a) language was not garbage collected (C++)

b) we avoided heap lock contentions in critical paths by pre-allocating object pools at startup

c) I/O operations were offloaded to separate threads, connected by mutex locked linked lists

d) processing thread was bound to its own CPU core

That's about as deterministic as we could get.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936368

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJT4sdifLXM

I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was four people. An in-house distributed process orchestration tool (both front end and back end written in C++) were two guys. I myself once managed to produce an entire post-trade risk management system for futures contracts in a couple of months, working alone. Today, I see teams of 60-80 working on web and mobile applications where the vast majority of operations are CRUD, with some transaction/queue complexity at the extremities.

I think the difference is tech churn. Back then, what few dependencies we had in terms of either runtime libraries or development time tools, were stable: the standard library, compiler, unix commands and bash scripts, and some internal libraries. Much of our time and focus went into figuring out the right algorithms and data structures, with coding coming in second. Very little time was spent on selecting, configuring, updating, rearchitecting or replacing tech stacks and tools.

(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.

(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.

(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.

If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.

Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.

> Leven and Tristan worked over several months on one of the Millenium Prize Problems with various AIs to reach final interesting results. OpenAI apparently heard about it in the last days and prompted their latest models to work on the direction Leven and Tristan found fruitful. They then tried to push for controlling communication of the result and dropping Leven from authorship with some very bad taste social pressure.

(1) https://x.com/Thom_Wolf/status/2097215782484607029

(2) https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723341370570119...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597379

Points: 12

# Comments: 4