Ologn

Solaris x86 launched in 1993. I had one on my desk at work in early 1997, running Common Desktop Environment.

Even back then, the CTO of our startup said Sun had missed the boat on dominating x86 Unix. They could have had a larger role in x86 Unix world if they had wanted to. It was definitely a misstep for Sun.

Having said that, throughout the 1990s Sun was amazing. They were even good right up to the Oracle purchase, although by that time RHEL on HP (or Dell) servers was eating their lunch.

SK Hynix stock went up over 9% - today. Up 72% in the last month. 323% in the last six months. 978% in the past year.

Micron up 3% today, 76% last month, 292% last six months, 863% in the past year.

I bought Micron in mid-March when it dipped. I looked at SK Hynix last week with thoughts to buy, but it had gone up so much in the past month I figured too late. Nope, up 9% today.

With Gemini 3, I wrote an Emacs Lisp which can tell if a number is prime or not using only primitive recursive functions. That was done at the end of last year, and none of the frontier LLMs were able to do it earlier in 2025.

I had some test functions where minimization could be optionally used, but wanted to do one where minimization was needed, like the Ackermann function. Most of the frontier models struggled with doing this, although I may have been prompting incorrectly. Although - if I had been prompting totally correctly, I probably could have gotten what I got out of a frontier LLM in early 2025 and before.

Incidentally the test function that tells you if a number is prime in Emacs Lisp with primitive recursion is

(defalias 'prime (c (c (c (r 's (c 'z (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (c (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (p 1) (p 2))) (p 2) (p 1)) (c (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (p 2) (p 1))) (p 2) (p 1)))) (c (c (r 'z (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (c (c (r 'z (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (p 2) (p 3))) (c (c (c (r 's (c 'z (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (c (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (p 1) (p 2))) (p 2) (p 1)) (c (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (p 2) (p 1))) (p 2) (p 1)))) (c (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (c (r 'z (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (p 2) (p 3))) (p 2) (c (r 'z (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (p 2) (c (c (r 's (c 'z (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r 'z (c (r 'z (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (p 2) (p 3))) (c 's (p 2)) (c (c (r 's (c 'z (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (c (c (r 's (c 'z (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c 's (p 2))) (c (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (p 1) (p 2))) (p 2) (p 1)) (c (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (c (r (p 1) (c (c (r 'z (p 1)) (p 1) 'z) (p 2))) (p 2) (p 1))) (p 2) (p 1)))) (c 's (p 2)) (p 3))))) (c 's (p 1)) (p 3))))) (p 1) (p 2))) (p 1)) (p 1) (p 2)) (c 'z (p 1))) (c (c (r 'z (c (c 's 'z) (p 1))) (p 1) 'z) (p 1))) (p 3) (c 's (p 1))) (p 2))) (p 1) (p 1)) (p 1)) (c 's (c 's 'z))))

Stock market last 365 days:

S&P 500 - up 16%

Nvidia - up 25%

ICLN (global clean energy ETF) - up 46%

Micron - up 246%

Seagate - up 270%

Western Digital - up 342%

Dijkstra's notions about provable functions are probably more important during these times where LLMs are churning out hallucinated code.

I am on the free tier of Gemini 3. With some intervention on my part, I got it to build, in Emacs Lisp, a primitive-recursive function for determining if a number is prime (by mu-recursive I mean a function built from the building blocks of a constant, successor and projection function, as well as a primitive recursive function and compositional function/macro). I was impressed, as previous models (including Anthropic and OpenAI) could not do this.

For the past few days I asked it to built a mu-recursive Ackermann function in Emacs Lisp (built on the primitive-recursive functions/operators, plus an extra operator - minimization). I said that the prime detector function it already built should be able to use the same functions/operators, and to rewrite code if necessary.

So far it has been unable to do this. If I thought it could but was stumbling over Emacs Lisp I might ask it to try in Scheme or Common Lisp or some other language. It's possible I'll get it to work in the time I have allotted from my daily free tier, but I have had no success so far. I am also starting with inputs to the Ackermann function of 0,0 - 0,1 - 1,0 - 1,1 to not overburden the system but it can't even handle 0, 0. Also it tries to redefine the Emacs Lisp keyword "and", which Emacs hiccups on.

A year ago LLMs were stumbling over Leetcode and Project Euler functions I was asking it to make. They seem to have gotten a little better, and I'm impressed Gemini 3 can handle, with help, primitive recursive functions in Emacs Lisp. Doesn't seem to be able to handle mu-recursive functions with minimization yet though. The trivial, toy implementations of these things. Also as I said, it tried to redefine "and" as well, which Emacs Lisp fell over on.

So it's a helpful helper and tool, but definitely not ready to hand things over to. As the saying goes, the first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the code takes the other 90% of the time. Or the other saying - it's harder to find bugs than write code, so if you're coding at peak mental capacity, finding bugs becomes impossible. It does have its uses though, and has been getting better.

It's The Mythical Man Month idea. Programming software is a different thing than working on an assembly line, or a call center, or in retail sales. You're much better off having four programmers who are worth paying $200k a year than ten programmers who are worth paying $75k a year.

Yes...NVDA closed at $188.15 yesterday, a price it was never at until October. It did hit $212.19 last week, but retreated.

After spring 2023, Nvidia stock seems to follow a pattern. It has a run-up prior to earnings, it beats the forecast, with the future forecast replaced with an even more amazing forecast, and then the stock goes down for a bit. It also has runs - it went up in the first half of 2024, as well as from April to now.

Who knows how much longer it can go on, but I remember 1999 and things were crazier then. In some ways things were crazier three years ago with FAANG salaries etc. There is a lot of capital spending, the question is are these LLMs with some tweaking worth the capital spending, and it's too early to tell that fully. Of course a big theoretical breakthrough like the utility of deep learning, or transformers or the like would help, but those only come along every few years (if at all).

From spring 2019 to July of this year, I worked at IT at a Fortune 100 retailer.

The project I worked on was enormously successful in terms of revenue growth. I, and people on my team had a huge nationwide impact, which started when we were about a dozen people (it has grown now to several dozen).

Whereas even a manager of one of the big box stores would only have a limited geographical impact. Whereas my work would always have nation-wide impact (and at some companies programmers would have world-wide impact). I turned on a payment option for my platform one quarter, and very quickly people were using it for one million a month in purchases. Which kept going up.

The book Capitalism without Capital talks about this. Some aspects of it are alluded to in Fred Brooks 1975 book The Mythical Man Month.

To build a car, a lot of effort has to be made in making the car - not just the end result, but the making the glass, tires and so forth. Whereas with programming, I write an app, or a feature for an app, and the end result is duplicated and distributed around the country (or even around the world) for free, or virtually free. I'm not helping make commodities one at a time like someone on an automobile line is. It is something different.

> If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology?

innovator's dilemma

NVDA had a surprise earnings on May 24, 2023, closing at $305 and opening at $385 (before the 10 for 1 split). Pretty much every earnings day since then has been the same - the numbers come out, they beat what they estimated, the stock goes down a little. People have been doom and glooming it every earnings call - you can read the threads here from May 2023, people were saying it was a bubble then, and it's over four times what it was then.