control flow. The computer can handle all of these things with minimal effort on its part; why not let it, so I can focus on making the thing I want to make?
The affinity for live coding systems (both the modern kind and the lisp/smalltalk image-based kind) among permacomputing people is also pretty weird to me. I want to make things and know that they will persist as I made them. That's a big part of the point of permacomputing to me. Editing a running application makes me instantly worried that I am creating a state that I will not be able to easily reproduce later.
I suspect a large part of the difference is that last value I ascribed to them: perhaps they're far less jaded on computing than I am, and still enjoy it for its own sake. I'm glad they're doing what they do, regardless. The world needs more of this weird stuff that doesn't scale.
I think that's a big drive for the people who arrive at a more extreme position as well. The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 (referenced in the page above) was really illuminating for me to understand more of their perspective.
Personally, I don't think we'll one day wake up in alien planet Kin-dza-dza where we lost a gap of knowledge that makes it impossible for us to run old programs--but there's still value in building low-power and more sustainable computing platforms.
My thoughts on software that stops working is that there are two major problems that should be solved on a societal level
First is that the software and hardware we are using is proprietary. This means that the source code is a secret and in some cases may not exist because all copies have been lost. Even if it were public to change the code to work in modern systems would likely be illegal in most countries. So if the hardware or software dependencies go away for whatever reason, things built on top of it stop working. We can apply this to cloud services and license management as well.
The second one is an obsessiveness over novelty by programmers and project managers. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself; it could be argued that this is where innovation comes from. But it does have downsides. Software written on top of software that is in a constant state of flux is going to need to be able to change itself as that dependency changes.
One way to think about this is that software written for the Commodore 64 still works on Commodore 64 computers today. The problem is that the Commodore 64 isn’t being made today. But in this case we have a lucky break because we have engineered drop-in replacements for all of the components and now surprisingly we do have new Commodore 64 computers being made now. We can do this because people have made the details of how the computer works in the public domain so these efforts could bare fruit.
There are a billion and one things people consider when they are trying to build software solutions, but I genuinely think the world would be a better place if we built everything to be open and modular, and generally (but not always) to work with established standards.
The original duration for copyright in the USA was 14 with 14 renewable. I think that may have been close to perfect.
I think that we'd be in a lot better space if everything before 1997 was public domain. The first Harry Potter novel would be entering the public domain next year instead of the first Nancy Drew novel. We'd be getting "Men in Black" instead of "All Quiet on the Western Front".
And that's presuming renewal. There's a decent chance everything that flopped in 2011 wouldn't get renewed.
I guess we can look forward to 2050 (in US law) when the first people without millions of dollars can make a Lord of the Rings videogame.
Or perhaps 2102 when some random schmo can make a Kill Bill MMO.
Ugh, maybe in 2050 millions of dollars won't even be worth that much.
The money bit in Back to the Future 2 was funny at the time, I'm finding it less so now.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJuOwy4aGA
Related: https://100r.co/site/tools_ecosystem.html
Overall, I found this article very insightful. It had littered throughout some very impactful quotes.
In general, while some of the technical details was something that was hard for me to follow, the philosophy behind it all was even more interesting.