baud9600

Right that’s it. Time to get a standing desk at work!

Great work on Goose, a whole load of practical thought went into it!

I’d love to see 1st class lightweight ‘processes’ and typed comms, like CSP. These light processes would be cheap to spawn in the thousands, with synchronous comms. So it’s possible to quickly use arbitrary networks rather than OS thread worker pools with queues. Maybe like:

fn produce(out: chan<i32>) { for i in 1000 { send(out, i); } }

fn consume(inp: chan<i32>) { for i in 1000 { print(recv(inp)); } }

fn main() { let c = chan<i32>();

  par {
    produce(c);
    consume(c);
  }
}

> “We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.”

Stafford Beer wrote that the purpose of a system is not its declared intent but what it does - what it manifests, causes or how it behaves (1979, 2001). Higher education has a lofty purpose, but the system manifests as a Defence Contractor among other things like teaching one’s kids. “We’d prefer not spoken aloud” is probably true.

Interestingly, early Ethernet performance studies suggested that about 37% utilisation was the best possible on a heavily contended network due to all the collisions. So a 10mbps Ethernet cable run was arguably similar in performance to 4mbps TR? That was essentially IBM's marketing argument for 4mbps token ring. But TR was more predictable under heavy traffic contention. That’s what we were told anyway…

And that was Ethernet at 4mbps over IBM “structured cabling”?

A very nice trip down memory lane. The big banks bought token ring because nobody gets fired for buying IBM, and Ethernet looked so amateurish compared to the heft of TR cables and chunky spaceship MAUs. Hermaphrodite connectors, remember those? I knew a bank that ran TR at 4mbps, connecting its head office buildings nearby and was considering an upgrade to 16 - it seemed mysteriously fast in those days. But then Ethernet came along, and SCO Unix servers on 486, so it was relatively easy and affordable to get a department of 30 people up and running with PCs as terminals. Those were the days…

One omission is Turing! Halmos gives JvN considerable credit for electronic computing without ever mentioning Turing or the connection between Turing’s universal machine and the stored-program computer. JvN knew Turing at Princeton, thought highly of his work, and offered him a position at IAS.

While the paper mentions the IAS in Princeton, it only briefly refers to the computer project which JvN directed, describing the IAS machine as “his electronic computer”. This is a surprisingly slight mention of a major project that ran for years and was highly influential (the project is the subject of George Dyson’s book “Turing’s Cathedral”, recommended).

I think the problem is when the execs aren’t looking at change-for-the-better. Instead they’re looking to appoint blame. Moving to a position of assumed competency in your staff and taking the perspective of how-to-improve-next-time is a real step forward in maturity. My guess is it’s rare and blame is easier: most management doesn’t reach this level, instead it’s immature.

We seem to be very sensitive to style. It can be rather distracting. This writing contained 7 exclamation marks and 9 colons.

As for em-dashes, there were 7.

Good points. I’ve tried this a few times and I’ve been impressed by the dialogue. Given this was a very simple prompt, I am convinced a more precise version could be developed, including a rubric, a library of course content, starter questions and other guidance to the AI. I haven’t seen anything like this and schools / universities seem to be “struggling” with AI, which has me wondering why not embrace LLMs for learning and assessment, like this?

I am waiting for AI Viva Voce (“AVV”). I am really surprised we aren’t hearing more about this idea?

Try it for yourself by making a prompt like this (adapt as needed):

Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me, to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 5 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction. Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?

It would be interesting to install os8088 on a later series, like a Pentium III 500mhz or a modern Intel i7! Would it even run? I guess os8088 could not harness the CPU power to make it usable. Instead, could a modern CPU run multiple instances of os8088 like a server? That’s probably something Claude could code…? A multi-session server that provides 1024 instances of os8088 by remote connection?

> “The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting…”

Tell? Largest “tell”? Tell for me to tell?

Write in English, please:

“The biggest sign that shows me how culture and sentiment are changing, is…”