jleyank

I would have thought the vax owed more to the pdp-11 culture than the pdp-10. If you don’t want to move the line add a second one. Berkeley Unix really helped things network and hack and that came from the 11 onto the vax.

If "programming" is not a skill (too broad?), then "design" and "debugging" are skills that can be be applied to all sorts of activities other than programming. Not sure if they can be taught, but they certainly can be learned via practice. Another example where 10K days/repetitions are required to build up the necessary muscles.

My group was new, lacking much in the way of research funds. Therefore, we taught for support (Chemistry): lab proctor, recitation leader. Somebody had to wrangle those 1000 people taking 1st-year chemistry. Pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dental, biology and a rare chemistry major or two. In return, the department covered my living expenses. This was in ancient times, but I figure similar mechanisms exist today because the student base seems to be quite similar.

Perhaps study the fields that are cs-adjacent as these might be positioned to expand when coding ceases to be a limitation? Biotech/pharma, engineering disciplines, these rely on modeling and data management tools whose improvement would be a win. Developers with discipline-specific knowledge are quite useful.

The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.

There was a whole lot of interesting and important computer work done in the 60's, but there was way larger stuff that went down. The moon race, 'Nam, decolonization, the Cold War, unrest in Europe (Paris, Prague Spring), Civil Rights, ... I'm sure I missed stuff. If the computer stuff "went wrong", things would have been delayed but people would have created things eventually. Maybe we'd all be using Algol.

If the other areas "went wrong", more wrong than some of them did, a whole lot of people would have died. We might be looking at a recovery similar to what followed WW I w/o the roaring 20's. Worst case, we'd have tested Sagan's models.

Much of the 20th century was a hot mess. I'm very disappointed that more people don't know this and wish to recreate it in the 21st century. Not a positive commentary on human nature I guess.

Category error. These comments are only relevant with a democratic administration.

These things are a balance that require at least medium term perspective. No jobs no Uber Eats. So perhaps letting people handle delivery keeps more cash circulating in society?

More cops? Better mental health? Just fewer bloody guns? Seeing others as people not NPC's? Opinions vary.

At the moment it’s worse than this title suggests. The US has ceased being a guarantor of peace, preferring to be one that will end the peace.

The US and Soviets had various teams looking for "Germans with technical information". This was more valuable that all the industry and materials seized. I'm sure, like this one, the teams were working to control whom acquired them...

And it might take into the next generation to find that other job. Hard to retrain past 20-30 or so. And, perhaps, automating taxis aren't something worth all that effort? Having a driver means they can do things when there is a problem rather than just phone home.

Quantum mechanics, molecular modeling (classical mechanics and empirical), data handling, chemical reaction prediction, …. There’s FOSS and commercial software for all aspects of drug design.

Hopefully, people don’t look back from a few years on and state that this was the last truly stable or secure versions of the kernel. Yeah, I assume Linus is assuming people understand their submissions but people are lazy. If they were given code in some fashion, it wasn’t thought through.

They better plan for fewer well-paid customers if they’re eliminating developers. AI doesn’t pay for things, and we’re in a consumer economy that lives on customers.