Fair enough, but this isn't about how cool it was that there were warring factions. There were reasons that the divide existed, and most of the reasons involved the behemoth Microsoft throwing its weight around and trying to bully the world of technology. People who ran Windows were seen as complicit, and in some ways, they actually were.
Especially at the time, saying that both sides were obviously bad people because they had a beef with each other is a little like saying the Dark Side and the Jedi should have just stopped being assholes to each other. It's not that simple.
It wasn't exactly like that. It was cliquey but it wasn't like the crisps and bloods or anything.The windows people were typically either baffled by the Linux people or curious about them. There was a bit more attitude from the Linux side I think, but we're talking more about being sarcastic and mocking rather than hostile. These are late 90s CS students we're talking about here, they were a polite bunch generally.
A stored program computer refers to the computer architecture where program instructions and data are stored in the same memory. This is also referred to as the Von Neumann architecture.
In contrast, a lot of early computers were built with separate instruction memory like punch cards. This is called the Harvard Architecture. If the instructions were immutable, which they usually were, then things like modifying the program at runtime were not possible.
Concrete examples of this difference is the Harvard Mk 1 and the Manchester Mk 1, the former being a Harvard architecture computer and the latter is a stored program computer or a von Neumann architecture.
"Babbage architecture" would have been much more accurate than "Harvard architecture", because Howard H. Aiken, the designer of Harvard Mark I, has been explicitly inspired by the work of Babbage into making his automatic computer at Harvard, which was intended as a modern implementation of what Babbage had failed to build.
The "Harvard architecture" had nothing to do with Harvard and it was not a novel thing. Having separate memories for programs and for data has been the standard structure for all programmable computers that have been made before the end of WWII, in all countries, and the methods for storing computer programs had been derived from those used in programmable looms and in the much earlier music boxes, which are the earliest programmable sequencers. Like the computer keyboards have a history of millennia since their origin in musical instruments (i.e. organs), the computer program memories have also their origin in (automatic) musical instruments, more than a millennium ago.
I don't know that the problem is short attention span. Poor communication has always been with us. I am sure Luu has compelling insights—what I was able to get through seemed interesting—but he is a poor communicator. It's not just that he presents a wall of text; his wording and his approach to communication tell me that he thinks if he just gets his thoughts recorded, that's enough. It is not enough.
It might not be enough for you, but maybe you're not the target audience. His blog is quite popular so clearly it's enough for a lot of folks.
What is "good" communication depends on the social context of the communication, the audience, etc. A novel probably shouldn't be written in the same style as a project status update document. IMO one of the downsides of people in our modern education system being drilled on the "one true way" of communicating for a small handful of contexts (position paper essays, tactical business memos) is that they begin to think that is the only way to communicate ever in any context to any audience and forget that different people have different tastes and in a lot of contexts catering to your audience's taste is what matters.
True but if this is just the extent of he can do, maybe it's better that he did it than if he didn't bother to put his thoughts on paper at all.
I'm sure you'd say it's a distinction without a difference but clearly it resonates with someone and those people are able to summarize his ideas or reframe them for a broader audience.
I'm really curious what makes you say feel that way, if you can put it into words?
I think his style is quite particular (I think I would compare it to patio11 a little bit?), and I understand it not being everyone's cup of tea; but one thing I don't think I would ever say it feels unedited.
To me, it feels _very_ edited — yes, there are occasional sentences with five sub-clauses in them, but they all feel very _deliberate_, and serve a particular stylistic goal.
>I think his style is quite particular (I think I would compare it to patio11 a little bit?)
I find them quite different, patio11 is good about introducing a topic and easing you into, even if it's something you might not be initially interested in. Luu's writing isn't inviting at all. I'm sure it appeals to folks already familiar with his work, but there is nothing to draw in a new or not particularly interested reader.
> Yossi's post about how an unusually unreasonable person can have outsized impact in a dimension they value at their firm also applies to impact outside of a firm. Kyle Kingsbury, mentioned above, is an example of this. At the rates that I've heard Jepsen is charging now, Kyle can bring in what a senior developer at BigCo does (actually senior, not someone with the title "senior"), but that was after years of working long hours at below market rates on an uncertain endeavour, refuting FUD from his critics (if you read the replies to the linked posts or, worse yet, the actual tickets where he's involved in discussions with developers, the replies to Kyle were a constant stream of nonsense for many years, including people working for vendors feeling like he has it out for them in particular, casting aspersions on his character, and generally trashing him). I have a deep respect for people who are willing to push on issues like this despite the system being aligned against them but, my respect notwithstanding, basically no one is going to do that. A system that requires someone like Kyle to take a stand before successful firms will put effort into correctness instead of correctness marketing is going to produce a lot of products that are good at marketing correctness without really having decent correctness properties (such as the data sync product mentioned in this post, whose website repeatedly mentions how reliable and safe the syncing product is despite having a design that is fundamentally broken).
I'm sorry, this is too much for me. I don't understand what this paragraph is about. Too many abstract nouns; "correctness" lost its meaning for me. If this is a parody or a joke, then it flew way over my head. Was it supposed to recreate "a constant stream of nonsense"? If so, it missed the mark.
While we're at it: enough with the brain teasers and weird analogies. These, too, have nothing to do with actual day-to-day work and are really just a way to exercise power over candidates.
He actually did know how to code. He and Woz created the classic video game Breakout while working at Atari. (I have no doubt Woz did most of the heavy lifting.) It's not that he didn't know how to program, it's just that coding was not his strong suit.
> He actually did know how to code. He and Woz created the classic video game Breakout while working at Atari. (I have no doubt Woz did most of the heavy lifting.
And Jobs kept most of the money ($4,750), gave Woz $350 and went off to India to achieve enlightenment.
Agreed that the author doesn't seem to understand what is and is not a conspiracy theory. The article starts off by calling the ancient alien astronauts "theory" a conspiracy theory. Who are the conspirators? I don't mean Tsoukalos, he just spreads the myth. But if it's a conspiracy theory, there had to be conspirators. And there weren't, because there is no conspiracy. A conspiracy is not the same thing as a myth.
There's so much dystopian science fiction about people being completely helpless because only machines know how to do everything. Then the machines break down.
While I do like a lot of what AI brings us, it also scares the hell out of me and makes me fear more for the future of humanity than I ever have.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." —"Dr. Ian Malcolm" (Jeff Goldblum), Jurassic Park
