How is this any different than a data center of the same scale? I'm not even sure it has a higher bisection bandwidth.
Okay—I am sure it will have way lower latency between nodes at any equivalent bandwidth tier. But unless you're planning to aggressively exploit that, it's just your garden variety datacenter make more expensive and less flexible.
But right before then, Intel was seen as the dying giant.
No serious observer regarded Intel as a dying giant, though you'd have my vote for a Napoleonic (Itanium) psychopath (RDRAM), sleeping off a boozy bender (Prescott, Caminogate).
One humble phone call to their Israeli design center ("maybe let's just put the engineers back in charge for a short while"), and Intel bounced right back off the matt again, big time, rocking those giant abulous fabs we all knew they were still packing under their delirious anti-competitive power-grab.
For about a five year period, during their Hewlett Packard joint venture, that must have been one hell of dysfunctional board room, perhaps even arcing as high as 100 mFi (milli-Fiorinas).
All the splinter chains are vulnerable to Beowulf-cluster alliance attacks.
Unless you've got 51% of all available blockchain compute over all blockchains held by honest parties, your blockchain is at risk if all the hostile compute coalesces for a quick, selective heist (before going back to its sundry regular programming).
Even worse: all available blockchain compute includes Amazon's instant army (and any other advanced GPU cloud service), though perhaps the ASIC-advantage presently renders this moot (I don't follow this closely enough to know for any specific currency).
Bear in mind: you might only need to rent the instant army for a few minutes to tip the balance of power.
Mathematically, the ideal solution is to only have one blockchain, making the 51% bar is a sizeable fraction of all marginal or repurposable compute available, on a global basis.
Put that in your blockchain ICO and smoke it.
Yeah, yeah, I know—I'm exaggerating for effect—and my claim is barely 51% true, which is hardly true at all, by traditional standards, supposing you still believe in those, when obviously the whole point of your ICO is that you clearly don't.
Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so lurid is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it.
About leaked documents, the intel guys always ask "Could we just see an inch up your skirt, little girl, so that we know it's real?"
Only under this system, an inch is all it takes.
I suspect the canary car-wash maneuver is pretty darn hard to pull off, though you might onion-route it through Google translate, and then back to English again. But don't forget to sort every sentence in the resulting document into alphabetically order, or they'll nail you on a sequence canary.
The result at this point might seemingly be reduced to Lucky's monologue, but if you subscribe to the Russia House doctrine, questions are almost as revealing as answers, anyway.
Thus our canary-lite topic salad would be almost as revealing as the original document, modulo a ready supply of Brits in bow ties, hemming and humming and hawing and long-stroking a dusty chalkboard (this was my favourite scene in the movie, actually: the tea-sipping Rainmen of MI6 spook-kindergarten confabulation; later, when they cut to America, it's vast arrays of industrially air-conditioned beige MHz and short-stroked disk drives).
Moral of the story: baskets of bucks shorten your stroke length.
In canary world, sometimes even a fractional inch is all it takes. Proceed carefully, and leave no feather behind.
I keep an unusual amount of notes on things. It's a kind of GTD overkill. Anything that visits my mind, I prefer to have nailed down.
To some degree, this spiralled of its own accord: the more I recorded the faster I got; the faster I got, the more I recorded. It also helps to resolve the never-ending Sophie's Choice selection events among my dozens of major cognitive interests: get a bigger shoe & a less bare cupboard, and keep them all.
Then along comes Facebook. One mere Facebook folder no longer carries the day.
And now here's another item for my very narrow (yet non-slim) Facebook/data-sharing_public_spotlight_2018/ auxiliary flood plain.
I'm kind of surprised my explicit folder name actually fit into the Slashdot subject box. Facebook may break this yet. Stay tuned.
To be fair, plenty of engineers also have mental health issues, it's just that it's aspergers/ocd vs dementia/ptsd.
There's no health issue at all with most of the spectrum.
Probably the correct term is environmentally challenged—they just don't fit the Department of Education's main-sequence all-weather Cinderella slipper, not without great difficulty.
But, inshallah, they often get along in life just fine, once they dial into their unique groove, sufficiently off the beaten track of the main sequence.
The rare Anchorage Ethiopian also has a his own special personal "health" consultant, only in this case it's not some doctor with extensive training in the vagaries of human cognition and a well-thumbed DSM-V groaning under his desk, it's some junior sales flunky at Mark's Work Warehouse (or the Alaskan equivalent) who's A+ on layering pull-over parkas.
Just like the top comment on that story, if you use supermicro, you deserve what you get.
My afflicted X9SAE under FreeBSD routinely had uptimes over a year. Until we moved.
Now we reside in a charming garden community, almost exactly between the sea and a middling—but very busy—all-purpose international airport (flight school, helicopter base, many small planes, in addition to all the commercial jets and turboprops). This whole show is close enough to the sea that there's actually a gate in the security fence at the far end of the long runway (and a brightly painted tow path over a semi-major local artery) for schizophrenic seaplanes to toggle between wet feathers and dry feathers (though I've never seen it used; plus it routes around customs, so the paperwork and oversight would be decidedly non-trivial).
Here the Hydro powers-that-be, a few years back, replaced all the old wooden power poles with new concrete poles, only to later discover that the concrete poles were defectively engineered, so they would come out every three to six months to replace another one (cue a youthful, as-yet-unknown Weird Al bleating out "another day off the grid").
All the swanky new new poles are wood again.
Setting aside the Homer Simpson Hydro problem (doh!), I basically haven't experienced a single outage or fault on this build, either due to hardware or software, since I removed a bad 4-port network card in the fall of 2012, in its first month of life.
So I guess this is definitely a case of "deserve what you get" half full, because this particular board is the most rock-solid board I've ever deployed ("full" disclosure: sample size N=1).
This modulo a power company that can't successfully deploy concrete poles that don't randomly snap in half (I presume this is the terrifying failure mode that necessitates full road-closure, tandem cherry picker and flatbed crane, crewed by a reflective-vest six-pack of union labour, to show up and perform a six–eight hour field replacement); this additionally modulo a hardware company with none of the same hardware quality problems as my local Hydro company, but with shit for BIOS.
Between Intel and Supermicro, I must confess this whole thing is indeed a bit of a bummer.
Intel's face palm—Spectre—makes my isolation jails worthless. Supermicro's face palm turns any jail escape into a secret-volcanic-island undersea laser lair, there to reside until hell freezes over, which might very well arrive before my next core dump, on this amazing piece of kit—at least as viewed by the brilliantly marshalled electrons (if they can manage to get here, in the first place, which was Weird Al territory in this garden-by-the-noisy-sea community for a bad stretch, of late).
Welcome to paradise, half full.
... conclusively proven time and again...
Bitter segfault at #JADEDDEADBEEFCAFE
(Some security-addled Supermicro segfaults are worse that others. That particular one would worry me sick.)
A laptop with a large external monitor (or any kind of docking station) is a desktop.
