Would be great to work in such a company as a Linux guru.
There are so many entangled services and machines that you feel like an Indiana Jones. You ssh into a machine and feel century-old dust beneath your footsteps. And you never know what will you find. Maybe a service which holds the company together. Maybe a CPU eating hog which didn't do anything useful last 3 years.
I don't enjoy writing new code much. But in such an environment even with my limited skills I can do decent improvements, especially from security point of view. Feels great
Having studied complexity from a computational perspective (via Santa Fe Institute and 1st wave Cybernetics) and a natural sciences one (via Dave Snowden and Alicia Juarrero) my preference is to stay away from modelling complex systems particularly complex adaptive ones. There is value in modelling, but heed the advice that all models are wrong. If you want to understand why, take a look at Steven Wolfram's Computational Irreducibility and Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework.
As for your interest in self-assembly and emergence I would highly recommend Alicia Juarrero's Dynamics in Action and Context Changes Everything - they are both tapping biological sciences to update and better inform our views of the world in deeply meaningful ways. The former changes our notion of cause-and-effect as the driving force in complex systems, stepping away from the Newtonian billiard ball frame. The latter expands on it talking about how constraints underpin the actions and dynamics in complex systems.
I'd agree that I'd love to see some convergence eventually in the complexity sciences world - but it is a new science relatively speaking - the divergence is a positive property in my opinion!
Keep up the energy, keep writing and keep researching! I enjoyed your post, it reminded me of the excitement I have for the field as a whole and the thirst I had for very similar questions! I wouldn't of guessed you were a 16yr old had you not stated it. Be prepared to have fundamental views changed and get comfortable with uncertainty!
Pilot Plants and Scaling Up Chemical engineers learned long ago that a process that works in the laboratory cannot be implemented in a factory in only one step. An intermediate step called the pilot plant is necessary to give experience in scaling quantities up and in operating in nonprotective environments. For example, a laboratory process for desalting water will be tested in a pilot plant of 10,000 gallon/day capacity before being used for a 2,000,000 gallon/day community water system.
Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built.
In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done.[ Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Seen this way, the answer is much clearer. Delivering that throwaway to customers buys time, but it does so only at the cost of agony for the user, distraction for the builders while they do the redesign, and a bad reputation for the product that the best redesign will find hard to live down.
Now that we can "rotoscope" full motion video via AI, Koko the Clown becomes an even better mascot.
[would Betty Boop then be an appropriate mascot for what Linebarger quaintly calls "Oestrous Propaganda"? As evidence that even in the 1940s and 1950s scientists and other men of culture were punctilious with providing sources, here's Linebarger:
> Figure 31: Oestrous Black. Young human beings, especially young males, are apt to give considerable attention to sex. In areas of military operations, they are removed from the stimuli of secondary sex references which are (in America) an accepted part of everyone's daily life: bathing beauty photos, magazine covers, semi-nudes in advertisements, etc. Our enemies tried to use the resulting pin-up craze for propaganda purposes, hoping that a vain arousal of oestrum would diminish morale. This choice Japanese item is from the Philippines. (The best collection of these is kept in a locked file—for experts only—at the Library of Congress.) ]
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6amCG2KHlRg (the Gaidai movie referred to Pushkin, so there are layers under layers here; judging by geography I wouldn't even be surprised if the surface layer were also referring to the third)
Coincidentally in the project I'm currently working I managed to reduce our compile times significantly (~35% faster) using ClangBuildAnalyzer [1]. The main two things that helped were precompiled headers and explicit template instantiations.
Unfortunately, the project still remains heavy to compile because of our use of Eigen throughout the entire codebase. The analysis with Clang's "-ftime-trace" show that 75-80% of the compilation time is spent in the optimisation stage, but not really sure what to do about that.
I stuck around using it for longer than I probably should have. The integrated chat and mail clients were useful. The HTML editor not so much, and didn't appear to get much attention.
One of the main things I miss is the LCARSTrek theme by KaiRo. Unlike any other LCARS browser theme, I found it to be usable on a day to day basis. Sadly it isn't available for Firefox.
I was one of the first hires on the Cyc project when it started at MCC and was at first responsible for the decision to abandon the Interlisp-D implementation and replace it with one I wrote on Symbolics machines.
Yes, back then one person could write the code base, which has long since grown and been ported off those machines. The KB is what matters anyway. I built it so different people could work on the kb simultaneously, which was unusual in those days, even though cloud computing was ubiquitous at PARC (where Doug had been working, and I had too).
Neurosymbolic approaches are pretty important and there’s good work going on in that area. I was back in that field myself until I got dragged away to work on the climate. But I’m not sure that manually curated KBs will make much of a difference beyond bootstrapping.
Supreme Commander is still pretty active, via the FAForever community. The original single player maps were converted to co-op. Lots of game modes, a new race, unit tweaks, new maps - very much a game that still gets love.
When the next steam sale hits, you only need the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliances game (Under $3) and https://www.faforever.com installer and it all updates lovely. Works on Linux, multi monitors, and a dozen or so players connecting.
For me, I found this was the open source project I used to keep my SpringBoot skills current. Nothing but positive things to say.
This means links get a semitransparent underline normally, and full-opacity on hover. I reckon it’s an excellent balance. Occasionally you’ll get double underlining due to people using border-bottom instead of text-decoration for some unfathomable reason, and occasionally there’ll be link-styled buttons that won’t get this underline, but all up I’ve found it pretty good as an intervention.
(I’ve been using this technique on websites I make since 2019, though I haven’t yet had the opportunity to use color-mix() on a public site, which only stabilised in browsers 6–11 months ago. My preferred technique there will be `:any-link:where(:not(:hover, :active, :focus)) { text-decoration-color: color-mix(in srgb, currentcolor 30%, transparent); }`.)
The best antenna will depend on what you're trying to receive. Different antennas are optimized for different frequency ranges, and may be either omnidirectional (receiving equally well from many directions) or favour reception in one particular direction. To get started, you could buy a dongle that comes with an antenna included, but you may eventually want to switch to something targeted to the particular application you have in mind.
As for the computational cost, it depends a lot on what you're trying to do. As a general rule, the wider the bandwidth of the signal, the more processing power it will take to demodulate. HD Radio is relatively narrow-band (400 kHz), so it doesn't require much CPU power to receive it.
There are so many entangled services and machines that you feel like an Indiana Jones. You ssh into a machine and feel century-old dust beneath your footsteps. And you never know what will you find. Maybe a service which holds the company together. Maybe a CPU eating hog which didn't do anything useful last 3 years.
I don't enjoy writing new code much. But in such an environment even with my limited skills I can do decent improvements, especially from security point of view. Feels great