"(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."

They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.

Whenever I use a recent(ish) Windows (rarely :-), it's annoyances like this that make for a poor UX. Again & again.

When you put a computer to sleep/hibernate, you expect it to come out of sleep in a similar state as before. When you select "shut down", you expect that. Not "installing update 1..20, then shut down".

It keeps amazing me that within Microsoft, after having done so many OSes used by millions, some eggheads think that breaking user expectations is a good design decision. It is not.

This. After Doom, there were maaany releases where a studio had X out there, and then released [3D version of X]. Or also throw themselves onto the fps genre. Almost to the point of killing innovation.

Don't get me wrong: that, and the 'infinite' storage of CD-ROMs got us many nice games.

But neither did much to sharpen game developer's creativity skills. Many "me too! (meh..)" releases in that era.

For a # of years I used a setup with all my favourite tools running from a RAMdisk. That's on MSX2/2+. Edit/assemble/debug cycles in <1 minute if so desired. There was also KUN BASIC on that platform: a JIT compiler for (a subset of) MSX-BASIC. Speedups of ~10..20x or more for many programs or -sections with near-zero effort.

And of course, all this could be freely mixed. Short snippets of machine code for speed/'heavy lifting', BASIC to glue everything together & make quick edits.

Sadly this seems to be lost on modern platforms. Despite >10,000 faster cpu's, ungodly amounts of RAM, storage etc.

Mostly not to destroy people's muscle memory, I think.

People have gotten used to, and expect certain behaviour from OS+apps. Futz with that, and users become annoyed, frustrated, or ditch an otherwise fine piece of software.

In other words: history / inertia.

'Grab laptop, fire up IDE & plug in programmer cable' vs. 'configure the circuit using a soldering iron'. Both have their place.

Worldwide, dairy & meat are big drivers in climate change, as well as other ecological problems. The NL has a front row seat there. :-( Eg. quality of surface waters is about the worst among EU countries.

Imho the NL would be a better country without its dairy industry: land to re-purpose for growing other crops, increase nature and/or recreational areas, reduce a host of ecological issues, etc. At the cost of a vanishingly small part of our GDP.

But alas - dairy industry, its suppliers & their lobby is a powerful one. So change is slow to come and only if/where absolutely necessary.

"Invasive" is usually reserved for cases where species hitch a human-facilitated ride, and then invade native species/ecosystems.

Another data point: I've visited public libraries around Friesland province. They all use catalog + internet facilities which look & feel the same across libraries: a browser (Mozilla) + office suite, PDF reader, files can be saved locally put don't persist between user sessions.

This would lend itself perfect for a Linux-based setup: netboot (from per-building local file server or NL-based cloud), read-only filesystem, LibreOffice etc.

But alas: the setup is Windows-based (running on Intel NUC or similar), office suite is Microsoft Excel/Word/PP. Completed by Acrobat PDF reader. No doubt it's at least able to leak telemetry and/or user data if Microsoft were to feel like it (or asked/forced to do by US gov).

That's ignoring software bloat, super-heavy web frameworks, social media's addictive algorithms, user tracking & what have you.

What? That's nothing.

Come to the NL, especially coastal areas. Last week I drove past a field covered in geese. Imagine a rough square with ~150 geese on each side, entirely filled in. Some quick math told me I could be looking at ~20k geese. Definitely >10k. In one swarm.

Okay, that one was big enough to amaze even me. And I have seen many geese - especially the last few years.

But 300? Be happy they're there & enjoy the wildlife while you still have some, for ff's sake. Remember there was a time when wild animals outnumbered humans on this planet.

I'm reminded of a quote I heard recently, concerning military drones: "hardware becoming cheaper & cheaper. Software that controls it, becoming more & more expensive".

Read: opening a can of pre-coded stuff is 'free'. But: the engineering effort that went into that existing code, and the effort required to improve that, is on a hockey-stick curve.

To get this started: for the good 'ol Z80, I'm torn between Decrement-and-Jump-if-Not-Zero (DJNZ), and Decimal Adjust Accumulator (DAA). Rarely used ComPare, Increment & Repeat (CPIR) could be another contender.

On RISC-V, I much like the Set-Less-Than (SLT..) instructions. Great for replacing conditional branches with branchless, sequential math.

Your favourites?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870685

Points: 5

# Comments: 10

There'll be plenty of hobbyists and/or legacy industrial / niche applications for a looong time to come.

For example the design of a machine may have it tolerate inputs way outside spec & work fine. It may be built to take a beating, while no manual mentions using it in a rough environment. There may be subtle or not-so-subtle tweaks done to it over the years.

So that machine embodies knowledge, that may be 're-discovered' (by observing machine in action) long after its original designer is gone.

Another example: the design of traffic systems, the layout of cities (mostly organic growth), and how it affects the flow of people & goods through that city.

That's just a few examples. In short: knowledge is stored in other ways besides books/videos etc, or people's heads.

That said: it's a bit sad there's so little (if anything) in the space between microcontrollers & feature-packed Linux capable SoC's.

I mean: these days a multi-core, 64 bit CPU & a few GB's of RAM seems to be the absolute minimum for smartphones, tablets etc, let alone desktop style work. But remember ~y2k masses of people were using single core, sub-1GHz CPU's with a few hundred MB RAM or less. And running full-featured GUI's, Quake1/2/3 & co, web surfing etc etc on that. GUI's have been done on sub-1MB RAM machines once.

Microcontrollers otoh seem to top out on ~512KB RAM. I for one would love a part with integrated: # Multi-core, but 32 bit CPU. 8+ cores cost 'nothing' in this context. # Say, 8 MB+ RAM (up to a couple hundred MB) # Simple 2D graphics, maybe a blitter, some sound hw etc # A few options for display output. Like, DisplayPort & VGA.

Read: relative low-complexity, but with the speed & power efficient integration of modern IC's. The RP2350pc goes in this direction, but just isn't (quite) there.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812075

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

But beware of Jevons paradox.

Say that eg. a software project has 10 developers, and each build takes ~15 minutes. Most developers would take at least some care to check their patches, understand how they work etc, before submitting. And then discuss follow-on steps with their team over a coffee.

Now imagine near-instant builds. A developer could copy-paste a fix & hit "submit", see "oh that doesn't work, let's try something else", and repeat. You'll agree that probably wouldn't help to improve the codebase quality. It would just increase the # of non-functional patches that can be tested & rejected in a given time span.

In other words: be careful what you wish for.

But gates apply operations/functions to those signals, and naming that logic clarifies its purpose.