In fact, I would enlarge "desktop" to include any form of input-heavy computer use where you don't constantly have your own fingers occupying (if not obscuring) your field of view.
Life savings have been stolen from TSB accounts...
Dog bites man. Contract law falls off turnip truck. Learned-helplessness porn, FTW. You know, could you grab a brain, please?
How about this, instead?
Illicit transactions savage TSB bank balances, nominally wiping out the life savings of some customers, most of whom are now shitting themselves to have TSB man-up pronto and restore their legally correct bank balances, ASAP.
I'm sure there's a nasty time gap between pronto and ASAP, because numerical restitution needs to be performed with extreme competence and exactitude.
Of course, if TSB shit the bed all the way to insolvency, the collective "fix this—you dirt-licking mofo—pretty please, with sugar on top" shit-storm presages a nasty run.
Mystery solved: I accidentally lopped off the closing double quote in the URL href tag. Slashdot recovered from this error fairly gracefully. My HTML to wiki script turned the bottom half of my post into %20 escape sequences. Trust Haskell to point out the error of your ways.
I wiki my longer posts as an exercise in finding out how often I repeat myself.
Verdict so far:
* thematically — all the time
* actual language and dress code — hardly ever
Of course, you keep going back to the same reference pool (e.g. Churchill's quotation). But that's because the common reference pool isn't actually all that large.
I read an article pool just last night where the reference pool was Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zygmunt Bauman, and Walker Percy.
On this list, three out of five is a pretty good score for an informavore gadfly (Walker Percy is mainly known—in popular circles—for writing the forward to A Confederacy of Dunces, much like Debbie Reynolds is barely known for her own immense filmography, but rather something else).
Somehow I managed to paste a link in title text rather than HTML, and this after manually excising the utm_term from the URL (how is that even possible?)
Many of these arguments are way too narrow. It's not just a feedback loop on the day: it also determines whether a driver makes enough money, in total, to say in the ride-hailing business altogether. It's also true that a pricing regime must be perceived as stable enough to plan around in order for the policy to converge on a maximal deliberated response—against the backdrop of the larger economy which is also shifting and uncertain. (Turns out, economics is complicated. Who knew?)
Uncertainty around the structure of surge pricing created by this kind of government meddling also factors into the equation.
In economics, it's very easy to construct counterfactual narratives about what choices might be made and how often, and then to suppose that some narrow observation supports one of those stories or another. This house of gas rarely survives structured measurement.
As a general rule with incentives, people are surprisingly good at organizing themselves to exploit incentive, given enough time.
There probably are people out there who would be happy to structure their lives to exploit surge pricing (mostly driving at surge times). But structuring your life is a time-consuming activity. Your wife might also need to make changes. She might have to speak with her boss, after carefully navigating her own work politics in preparation for that conversation. As comes down from history, Rome did not achieve transportation equilibrium in a day.
Where I can see a role for government is in ensuring that the ride-hailing consumer is fully informed about the surge pricing structure. Public transportation is, to some degree, a public utility. The riders should have pretty good tools to estimate their exposure to surge pricing before they step out their front door (if at all possible). Because a jerk-around-the-price-because-we-can-factor really does create a planning burden that society doesn't need.
So the government could mandate that ride-hailing services maintain a posture of data-rich predictive transparency, but leave the algorithm and its parameters in the good hands of greed. (And if the services get all proprietary about predictive transparency, then at that point their surge pricing medallion can be taken away. I'm pretty sure we'll find out at that point that Uber, too, is surprisingly good at adapting to political incentive, under necessity.
But again, this works only if the ride-hailing services believe they can't hack political necessity by sleeping with the mob—and leaving cash under the pillow. We have a name for this that no-one uses: institutional goodwill. We also have a name for the measurement of this, which everyone uses: the corruption index.
Apparently, to sample the average economics discussion, hardly anyone in society can recognize institutional equity when they see it (government sucks derf derf), but this same myopic majority sure can tell it when they don't see it (shithole-country spectrum disorder; the entire African continent lumped into a single basket-case; wealthy-nation border lice patrol).
In my view, corruption sucks, on pure systemic effects. But in order to deal with this, you have to believe government is healthy enough in the first place to endure painstaking reform. Just saying: the huge narrative out there that government isn't worth painstaking reform sure plays into to the greasy hands presently engaged in lucrative corruption circle-jerks between the virtuous private-sector Johns, and their slutty congresscritters (it's almost always such a loop; and it's almost always perceived through the primal, Edenic lens of sexual double standards). Even more to the point, at age fifty, the slutty congresscritter decides it's now time for his turn on top, and so he cashes in all his sub chits and erects his shingle in some shiny, top-corner office with a view of central park, and thus the slimy circle is made whole. Thus spoke Follow the Money 101.
As it happens, I viewed the Europa Report last night.
I'm not sure whether they revised Europa to have more atmosphere (by a factor of about 7 billion) or they revised water to have an entirely different triple point (with Jupiter so close, who knows?)
I guess the main theme of the movie is just how quickly all that intensive drilling wears off during a long, monotonous space flight with inadequate radiation shields (the audience can only presume the crew went through some kind of training regime, even in the quick & dirty, bottom line corporate context).
You also have to question their psychological preparation. Their first response to any difficult task is to immediately lose all track of time/safety (unless someone is constantly nattering at them through their helmet radio, if these ever work).
The radiation in Jupiter's belts is a million times more intense than in Earth's belts. For this reason, spacecraft—such as the Galileo orbiter—have typically tried to spend as little time as possible inside the belts. Although the radiation is generally well-understood, no one has yet figured out precisely what the effect is on Jupiter's moons.
The Europe Report in real (ish) life: we came, we saw, ventured ten feet out the door, discovered that our helmet radios were a steaming POS, immediately cancelled the EV, packed up our things, and returned home again, as we were comprehensively trained to do.
Better luck next time.
With humans on board, every milestone is preceded by ten prudent abortions.
I can't recall a time when I wasn't firmly in Dyson's astrochicken camp.
Astrochicken, Dyson explained, would be a one-kilogram spacecraft unlike any before it. It would be a creation of the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence and modern microelectronics—a blend of organic and electronic components.
Ever space movie tries to divert attention to the heroic, and every time they only manage to make the human crew look like an even bigger liability than I thought before.
The other option is one-way tickets. Which is actually way more believable than this cowboy crap.
Within fifty years, The Valhalla Implant could lie within easy reach. Plus, having redirected all that sexual energy (with a pink protein extracted from spawning salmon) it would also resolve the extra long voyage skoodlypooping-prohibition group sulk.
That is because advances in technologies for energy efficiency and renewable power, and the accompanying drop in their price, have made low-carbon energy much more economically and technically attractive.
There's a basic stupidity here. By implied extrapolation, the PR wonks are trying to lump energy technology in with Moore's law, as it applies to silicon: a die shrink only ever gets better (which itself is barely true any more, though it certainly enjoyed a stellar half century).
Environmental energy is not like that. Your fancy new solar technology might be cost effective while there is still more of California to exploit, but hardly ready for prime time in frigid "central" Alberta (the same 55th parallel north also runs through Glasgow, Copenhagen, and Moscow, just for starters).
