If you have finite monkeys, let's say they number M, but infinite time, then for small values of M it would be faster to breed the monkeys until one of them evolves into Shakespeare.
In the early 90s, Geoworks Ensemble filtered through my local teenager PC scene. The more curious among us tried it out. The experience was smooth and polished enough, and just different enough, that we went back a few times. Running Geoworks for weeks at a time.
But ultimately the system was relatively closed and limiting, there was nowhere to go with it once you got sick of the range it offered. From the perspective of young home enthusiasts at the time, anyway.
Meanwhile DOS (and even Windows) -based development was undergoing a period of extremely rapid iterative changes and extensions. It was impossible to stay away from that for long. It's where all the action was.
Yeah, it took way too long to prioritize and deliver a non-assembly development chain and opening that up to the public at large.
We cross-developed from Sun workstations to x86 PCs and quality of x86 native tooling wasn't nearly as good. But eventually building on x86 was actually quite a bit faster.
A belated note, from a bubbled-up memory (all on an "IIRC" basis!) :
Hard disk space was the killer, as much as anything. The average home PCs hard disk was 40-50MB in those days, and iirc a full Geoworks Ensemble install took almost half of it. And regardless of how one scrimped and made-do with what was left, it became an overwhelming disadvantage to have the whole system weighed down in that manner by such a heavy OS.
I can't edit the above post now (thus the folly of hastily commenting on HN, perhaps), but after actually looking into it by doing a DOSBox-X install, it seems that the Geoworks Ensemble 2.0 install size is only <10MB.
I suspect that my false memories of it taking more space were because, by 1993, DOS games and programs were requiring steadily more disk space (and there were more of them!). With Geoworks taking any sizeable portion our increasingly-meagre 40-52MB disks, we soon found ourselves desperately wanting those megabytes back to install this-or-that extra thing.
I guess the old 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle somewhat applies to the support distribution for many products. That is, 80% of the support resources are taken up by 20% of the clients. (incredibly-vaguely-speaking, naturally)
The variable is "20% of what type of client?". 20% of Taylor Swift concert attendees, or 20% of assembly coders? Each comes with its own unique challenges!
Mostly true. But the last part is incorrect. There are far more pixels in an image compared to the number of points in the point cloud area covered by that image. So you get 1 pixel per point. In addition there can be multiple points that map to the same pixel.
NZ elected a business-centric government last year. Since then, all government decisions involving individuals-vs-business have taken a distinct lean towards the business side.
Funny how it's considered ethically ok to cause a great deal of angst and bother with the bugs and features of corporate releases, provided the problematic elements are entirely couched in 'professional' language and symbology.
I cook versions of this on the regular. I say versions, because simply having The Official Recipe is only half the battle. The actual flavours and strengths of the individual herbs and spices can vary a lot by brand, and by country, and by source, and other factors.
My main takeaway (PNI!) is that the white pepper and the smoked paprika together are the heart of the KFC flavour. The rest just augment, refine the flavour. And of course, the salt and/or MSG go a long way.
Which contains its own irony, as the trees providing the primary material the physical books are made from would probably have a thing or two to say about the notion of being stolen from.
I don't see any irony in it since trees don't have brains or opinions as far as we know, but when they decide to say something about it I'll definitely be sure to listen. Short of that though, I'm generally not opposed to the production of paper.
You mean sentience? Of course that's where moral value begins. Almost everyone holds that position.
And people who say they don't almost always are roleplaying that they don't for the sake of argument and can be immediately exposed as holding a contradiction in their values with the most basic pressure/consistency tests.
Your belongings aren't sentient and I'm sure that if they were to be wiped out almost everyone would hold the position that they couldn't be bothered to care.
That's not a comparable argument because your belongings have a material effect on at least one sentient entity.
Instead what if you were given the power to expunge everything in the universe outside of our solar system. Would that be acceptable?
That's not a comparable argument because you haven't been properly compensated as authors of the printed word are. If you received a dime for every snuffed-out star, would it then be acceptable?
Of course if you were to argue that downsizing the universe represents an intangible loss to humanity as a whole, we are have returned to ground zero in which it is ironic that exterminating trees provides a net benefit to humanity.
It's scientifically known that plants respond to stimuli such as being injured, namely to communicate that fact to others of its species in the vicinity.
For an example I'm sure most people can relate to, you probably know that "cut grass smell" when you mow your lawn? That's the grass throwing out chemical signals telling other grass "Hey! Something cut me down! Be warned!".
While whether this can count as intelligence or sentience is worthy of further debate, to say that trees don't feel anything is a gross mistake.
All living things respond to stimuli, even some non-living things respond to stimuli (like viruses or crystals) so I don't see "response to stimuli" as sufficient evidence that plants suffer pain.
Actually, I'm not categorically opposed to the notion, but I think you need to bring a lot to the table to explain why things without nervous systems feel pain. If the default assumption is that all complex systems feel pain then I wonder if you think things like jetstreams, economies and the internet feels pain.
> that "cut grass smell" when you mow your lawn? That's the grass throwing out chemical signals telling other grass "Hey! Something cut me down! Be warned!".
>Actually, I'm not categorically opposed to the notion, but I think you need to bring a lot to the table to explain why things without nervous systems feel pain.
Note that I didn't say they feel pain, just that they can feel what is done to them by the environment around them and respond appropriately.
The fact trees don't speak human plays a big role in us not understanding them, but they do clearly feel and express things whatever they may be.
>So is it immoral to cut grass?
Considering most of it is done for purely aesthetic purposes to satisfy human egos, arguably yes.
Note that whether it's moral or not is tangent to whether it can be done or not. We humans do plenty of immoral things without a care in the world.
Well, I never said "they feel nothing", but if you're saying plants have a right to life because they feel "something" I'm wondering where you draw the line. If you're something of a panpsychist I'm actually ok with these conclusions in terms of metaphysical consistency.
This reminds me of a situation which I'll label "satellite office syndrome" - which is where a company has a large/dominant Head Office, and smaller regional offices which are in a permanent state of playing second-fiddle in terms of funding, attention, respect and company culture.
This is as true with products as with locations. For example, the people doing S3 at Amazon get everything they need, because that is a blockbuster product...and the people doing, oh I dont know, Greengrass IoT are waayyy down the totem pole even though it might be a perfectly profitable product.
Large orgs tend to have a Roman Empire feel to them for most of the people, most of the time. You're stuck out on the edge of the empire, minding Hadrian's Wall, proud to be a Roman but also far, far away from any influence over or interest from the Emperor. If you are lucky they leave you alone. Occasionally a missive arrives from Rome that you have to decipher and implement no matter whether it makes sense or not. Fun times.
I thought that metaphor would go in a different direction, tbh. I was thinking “praetorian guards”, “imperial decline”, “decadence”, “barbariand resettling inside the limes” etc.
