10 ms·

I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel l

I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.

avidiax 1y ago
Yeah, the sense at that time was that you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you if you aren't careful. Of course, the machines haven't really done anything to us. They've just been locked down and remotely controlled to deliver ads and misinformation.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us. While "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is a cliché, I think there's still considerable meaning behind it, and I'd say the same holds in the "machines don't do anything to people" sense. Sure, a lot of decision-making and faceless authority is outsourced to machines, but it's still people who are doing that outsourcing, and if those people stopped deciding to put so much weight on the output of (intentionally and unintentionally) black-boxed algorithms then that power of the machines would vanish instantly.
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  > ...you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you... Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping. The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping. Even in the "before times" we had such limitations: the 486 was shipped as a cheaper version with a functional but disabled math coprocessor. There are meaningful differences in practical terms, but I definitely see it as a clear predecessor of this behavior.
    - grishka 1y ago
      That's different. Lithography masks are expensive. It's cheaper to make them once and use them for different models of the same chip than to make a separate set for each model. My understanding is that in this particular case they would sell the FPU-less version below the cost and the full one with some markup. In modern times they also do this because the process of semiconductor manufacturing is imperfect and sometimes some parts of the chip would come out damaged. IIRC this happens with GPUs a lot so they tend to have spare cores.
      - fredoralive 1y ago
        IIRC later revisions of the 486SX have a unique mask set without the FPU, presumably the higher chips per wafer made up for the extra tooling costs. Also, as a note, unlike modern chips where they fuse off broken cores and sell them as lower specs[1] as part of the binning process, with the early 486SX the FPU was disabled before any testing / binning, so they weren’t selling broken DX dice as SXs. [1] Or in some cases, fusing if working silicon if the supply / demand curve works that way, see the infamous 3 core AMD Phenom.
    - EvanAnderson 1y ago
      Binning products into segments is different than blowing e-fuses. When I bought a 486SX I got a 486SX. It remained forever what it was when I bought it. In a hypothetical scenario where I somehow "unlocked" the FPU functionality Intel couldn't push out a mandatory firmware upgrade to blow an e-fuse in my chip, fixing the "vulnerability" that allowed me to access the FPU and simultaneously preventing me from ever loading "vulnerable" firmware again (like, say, the Nintendo Switch).
- yongjik 1y ago
  That's just past with its rose-tinted glasses. It was easy for someone to master the machine when that someone was a university researcher or a lone gamer, the most precious resource stored in the machine was saved term projects, and either it was not connected to anything else, or connected to fellow university researchers. The stake was low, because nobody could use your computer to drain your bank account. And someone who would "prank" your computer beyond the social norm would get a stern talking to. Computers these days have to support your grandma making hotel reservations online without her entire financial information being sent to hackers in Eastern Europe. They're doing jobs that 70s OS designers never thought about. It's a different world.
- 6502nerdface 1y ago
  James Yeh, Ken Griffin's "first quant" and eventual co-CIO of Citadel, used to say, when annoyed by a junior who was overfitting to the backtest, "I don't let the computer boss me around! I tell the computer what to do!"
slipnslider 1y ago
I love his posts. Read every one of them.
layer8 1y ago
It’s probably partially an illusion, but while everything wasn’t fine back then, it seemed that there was at least a vision of a positive self-determined computing future that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on. Nowadays it feels more of a fight to keep things not getting worse, most of the time.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Computers were so new for most people that they weren't really yet on the "critical path". And when you got them working, they saved so much time that you had extra time laying around.
- ryoshu 1y ago
  Building value vs extracting value.
- CWuestefeld 1y ago
  I agree, but I also think it goes farther than computers and technology. Back then the overall zeitgeist was just a whole lot more positive. These days people are all about one-upping on the dark grittiness of music, movies, etc. But back then things were more upbeat. Yeah, we were worried about the cold war and nuclear armageddon, etc. But we still felt hopeful that we were working toward something better. I miss that.
- exikyut 1y ago
  Zeroing in on this exact sentiment: > ...that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on. I think there's a strong lateral connection to this quote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time I think this has interesting implications wrt the perception of nostalgia, because nostalgia seems to be able to apply at any age to any event that happened far enough back in time; while the above theoretical model maps roughly to specific ages. So I wonder what things are actually a partially overlapped Venn diagram of the above maxim and nostalgia. In this case I think it's possible the idea that we were "roughly on-track on" with certain technologies - the notion of an emergent sense of structure that was certain to unfold - could map to some point in between points (1) and (2) in the maxim above. An objective analyses would instead recognize "success" as the survivorship bias that it is; but we're not objective :) - and I find that endlessly fascinating!