But no problem, Canada's tiny population has a ludicrously unfair share of the world's ground water (and many powerful rivers associated with this). And if that doesn't get us through, we've still got thorium, too. As for wind power, better hope you get that build soon enough for forestall run-away climate change, or your wind forecasts might prove extremely fickle.
The march of progress is good, but this is shaping up as a long war, and today's low hanging fruit shall ever remain in perilous supply.
Yes, the implied metaphor sucks big time. In truth, the problem here is a lot more like optimizing software than optimizing silicon. Your database is the bottleneck, so you optimize a few key queries—and declare permanent victory.
But nope, now you've got other fish to fry. The load balancer, OMG PHP, the Intel Spectre BIOS patch, etc.
Dang it! If only Intel would simply give us the 8 GHz chip we've been waiting for since the thermally untenable Pentium 4 teased us horny.
———
As a side note, the legendary inefficiency of the Pentium 4 almost surely lead to the construction of an entire electrical generation station the world desperately did not need. And now all that extra carbon is part of today's problem, too, likely continuing to bear Intel-legacy climate interest for the next hundred years.
Good grief, Charlie Brownout, are we a feckless, stupid species.
———
Global-foresight triple word score if you bought a Prescott and then configured your 24/7 screensaver to run 3D Pipes.
Intel also moved to Prescott in order to increase clock speeds, however none of those speeds are available at launch (we're still no faster than Northwood at 3.2GHz) and Intel did so at the expense of lengthening the pipeline; the Prescott's basic integer pipeline is now 31 stages long, up from the already lengthy 20 stages of Northwood....
If you thought that Prescott was just going to be smaller, faster, better — well, you were wrong.
Cuffing Intel upside the head is popular again, lately, but in truth Intel has always been strangely bipolar.
For a while, there, CoreDuo's lurking Spectre saved a lot of carbon (on finite tasks, not counting CPU sinks like 3D Pipes).
This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. And it's not entirely a bad thing, either.
If Saab killed their automotive brand (this was mooted in another post I skimmed) by overpricing replacement parts, perhaps that was a rational market response (and implicit exit strategy). Perhaps they invested short-term cream windfall in other lines of business to great effect.
The whole point of capitalism is to let people screw their own pooch, if they are so inclined, because the view over the fence is generally full of shit. It's just human nature to underestimate the complications of other people's circumstances almost 100% of the time. Never heard at the water cooler after a natural experiment in trading places: "OMG! This is way easier than I expected it to be!" The other side of capitalism is that every action provokes a reaction, not necessarily equal and opposite (overreaction has long been a crowd favourite).
This pricing software exploits a fundamental asymmetry between the average car owner, and the industry as a whole. The rational response of the consumer is to flee the increasingly tilted asymmetrical power relationship—by not owning their own car in the first place. As car ownership becomes increasingly concentrated—in the hands of professional Uber drivers, ride-sharing fleets, weekend rentals, and leasing agreements—this asymmetry shrinks again.
Often this kind of pointed exploitation exactly precedes such an industry shift (because the incumbents see it coming, anyway, for other reasons; there's not a soul remaining in the automotive industry who doesn't daily hear the loud footsteps of the see-it-coming train).
Even so, private vehicle ownership has been equated to personal freedom by Madison Avenue for so long now, that this all does come as a shock, somewhere deep down. Of course, we all know that Madison Avenue only traffics in captive freedom, from the get go. I mean, we buy the products, but we're not dumb.
Even so, the unpleasant sound of tight fingers collapsing the trachea of romance does register as a shock, somewhere deep down.
These weirder-than-normal typos happen when I've got mental shoes pointed at the exit (you know that old "toe direction" magic decoder ring to home in on damp sex-kitten hotness).
This, in keeping with my theme, that maintenance of full autonomy does ultimately become wearing.
Eventually, another part of my brain orients me toward another task, entirely unlike girding my alimentary intake against the daily shit-sandwich shit storm.
Generally, when I'm not writing, I think the world is a grand place (mostly). This partly because I do exercise my immune function so vigorously, in my ritualistic (and personally important) daily yelling into the wind—without which I would soon lapse into mouth-breathing, like so many others, who've pragmatically adapted themselves to inhaling the taint tax.
Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins
This is way more libertarian than its comic imagery suggests.
To begin with, it implies millimeter large-muscle control, situated in the cerebral cortex, over an ape-link domination reflex arc which traditionally originates in the Brown Shirt–craving amygdala.
It also implies passive boundary management on the behalf of the indolent beak. Perhaps an alternate version would read: Your right to shove your shit down my throat ends when I close my mouth, purse my lips, and bar my teeth.
The difference explains why so many people show up with a shit sandwich to find out whether you've got the wits (or not) to suppress your aggressive ape arm-swing swallow reflex.
Standard libertarian error: I did nothing, because I presumed the asshole was aiming at my nose, instead. In libertarian theory—if you believe this aphorism—that's quite all right, no need for alarm. Just so long as the fist stops, on a dime, in cross-eyed, neutral air space.
On his part, Mat Velloso, who is technical advisor to CTO at Microsoft, said, "I don't think people understand how many of us at Microsoft love GitHub to the bottom of our hearts. If anybody decided to mess with that community, there would be a riot to say the least."
The intended imputation here is that if only we understood, we'd behave differently.
Not true.
Our behaviour can only be influenced by a loud, long, thorough, sensible, and credible disclosure about how a newly kinder/gentler Microsoft plans to operate, maintain, intervene and intercede with their newfound toy and it's non-trivial powers.
This book explains how most corporations under-communicate change by an order of magnitude.
We're not talking one soul-baring High Commission of the CTO blog post here. We're talking an entire Kotteresque full-court press, set into stone for the long haul.
The book depicts a clear path from creating the urgency to sustaining the change in the culture while using visual examples & proven practices.
What Kotter doesn't cover (time for an updated edition?) is the New World Order, where the urgency and sustained campaign lies in communicating a credible backbone of non-change.
In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Nadella said today the company is "all in with open source," and requested people to judge the company's commitment to the open source community with its actions in the recent past, today, and in the coming future.
I just finished watching a history of civilization video in which the British history (of world history) commented that when he grew up, all the high school history textbooks concerning Great Britain stopped at 1850 (British peak influence and affluence); he then claimed he had spoken to his American colleagues, who assured him that all their high school history textbooks stopped at 1950 (American peak influence affluence & greatest hit on the Welcome Back Codger campaign tour, as portrayed by the Pussy Grabber Elect, who, under Sharia law, would now be larger than life with a real hook and a real eye patch, mostly moaning about his once-legendary golf game, but still surprisingly agile on Twitter, typing with two fingers and one stump—Trump benefits far more from western-democratic social progress than he's honest enough to admit).
America: Try not to judge us by how we treated Native Americans before we had the complete run of the place.
