kenfox

The computers at the time had very little ram. The IBM System/360 didn’t get 1MB until 1968. I suspect a lot of programs were I/O bound just to be able to work at all. Most modern engineers cannot conceive of doing anything useful with 64KB and I think it’s a mistake to project modern practices 50 years into the past.

System prompts themselves have many contradictions. I remember hearing an Anthropic engineer (possibly Lex Fridman's interview with Amanda Askell) talking about using exaggerated language like "NEVER" just to steer Claude to rarely do something.

I'm not sure what article about looting is being referenced, but NPR did interview author Vicky Osterweil about her book "In Defense of Looting". It would be extremely surprising to hear that NPR endorsed looting as a form of protest. The interview was definitely not an endorsement.

The author assumes we will only ever use raw materials on Earth. There are definitely impractical fantasies about asteroid mining in sci-fi, but the author ignoring the cost of getting things off Earth means the article is just a strawman.

Coal and oil formation would not occur due to lifeforms able to digest trees. It would be extraordinarily difficult to reset to those primordial conditions. I don't think an asteroid hit could do it.

The nuclear family is an American white cultural norm. It may also be a norm for other groups. You are seeing black as the opposite of white and blackness as defined as the opposite of every white norm. That seems pretty extreme; a deductive fallacy even. The infographic didn't say anything about black culture though it would be interesting to see the identical format used to describe black culture.

A perfect vacuum is a perfect insulator. There are capacitors that use vacuum.

You think there is a conspiracy to supress detailed global temperature measurements that were taken before 1880? It's interesting that we have ways to estimate global temperature before 1880, but that marks the start of modern record keeping.

It also has the advantage of showing the blip of very high US temperatures in the 1930s. People also complain about bias if those extremes are left out.

North America is a large place. There are at least a half dozen different climates. Michigan has excellent variety with apples, peaches and cherries for example, but bananas are limited to Dole or Chiquita's Cavendish. Perhaps the availability of local fruit suppresses demand for banana variety. I've only seen more choices of banana in larger cities and university towns.

The 2 volumes of authoritative X documentation came from Digital Press. X Window System by Scheifler, Gettys and Newman. X Window System Toolkit by Asente and Swick. If you read further in the acknowledgements that you quote, you'll see them listed as primary sources. My copies take up 3.25" on the shelf.

I know we had a lot of the O'Reilly X books floating around. Nobody ever read them, but we felt weird throwing books away. You're right that they got bundled by vendors--I think HP and Sun eventually bundled stuff too. The bundling decision was probably more about trying to justify insanely high workstation prices than an indictment of the complexity of X.

You are seriously trying to add up all the O'Reilly books and compare that to documentation published by NeXT?

I think I still have my books at home somewhere. They were by Digital Press if I recall.

The X documentation was 2 volumes: 5 inches total. If you throw in Motif, Display Postscript (which came out in early 90s on SGI) and GL, it's still under a foot. I never had NeXTSTEP manuals, but I did have the OPENSTEP box set which was about a foot thick.

I understand the point you are trying to make, but the truth is an expert would find a lot of similarity in those systems. Even today iOS development feels comfortable and similar to the work I did on SGIs in 93.