Selfish how, because he clearly does not say that upgradability or customizability are bad things? Its also not like hes proposing something that isnt reality for most manufacturers, especially Apple.
In 1983, AT&T released the fifth version of Unix, called "System V". Part of the release was an ABI specification for how the different parts of the system would talk to one another. Notably, the main portion of the spec described portable things like the file-format of executables, and the details for each supported platform were described in appendixes.
The SysV ABI is still used to this day, although the specification itself has withered until only two chapters remain[1], and CPU vendors still publish "System V ABI appendix" documents for platforms that System V's authors could not have dreamed of[2].
C as an interface is going to be around for a very long time, like POSIX and OpenGL and the SysV ABI standard. C as an actual language might not - it might wind up as a set of variable types that other languages can map into and out of, like what happened to the rest of the SysV ABI specification.
I plan to be writing C for the next decades even for new projects, because I think it is a great language. I happy if people are excited about Rust, but I do not like it too much myself (although I acknowledge that it contains good ideas, it also has many aspects I do not like).
I think it’s really revealing to see so many folks defending views like “hunter gathering was better” and “the past wasn’t dickensian.”
I remember the first time I encountered the former view from a person, they were an artist living in London and a communist. I nearly spat out my beer when he told me that hunter gathering was a better life for humans.
It seems to be some kind of desire to rage against progress, because industrialisation brings many downsides e.g, pollution climate change etc. Maybe because they hate the rich and powerful capitalists that rule the world.
But what they always miss from their arguments is a clear conception of just how incredibly privileged and fortunate they are to be born into an industrialised society. People are very very bad at appreciating what they are given, it seems to be an innate human trait to exhibit breathtaking ingratitude for what already is. We’re pretty good at anticipating and appreciating the new, but if it’s already there then, like a spoilt child living in a luxury home, we take it for granted.
I think one solution to this problem is to remove as many comforts from your life, temporarily. For example, for a week in winter don’t use your heating or hot water. For me, it was travelling to poor countries and living without potable or warm water, decent transport, good food, etc. that made me grateful (at least for a while).
There's no reason such a laptop can't be repairable. Sure, it may be harder to do, but that's the tradeoff you choose when buying such a device.
The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional: part serialization, no documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed.
Address those problems and you can happily have your ultra-slim, tightly integrated laptop. It may be _slightly_ less repairable, but as long as repair isn't intentionally being prevented, life will find a way.
Oops, skipped the 10x part. If it's really 10x better that would indeed be amazing. That's basically the leap from C to Rust in domains that C is not good at.
It's such a silly idea that whatever is simulating us would be in any way similar or care about what's possible in our universe. It's like a game of life glider thinking it can't be simulated because someone would have to know what's beyond the neighbouring cells and that's impossible! But the host universe just keeps chugging along unimpressed by our proofs.
Any hoax can be easily fought, if the punishment of getting caught is severe enough.
The problem is the justice system, that is optimized to protect a criminal and to offload the costs to the society, which is happy to be distracted with identity and moral supemacy arguments.
If the money holders no longer need plebs for anything because AIs can do it all, what role do the plebs play? Why give them any of the money, and therefore what value has money?
Are they reduced to say gladiators and pornstars, observed for entertainment by the AI-owning class, in exchange for enough food to live
Information 30 years ago was more difficult to obtain. It required manual labor but in todays' context there was not much information to be consumed. Today, we have the opposite - a huge vast of information that is easy to obtain but to process? Not so much. Decline is unavoidable. Human intelligence isn't increasing at the pace advancements are made.
Would you consider a “charity” for Nazis or Neo Nazis defense to be a good thing or even charity? Would you care if evaluators said it was favorable/good? I wouldn’t for any of those questions.
No, it was easier. Not just lower risk. It gave you advantages both in terms of self defence, resources and even aggression toward surrounding group if you were collectively assholes.
It was easier to make your numbers go up, raise more kids which made you stronger.
Knuths intention seems clear enough in his own writing:
Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
and
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our
main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us
concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what
we want a computer to do.
Thanks for sharing your experience That sounds really unsettling to go through. I’m glad things have improved for you, but episodes that feel psychotic can be important to look into, since there can be many possible causes, not all of them related to food. If you ever feel comfortable doing so, talking with a medical professional could help make sure nothing else is going on in the background. Everyone’s body is different, and you know your experience best. I just hope you can get clarity and support so things keep moving in a good direction.
That sounds like a great read. And it seems that a lot of world leadsrs have taken an interest in the book. Yet still no other country except maybe China has aggressively pursued the same kind of environment.
Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspect our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".
Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.
As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.