And I'm not talking about the normal violence in the clash of technological haves and have-nots. I mean abdicating their treaty responsibilities when the Nez Perce actually came to the bargaining table. I mean all that forked tongue business where the early European Americans said "if only the natives were more civilized, they'd have better outcomes" until they actually had such a case on their hand, and—nope—the Nez Perce got buggered just as badly as everyone else. You see, the politicians in Washington meant well, but they were too preoccupied with their own internecine bun fights to actually send the troops to protect the Nez Perce (as promised) in exchange for their negotiated concessions. "I mean, good God, you can't expect us to organize troops in the middle of a Washington bun fight—just how naive can these people be!"
And so, judge us by how we've behaved lately, rather than what we did before, and how we originally obtained the grand stature we now enjoy and exploit, in our new-found wisdom and kindness and open arms.
[*] A real historian can take issue with my depiction of the Nez Perce (which is shallow) or wield the same superior knowledge to supply another dozen examples, most of them even better than my dimly recalled case in point.
In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.
Ah, yes, you've come such a long way, America, indeed.
An SJW with a time machine could do worse than going back in time to warn the Incas and the Aztecs (and the eastern, coastal, northern tribes) to convey every disease-riddled Spanish explorer, conquistador, and missionary directly into the soup pot, by the most ruthless and expedience methods available, for a minimum 30-minutes of hard boil, including all personal effects, and then to pile all the bones and dental remains together, along with their ships and equipment, to then construct a bonfire to rival Texas A&M (which, however, now lies on a thoroughly deactivated, counterfactual time line; the Europeans would probably have arrived anyway—perhaps in some D-day scale continental invasion of the 1700s—to glorious rid the Dark Continent of the heathen, infidel, blood-thirsty cannibals once and for all; moral of the Native American story: damned if you do, damned if you don't—the kind, established European Mr Nice Guy surely won't make his gentle entrance until long after all your corn rows R belong to us).
It's true that Microsoft hit peak evil long ago, it's just that I'm still far from reaching peak forgiveness, so the GitHub news makes my stomach grind.
The best you can say is that recent Microsoft has acquired a pragmatism of old age — if pretty much at gunpoint. It was either change or stand pat, as four other corporate megaliths zoomed past. I will probably never fully eclipse my worry that reluctant pragmatism makes for a fickle creed.
Back in the day, with utmost reluctance, I paid for software that I reviled. And Microsoft (who never returned that money) surely used it to grow their empire, fuck you very much.
Once extorted, thrice shy.
Yes, I know that modern Microsoft operates at a baseline evil not so different from their four equally glutinous silicon siblings, but how did you get here? One of the back stories is worse than the others, by a slam dunk.
If I were more pragmatic myself, I'd put some work into getting over these aged, obsolete feelings. But nobody is presently holding me at gunpoint, so I guess I won't.
Microsoft might not ruin this, but on their history, I'll actively have one foot out the door, rather than passively.
I was somewhat active on LinkedIn — until Microsoft bought it.
I was somewhat active on Goodreads — until Amazon bought it.
Because with these large corporations, you just never know what of retroactive TOS root canal is coming down the turnpike, on any given day.
Once these corporations get to a certain size, it almost takes radioactive blow-back from the community to deflect their course in any meaningful way. And I don't enjoy the galloping pony-swap for the duration as this plays out.
My "own goal" comment was actually a bit of a joke (ha! made you think) because elsewhere I state that time oracles were far less of a hazard back in the day of Internet 404.
But you could already have your programming team for the hydrogen bomb's neutron Monte Carlo simulation partitioning into less classified programmers who write the I/O portion (generally punched cards on stdin and stdout, in some cases every card representing a separate neutron) from the highly classified mathematicians coding the actual neutron model.
So imagine you've got Klaus Fuchs on your I/O team, and he wants to write I/O code to leak secrets about the neutron algorithm, which he stegs into some output stream he's actually allowed to see (this is probably a severe security oversight, already, but oh well).
If his I/O code has some access to a precision wall clock, which he can read as many times as he wants each time his I/O code runs, who knows what details might leak about the simulation algorithm itself, based on electrical artifacts it leaves behind. (I believe row hammer was already very much a thing concerning the Williams tube storage array.)
Really, the pernicious time problem stems from any partition of the trust domain roped into the same computational task (or shared processing environment).
I've commented to a mathematical friend more than once that computer science is mathematics, plus the assumption that time exists. (This also explains why I'm LISP-boner impotent. LISP is computer science, ++delay, minus the assumption that time exists; the user sees time, while the programmer doesn't—what's not to like?—but I still don't get the happy hardness.)
Moral of the story: fear the clock.
Do not fear napkin Turing-complete, CSS Turing-complete, nor LISP Turing-complete. (Turing-complete happens by accident at least once out of every nine innings of billiard-table HO-gauge NAND-gate pick-up-sticks.)
Perhaps what we need is a degraded system timer.
Ideally, the local mean would wander somewhat slowly on a fractalish time scale, only minimally convex around the extremes so as to stay within a +/- 30 second deviance specification for 99.8% of all samples. Ideally, the estimate of the mean would converge considerably more slowly than sqrt(N). But I don't know my thick-tailed distributions well enough to say what that would look like as an actual thing. You also don't want the difference between step changes to be small, on average; and you don't want the locations of the step changes to occur on precise, minute boundaries, either (duh!) In fact, I think sloppy-clock would return an ascending integer sequence, but the wall-time duration of each distinct integer interval (of minute-ish duration) would be unpredictable, as described.
My math is feeble enough that I can't even prove that my sloppy-clock as roughly stipulated even exists in practice, but let's assume it does.
Then you need to implement a security ring where the best clock available is sloppy-clock—and stuff all foreign scripts in there. Yes, plugging time leaks from the outside world in a sophisticated API is hard. True mathematicians need not apply (i.e. LISP won't help you in this endeavour, not even a little bit).
By avoiding capacitors (condensors) von Neumann's IAS computer could be frozen and single-stepped, or run at any frequency you desired, until the internal bit signals themselves became unstable. (Some of these early designs were actually asynchronous and self-timed.) Effectively uncoupled from the real world, such a machine has no ability to introspect the duration of its own operations—unless you screw up, and give it an actual wall clock or cycle-clock or global operation-count API (the second case is only possible with synchronous designs).
Uncoupled computing (Internet 404) is not popular under the modern CSS paradigm, so you do probably have to at least make a concession for sloppy-clock (which dingbat users can upgrade to precise-clock if it bothers them that their ESPN scoreboard page refreshes aren't entirely concurrent with the real world; it would also suck for implementing chess clocks; but not, strangely, for anticipating when a soccer game will officially end).
Anyways, this whole proposal is a massive research project.
I'm merely pointing out that computer science is merely mathematics—right up until time begins.
Von Neumann's early IAS computer didn't even have (internal) time. (That's because they had more than enough problems to deal with, already, without scoring an own goal.) Interestingly, Turing specified hardware random number generation from the get go, on purely formal reasoning about the space of available computation. Turns out, precisely measurable operational elapsed-time is ultimately more insidious (under promiscuous interconnection) than nondeterminacy. (A promiscuous web page being any web page bearing more than one cookie, or related code artifact.)
Maybe time does not fly like an arrow as described in its early scouting reports—but it certainly does leak (across code-execution trust domains) like a bat out of hell.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this any different than a data center of the same scale? I'm not even sure it has a higher bisection bandwidth.
Okay—I am sure it will have way lower latency between nodes at any equivalent bandwidth tier. But unless you're planning to aggressively exploit that, it's just your garden variety datacenter make more expensive and less flexible.
1977 Heinz Ketchup Commercial "Anticipation"
Heck of a lot of money, Brownie, for less ketchup.
No serious observer regarded Intel as a dying giant, though you'd have my vote for a Napoleonic (Itanium) psychopath (RDRAM), sleeping off a boozy bender (Prescott, Caminogate).
One humble phone call to their Israeli design center ("maybe let's just put the engineers back in charge for a short while"), and Intel bounced right back off the matt again, big time, rocking those giant abulous fabs we all knew they were still packing under their delirious anti-competitive power-grab.
For about a five year period, during their Hewlett Packard joint venture, that must have been one hell of dysfunctional board room, perhaps even arcing as high as 100 mFi (milli-Fiorinas).
Itanium Sales Forecasts edit.png
I can never review that chart without hearing Julie Andrews in my inner ear chirruping gaily away about kettles of kittens and mittens of string.
All the splinter chains are vulnerable to Beowulf-cluster alliance attacks.
Unless you've got 51% of all available blockchain compute over all blockchains held by honest parties, your blockchain is at risk if all the hostile compute coalesces for a quick, selective heist (before going back to its sundry regular programming).
Even worse: all available blockchain compute includes Amazon's instant army (and any other advanced GPU cloud service), though perhaps the ASIC-advantage presently renders this moot (I don't follow this closely enough to know for any specific currency).
Bear in mind: you might only need to rent the instant army for a few minutes to tip the balance of power.
Mathematically, the ideal solution is to only have one blockchain, making the 51% bar is a sizeable fraction of all marginal or repurposable compute available, on a global basis.
Put that in your blockchain ICO and smoke it.
Yeah, yeah, I know—I'm exaggerating for effect—and my claim is barely 51% true, which is hardly true at all, by traditional standards, supposing you still believe in those, when obviously the whole point of your ICO is that you clearly don't.
Canary trap
About leaked documents, the intel guys always ask "Could we just see an inch up your skirt, little girl, so that we know it's real?"
Only under this system, an inch is all it takes.
I suspect the canary car-wash maneuver is pretty darn hard to pull off, though you might onion-route it through Google translate, and then back to English again. But don't forget to sort every sentence in the resulting document into alphabetically order, or they'll nail you on a sequence canary.
The result at this point might seemingly be reduced to Lucky's monologue, but if you subscribe to the Russia House doctrine, questions are almost as revealing as answers, anyway.
Thus our canary-lite topic salad would be almost as revealing as the original document, modulo a ready supply of Brits in bow ties, hemming and humming and hawing and long-stroking a dusty chalkboard (this was my favourite scene in the movie, actually: the tea-sipping Rainmen of MI6 spook-kindergarten confabulation; later, when they cut to America, it's vast arrays of industrially air-conditioned beige MHz and short-stroked disk drives).
Moral of the story: baskets of bucks shorten your stroke length.
In canary world, sometimes even a fractional inch is all it takes. Proceed carefully, and leave no feather behind.
I keep an unusual amount of notes on things. It's a kind of GTD overkill. Anything that visits my mind, I prefer to have nailed down.
To some degree, this spiralled of its own accord: the more I recorded the faster I got; the faster I got, the more I recorded. It also helps to resolve the never-ending Sophie's Choice selection events among my dozens of major cognitive interests: get a bigger shoe & a less bare cupboard, and keep them all.
Then along comes Facebook. One mere Facebook folder no longer carries the day.
And now here's another item for my very narrow (yet non-slim) Facebook/data-sharing_public_spotlight_2018/ auxiliary flood plain.
I'm kind of surprised my explicit folder name actually fit into the Slashdot subject box. Facebook may break this yet. Stay tuned.
There's no health issue at all with most of the spectrum.
Probably the correct term is environmentally challenged—they just don't fit the Department of Education's main-sequence all-weather Cinderella slipper, not without great difficulty.
But, inshallah, they often get along in life just fine, once they dial into their unique groove, sufficiently off the beaten track of the main sequence.
The rare Anchorage Ethiopian also has a his own special personal "health" consultant, only in this case it's not some doctor with extensive training in the vagaries of human cognition and a well-thumbed DSM-V groaning under his desk, it's some junior sales flunky at Mark's Work Warehouse (or the Alaskan equivalent) who's A+ on layering pull-over parkas.
Lay it on me!
Baby, it's cold out there!
And then they set to work.
My afflicted X9SAE under FreeBSD routinely had uptimes over a year. Until we moved.
Now we reside in a charming garden community, almost exactly between the sea and a middling—but very busy—all-purpose international airport (flight school, helicopter base, many small planes, in addition to all the commercial jets and turboprops). This whole show is close enough to the sea that there's actually a gate in the security fence at the far end of the long runway (and a brightly painted tow path over a semi-major local artery) for schizophrenic seaplanes to toggle between wet feathers and dry feathers (though I've never seen it used; plus it routes around customs, so the paperwork and oversight would be decidedly non-trivial).
Here the Hydro powers-that-be, a few years back, replaced all the old wooden power poles with new concrete poles, only to later discover that the concrete poles were defectively engineered, so they would come out every three to six months to replace another one (cue a youthful, as-yet-unknown Weird Al bleating out "another day off the grid").
All the swanky new new poles are wood again.
Setting aside the Homer Simpson Hydro problem (doh!), I basically haven't experienced a single outage or fault on this build, either due to hardware or software, since I removed a bad 4-port network card in the fall of 2012, in its first month of life.
So I guess this is definitely a case of "deserve what you get" half full, because this particular board is the most rock-solid board I've ever deployed ("full" disclosure: sample size N=1).
This modulo a power company that can't successfully deploy concrete poles that don't randomly snap in half (I presume this is the terrifying failure mode that necessitates full road-closure, tandem cherry picker and flatbed crane, crewed by a reflective-vest six-pack of union labour, to show up and perform a six–eight hour field replacement); this additionally modulo a hardware company with none of the same hardware quality problems as my local Hydro company, but with shit for BIOS.
Between Intel and Supermicro, I must confess this whole thing is indeed a bit of a bummer.
Intel's face palm—Spectre—makes my isolation jails worthless. Supermicro's face palm turns any jail escape into a secret-volcanic-island undersea laser lair, there to reside until hell freezes over, which might very well arrive before my next core dump, on this amazing piece of kit—at least as viewed by the brilliantly marshalled electrons (if they can manage to get here, in the first place, which was Weird Al territory in this garden-by-the-noisy-sea community for a bad stretch, of late).
Welcome to paradise, half full.
Bitter segfault at #JADEDDEADBEEFCAFE
(Some security-addled Supermicro segfaults are worse that others. That particular one would worry me sick.)
A laptop with a large external monitor (or any kind of docking station) is a desktop.
In fact, I would enlarge "desktop" to include any form of input-heavy computer use where you don't constantly have your own fingers occupying (if not obscuring) your field of view.
Dog bites man. Contract law falls off turnip truck. Learned-helplessness porn, FTW. You know, could you grab a brain, please?
How about this, instead?
I'm sure there's a nasty time gap between pronto and ASAP, because numerical restitution needs to be performed with extreme competence and exactitude.
Of course, if TSB shit the bed all the way to insolvency, the collective "fix this—you dirt-licking mofo—pretty please, with sugar on top" shit-storm presages a nasty run.
Mystery solved: I accidentally lopped off the closing double quote in the URL href tag. Slashdot recovered from this error fairly gracefully. My HTML to wiki script turned the bottom half of my post into %20 escape sequences. Trust Haskell to point out the error of your ways.
I wiki my longer posts as an exercise in finding out how often I repeat myself.
Verdict so far:
* thematically — all the time
* actual language and dress code — hardly ever
Of course, you keep going back to the same reference pool (e.g. Churchill's quotation). But that's because the common reference pool isn't actually all that large.
I read an article pool just last night where the reference pool was Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zygmunt Bauman, and Walker Percy.
On this list, three out of five is a pretty good score for an informavore gadfly (Walker Percy is mainly known—in popular circles—for writing the forward to A Confederacy of Dunces, much like Debbie Reynolds is barely known for her own immense filmography, but rather something else).
Somehow I managed to paste a link in title text rather than HTML, and this after manually excising the utm_term from the URL (how is that even possible?)
In Trump's Washington, public business increasingly handled behind closed doors
[*] Somehow I suspect the utm_term is just for show anyway:
29f9047c-54fb-11e7-ba90-f5875b7d1876_story.html
Many of these arguments are way too narrow. It's not just a feedback loop on the day: it also determines whether a driver makes enough money, in total, to say in the ride-hailing business altogether. It's also true that a pricing regime must be perceived as stable enough to plan around in order for the policy to converge on a maximal deliberated response—against the backdrop of the larger economy which is also shifting and uncertain. (Turns out, economics is complicated. Who knew?)
Uncertainty around the structure of surge pricing created by this kind of government meddling also factors into the equation.
In economics, it's very easy to construct counterfactual narratives about what choices might be made and how often, and then to suppose that some narrow observation supports one of those stories or another. This house of gas rarely survives structured measurement.
As a general rule with incentives, people are surprisingly good at organizing themselves to exploit incentive, given enough time.
There probably are people out there who would be happy to structure their lives to exploit surge pricing (mostly driving at surge times). But structuring your life is a time-consuming activity. Your wife might also need to make changes. She might have to speak with her boss, after carefully navigating her own work politics in preparation for that conversation. As comes down from history, Rome did not achieve transportation equilibrium in a day.
Where I can see a role for government is in ensuring that the ride-hailing consumer is fully informed about the surge pricing structure. Public transportation is, to some degree, a public utility. The riders should have pretty good tools to estimate their exposure to surge pricing before they step out their front door (if at all possible). Because a jerk-around-the-price-because-we-can-factor really does create a planning burden that society doesn't need.
So the government could mandate that ride-hailing services maintain a posture of data-rich predictive transparency, but leave the algorithm and its parameters in the good hands of greed. (And if the services get all proprietary about predictive transparency, then at that point their surge pricing medallion can be taken away. I'm pretty sure we'll find out at that point that Uber, too, is surprisingly good at adapting to political incentive, under necessity.
But again, this works only if the ride-hailing services believe they can't hack political necessity by sleeping with the mob—and leaving cash under the pillow. We have a name for this that no-one uses: institutional goodwill. We also have a name for the measurement of this, which everyone uses: the corruption index.
Apparently, to sample the average economics discussion, hardly anyone in society can recognize institutional equity when they see it (government sucks derf derf), but this same myopic majority sure can tell it when they don't see it (shithole-country spectrum disorder; the entire African continent lumped into a single basket-case; wealthy-nation border lice patrol).
In my view, corruption sucks, on pure systemic effects. But in order to deal with this, you have to believe government is healthy enough in the first place to endure painstaking reform. Just saying: the huge narrative out there that government isn't worth painstaking reform sure plays into to the greasy hands presently engaged in lucrative corruption circle-jerks between the virtuous private-sector Johns, and their slutty congresscritters (it's almost always such a loop; and it's almost always perceived through the primal, Edenic lens of sexual double standards). Even more to the point, at age fifty, the slutty congresscritter decides it's now time for his turn on top, and so he cashes in all his sub chits and erects his shingle in some shiny, top-corner office with a view of central park, and thus the slimy circle is made whole. Thus spoke Follow the Money 101.
These are the people who
Do you think America is more burdened with the poor than China? Or do you think China also struggles to "remain relevant"?
Defined in that way, an hour is not a measure of time: it's a measure of relative motion.
The modern hour has since be redefined as a proper measure of time, relative to some kind of gnomonic nanofizz emanating from caesium-133.
(Somehow caesium-133 must be inherently more "timey" than planet earth.)
Julian Barbour apparently doesn't think that time really exists in deep physics; he seems to believe it's relative motion all the way down.
As it happens, I viewed the Europa Report last night.
I'm not sure whether they revised Europa to have more atmosphere (by a factor of about 7 billion) or they revised water to have an entirely different triple point (with Jupiter so close, who knows?)
I guess the main theme of the movie is just how quickly all that intensive drilling wears off during a long, monotonous space flight with inadequate radiation shields (the audience can only presume the crew went through some kind of training regime, even in the quick & dirty, bottom line corporate context).
You also have to question their psychological preparation. Their first response to any difficult task is to immediately lose all track of time/safety (unless someone is constantly nattering at them through their helmet radio, if these ever work).
Hiding from Jupiterâ(TM)s Radiation — January 2009
The Europe Report in real (ish) life: we came, we saw, ventured ten feet out the door, discovered that our helmet radios were a steaming POS, immediately cancelled the EV, packed up our things, and returned home again, as we were comprehensively trained to do.
Better luck next time.
With humans on board, every milestone is preceded by ten prudent abortions.
I can't recall a time when I wasn't firmly in Dyson's astrochicken camp.
Ever space movie tries to divert attention to the heroic, and every time they only manage to make the human crew look like an even bigger liability than I thought before.
The other option is one-way tickets. Which is actually way more believable than this cowboy crap.
Within fifty years, The Valhalla Implant could lie within easy reach. Plus, having redirected all that sexual energy (with a pink protein extracted from spawning salmon) it would also resolve the extra long voyage skoodlypooping-prohibition group sulk.
Nerdfighter CAPTCHA dictionary
There's a basic stupidity here. By implied extrapolation, the PR wonks are trying to lump energy technology in with Moore's law, as it applies to silicon: a die shrink only ever gets better (which itself is barely true any more, though it certainly enjoyed a stellar half century).
Environmental energy is not like that. Your fancy new solar technology might be cost effective while there is still more of California to exploit, but hardly ready for prime time in frigid "central" Alberta (the same 55th parallel north also runs through Glasgow, Copenhagen, and Moscow, just for starters).
But no problem, Canada's tiny population has a ludicrously unfair share of the world's ground water (and many powerful rivers associated with this). And if that doesn't get us through, we've still got thorium, too. As for wind power, better hope you get that build soon enough for forestall run-away climate change, or your wind forecasts might prove extremely fickle.
The march of progress is good, but this is shaping up as a long war, and today's low hanging fruit shall ever remain in perilous supply.
Yes, the implied metaphor sucks big time. In truth, the problem here is a lot more like optimizing software than optimizing silicon. Your database is the bottleneck, so you optimize a few key queries—and declare permanent victory.
Celebrating Too Early Compilation
But nope, now you've got other fish to fry. The load balancer, OMG PHP, the Intel Spectre BIOS patch, etc.
Dang it! If only Intel would simply give us the 8 GHz chip we've been waiting for since the thermally untenable Pentium 4 teased us horny.
———
As a side note, the legendary inefficiency of the Pentium 4 almost surely lead to the construction of an entire electrical generation station the world desperately did not need. And now all that extra carbon is part of today's problem, too, likely continuing to bear Intel-legacy climate interest for the next hundred years.
Good grief, Charlie Brownout, are we a feckless, stupid species.
———
Global-foresight triple word score if you bought a Prescott and then configured your 24/7 screensaver to run 3D Pipes.
Intel's Pentium 4 E: Prescott Arrives with Luggage — 1 February 2004
Cuffing Intel upside the head is popular again, lately, but in truth Intel has always been strangely bipolar.
For a while, there, CoreDuo's lurking Spectre saved a lot of carbon (on finite tasks, not counting CPU sinks like 3D Pipes).
Even Steven?
Hard to say.
This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. And it's not entirely a bad thing, either.
If Saab killed their automotive brand (this was mooted in another post I skimmed) by overpricing replacement parts, perhaps that was a rational market response (and implicit exit strategy). Perhaps they invested short-term cream windfall in other lines of business to great effect.
The whole point of capitalism is to let people screw their own pooch, if they are so inclined, because the view over the fence is generally full of shit. It's just human nature to underestimate the complications of other people's circumstances almost 100% of the time. Never heard at the water cooler after a natural experiment in trading places: "OMG! This is way easier than I expected it to be!" The other side of capitalism is that every action provokes a reaction, not necessarily equal and opposite (overreaction has long been a crowd favourite).
This pricing software exploits a fundamental asymmetry between the average car owner, and the industry as a whole. The rational response of the consumer is to flee the increasingly tilted asymmetrical power relationship—by not owning their own car in the first place. As car ownership becomes increasingly concentrated—in the hands of professional Uber drivers, ride-sharing fleets, weekend rentals, and leasing agreements—this asymmetry shrinks again.
Often this kind of pointed exploitation exactly precedes such an industry shift (because the incumbents see it coming, anyway, for other reasons; there's not a soul remaining in the automotive industry who doesn't daily hear the loud footsteps of the see-it-coming train).
Even so, private vehicle ownership has been equated to personal freedom by Madison Avenue for so long now, that this all does come as a shock, somewhere deep down. Of course, we all know that Madison Avenue only traffics in captive freedom, from the get go. I mean, we buy the products, but we're not dumb.
Even so, the unpleasant sound of tight fingers collapsing the trachea of romance does register as a shock, somewhere deep down.
These weirder-than-normal typos happen when I've got mental shoes pointed at the exit (you know that old "toe direction" magic decoder ring to home in on damp sex-kitten hotness).
This, in keeping with my theme, that maintenance of full autonomy does ultimately become wearing.
Eventually, another part of my brain orients me toward another task, entirely unlike girding my alimentary intake against the daily shit-sandwich shit storm.
Generally, when I'm not writing, I think the world is a grand place (mostly). This partly because I do exercise my immune function so vigorously, in my ritualistic (and personally important) daily yelling into the wind—without which I would soon lapse into mouth-breathing, like so many others, who've pragmatically adapted themselves to inhaling the taint tax.
This is way more libertarian than its comic imagery suggests.
To begin with, it implies millimeter large-muscle control, situated in the cerebral cortex, over an ape-link domination reflex arc which traditionally originates in the Brown Shirt–craving amygdala.
It also implies passive boundary management on the behalf of the indolent beak. Perhaps an alternate version would read: Your right to shove your shit down my throat ends when I close my mouth, purse my lips, and bar my teeth.
The difference explains why so many people show up with a shit sandwich to find out whether you've got the wits (or not) to suppress your aggressive ape arm-swing swallow reflex.
Standard libertarian error: I did nothing, because I presumed the asshole was aiming at my nose, instead. In libertarian theory—if you believe this aphorism—that's quite all right, no need for alarm. Just so long as the fist stops, on a dime, in cross-eyed, neutral air space.
The intended imputation here is that if only we understood, we'd behave differently.
Not true.
Our behaviour can only be influenced by a loud, long, thorough, sensible, and credible disclosure about how a newly kinder/gentler Microsoft plans to operate, maintain, intervene and intercede with their newfound toy and it's non-trivial powers.
Leading Change — 1996
This book explains how most corporations under-communicate change by an order of magnitude.
We're not talking one soul-baring High Commission of the CTO blog post here. We're talking an entire Kotteresque full-court press, set into stone for the long haul.
What Kotter doesn't cover (time for an updated edition?) is the New World Order, where the urgency and sustained campaign lies in communicating a credible backbone of non-change.
I just finished watching a history of civilization video in which the British history (of world history) commented that when he grew up, all the high school history textbooks concerning Great Britain stopped at 1850 (British peak influence and affluence); he then claimed he had spoken to his American colleagues, who assured him that all their high school history textbooks stopped at 1950 (American peak influence affluence & greatest hit on the Welcome Back Codger campaign tour, as portrayed by the Pussy Grabber Elect, who, under Sharia law, would now be larger than life with a real hook and a real eye patch, mostly moaning about his once-legendary golf game, but still surprisingly agile on Twitter, typing with two fingers and one stump—Trump benefits far more from western-democratic social progress than he's honest enough to admit).
America: Try not to judge us by how we treated Native Americans before we had the complete run of the place.
And I'm not talking about the normal violence in the clash of technological haves and have-nots. I mean abdicating their treaty responsibilities when the Nez Perce actually came to the bargaining table. I mean all that forked tongue business where the early European Americans said "if only the natives were more civilized, they'd have better outcomes" until they actually had such a case on their hand, and—nope—the Nez Perce got buggered just as badly as everyone else. You see, the politicians in Washington meant well, but they were too preoccupied with their own internecine bun fights to actually send the troops to protect the Nez Perce (as promised) in exchange for their negotiated concessions. "I mean, good God, you can't expect us to organize troops in the middle of a Washington bun fight—just how naive can these people be!"
And so, judge us by how we've behaved lately, rather than what we did before, and how we originally obtained the grand stature we now enjoy and exploit, in our new-found wisdom and kindness and open arms.
United States incarceration rate
[*] A real historian can take issue with my depiction of the Nez Perce (which is shallow) or wield the same superior knowledge to supply another dozen examples, most of them even better than my dimly recalled case in point.
Ah, yes, you've come such a long way, America, indeed.
An SJW with a time machine could do worse than going back in time to warn the Incas and the Aztecs (and the eastern, coastal, northern tribes) to convey every disease-riddled Spanish explorer, conquistador, and missionary directly into the soup pot, by the most ruthless and expedience methods available, for a minimum 30-minutes of hard boil, including all personal effects, and then to pile all the bones and dental remains together, along with their ships and equipment, to then construct a bonfire to rival Texas A&M (which, however, now lies on a thoroughly deactivated, counterfactual time line; the Europeans would probably have arrived anyway—perhaps in some D-day scale continental invasion of the 1700s—to glorious rid the Dark Continent of the heathen, infidel, blood-thirsty cannibals once and for all; moral of the Native American story: damned if you do, damned if you don't—the kind, established European Mr Nice Guy surely won't make his gentle entrance until long after all your corn rows R belong to us).
Nice post.
It's true that Microsoft hit peak evil long ago, it's just that I'm still far from reaching peak forgiveness, so the GitHub news makes my stomach grind.
The best you can say is that recent Microsoft has acquired a pragmatism of old age — if pretty much at gunpoint. It was either change or stand pat, as four other corporate megaliths zoomed past. I will probably never fully eclipse my worry that reluctant pragmatism makes for a fickle creed.
Back in the day, with utmost reluctance, I paid for software that I reviled. And Microsoft (who never returned that money) surely used it to grow their empire, fuck you very much.
Once extorted, thrice shy.
Yes, I know that modern Microsoft operates at a baseline evil not so different from their four equally glutinous silicon siblings, but how did you get here? One of the back stories is worse than the others, by a slam dunk.
If I were more pragmatic myself, I'd put some work into getting over these aged, obsolete feelings. But nobody is presently holding me at gunpoint, so I guess I won't.
Microsoft might not ruin this, but on their history, I'll actively have one foot out the door, rather than passively.
I was somewhat active on LinkedIn — until Microsoft bought it.
I was somewhat active on Goodreads — until Amazon bought it.
Because with these large corporations, you just never know what of retroactive TOS root canal is coming down the turnpike, on any given day.
Once these corporations get to a certain size, it almost takes radioactive blow-back from the community to deflect their course in any meaningful way. And I don't enjoy the galloping pony-swap for the duration as this plays out.
My "own goal" comment was actually a bit of a joke (ha! made you think) because elsewhere I state that time oracles were far less of a hazard back in the day of Internet 404.
But you could already have your programming team for the hydrogen bomb's neutron Monte Carlo simulation partitioning into less classified programmers who write the I/O portion (generally punched cards on stdin and stdout, in some cases every card representing a separate neutron) from the highly classified mathematicians coding the actual neutron model.
So imagine you've got Klaus Fuchs on your I/O team, and he wants to write I/O code to leak secrets about the neutron algorithm, which he stegs into some output stream he's actually allowed to see (this is probably a severe security oversight, already, but oh well).
If his I/O code has some access to a precision wall clock, which he can read as many times as he wants each time his I/O code runs, who knows what details might leak about the simulation algorithm itself, based on electrical artifacts it leaves behind. (I believe row hammer was already very much a thing concerning the Williams tube storage array.)
Really, the pernicious time problem stems from any partition of the trust domain roped into the same computational task (or shared processing environment).
I've commented to a mathematical friend more than once that computer science is mathematics, plus the assumption that time exists. (This also explains why I'm LISP-boner impotent. LISP is computer science, ++delay, minus the assumption that time exists; the user sees time, while the programmer doesn't—what's not to like?—but I still don't get the happy hardness.)
Moral of the story: fear the clock.
Do not fear napkin Turing-complete, CSS Turing-complete, nor LISP Turing-complete. (Turing-complete happens by accident at least once out of every nine innings of billiard-table HO-gauge NAND-gate pick-up-sticks.)
Perhaps what we need is a degraded system timer.
Ideally, the local mean would wander somewhat slowly on a fractalish time scale, only minimally convex around the extremes so as to stay within a +/- 30 second deviance specification for 99.8% of all samples. Ideally, the estimate of the mean would converge considerably more slowly than sqrt(N). But I don't know my thick-tailed distributions well enough to say what that would look like as an actual thing. You also don't want the difference between step changes to be small, on average; and you don't want the locations of the step changes to occur on precise, minute boundaries, either (duh!) In fact, I think sloppy-clock would return an ascending integer sequence, but the wall-time duration of each distinct integer interval (of minute-ish duration) would be unpredictable, as described.
My math is feeble enough that I can't even prove that my sloppy-clock as roughly stipulated even exists in practice, but let's assume it does.
Then you need to implement a security ring where the best clock available is sloppy-clock—and stuff all foreign scripts in there. Yes, plugging time leaks from the outside world in a sophisticated API is hard. True mathematicians need not apply (i.e. LISP won't help you in this endeavour, not even a little bit).
By avoiding capacitors (condensors) von Neumann's IAS computer could be frozen and single-stepped, or run at any frequency you desired, until the internal bit signals themselves became unstable. (Some of these early designs were actually asynchronous and self-timed.) Effectively uncoupled from the real world, such a machine has no ability to introspect the duration of its own operations—unless you screw up, and give it an actual wall clock or cycle-clock or global operation-count API (the second case is only possible with synchronous designs).
Uncoupled computing (Internet 404) is not popular under the modern CSS paradigm, so you do probably have to at least make a concession for sloppy-clock (which dingbat users can upgrade to precise-clock if it bothers them that their ESPN scoreboard page refreshes aren't entirely concurrent with the real world; it would also suck for implementing chess clocks; but not, strangely, for anticipating when a soccer game will officially end).
Anyways, this whole proposal is a massive research project.
I'm merely pointing out that computer science is merely mathematics—right up until time begins.
Von Neumann's early IAS computer didn't even have (internal) time. (That's because they had more than enough problems to deal with, already, without scoring an own goal.) Interestingly, Turing specified hardware random number generation from the get go, on purely formal reasoning about the space of available computation. Turns out, precisely measurable operational elapsed-time is ultimately more insidious (under promiscuous interconnection) than nondeterminacy. (A promiscuous web page being any web page bearing more than one cookie, or related code artifact.)
Maybe time does not fly like an arrow as described in its early scouting reports—but it certainly does leak (across code-execution trust domains) like a bat out of hell.