avidiax 1y ago

Yeah, the sense at that time was that you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you if you aren't careful. Of course, the machines haven't really done anything to us. They've just been locked down and remotely controlled to deliver ads and misinformation.

deadbabe 1y ago
The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us. While "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is a cliché, I think there's still considerable meaning behind it, and I'd say the same holds in the "machines don't do anything to people" sense. Sure, a lot of decision-making and faceless authority is outsourced to machines, but it's still people who are doing that outsourcing, and if those people stopped deciding to put so much weight on the output of (intentionally and unintentionally) black-boxed algorithms then that power of the machines would vanish instantly.
EvanAnderson 1y ago
> ...you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you... Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping. The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping. Even in the "before times" we had such limitations: the 486 was shipped as a cheaper version with a functional but disabled math coprocessor. There are meaningful differences in practical terms, but I definitely see it as a clear predecessor of this behavior.
  - grishka 1y ago
    That's different. Lithography masks are expensive. It's cheaper to make them once and use them for different models of the same chip than to make a separate set for each model. My understanding is that in this particular case they would sell the FPU-less version below the cost and the full one with some markup. In modern times they also do this because the process of semiconductor manufacturing is imperfect and sometimes some parts of the chip would come out damaged. IIRC this happens with GPUs a lot so they tend to have spare cores.
    - fredoralive 1y ago
      IIRC later revisions of the 486SX have a unique mask set without the FPU, presumably the higher chips per wafer made up for the extra tooling costs. Also, as a note, unlike modern chips where they fuse off broken cores and sell them as lower specs[1] as part of the binning process, with the early 486SX the FPU was disabled before any testing / binning, so they weren’t selling broken DX dice as SXs. [1] Or in some cases, fusing if working silicon if the supply / demand curve works that way, see the infamous 3 core AMD Phenom.
  - EvanAnderson 1y ago
    Binning products into segments is different than blowing e-fuses. When I bought a 486SX I got a 486SX. It remained forever what it was when I bought it. In a hypothetical scenario where I somehow "unlocked" the FPU functionality Intel couldn't push out a mandatory firmware upgrade to blow an e-fuse in my chip, fixing the "vulnerability" that allowed me to access the FPU and simultaneously preventing me from ever loading "vulnerable" firmware again (like, say, the Nintendo Switch).
yongjik 1y ago
That's just past with its rose-tinted glasses. It was easy for someone to master the machine when that someone was a university researcher or a lone gamer, the most precious resource stored in the machine was saved term projects, and either it was not connected to anything else, or connected to fellow university researchers. The stake was low, because nobody could use your computer to drain your bank account. And someone who would "prank" your computer beyond the social norm would get a stern talking to. Computers these days have to support your grandma making hotel reservations online without her entire financial information being sent to hackers in Eastern Europe. They're doing jobs that 70s OS designers never thought about. It's a different world.
6502nerdface 1y ago
James Yeh, Ken Griffin's "first quant" and eventual co-CIO of Citadel, used to say, when annoyed by a junior who was overfitting to the backtest, "I don't let the computer boss me around! I tell the computer what to do!"

slipnslider 1y ago

I love his posts. Read every one of them.

layer8 1y ago

It’s probably partially an illusion, but while everything wasn’t fine back then, it seemed that there was at least a vision of a positive self-determined computing future that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on. Nowadays it feels more of a fight to keep things not getting worse, most of the time.

bombcar 1y ago
Computers were so new for most people that they weren't really yet on the "critical path". And when you got them working, they saved so much time that you had extra time laying around.
ryoshu 1y ago
Building value vs extracting value.
CWuestefeld 1y ago
I agree, but I also think it goes farther than computers and technology. Back then the overall zeitgeist was just a whole lot more positive. These days people are all about one-upping on the dark grittiness of music, movies, etc. But back then things were more upbeat. Yeah, we were worried about the cold war and nuclear armageddon, etc. But we still felt hopeful that we were working toward something better. I miss that.
exikyut 1y ago
Zeroing in on this exact sentiment: > ...that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on. I think there's a strong lateral connection to this quote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time I think this has interesting implications wrt the perception of nostalgia, because nostalgia seems to be able to apply at any age to any event that happened far enough back in time; while the above theoretical model maps roughly to specific ages. So I wonder what things are actually a partially overlapped Venn diagram of the above maxim and nostalgia. In this case I think it's possible the idea that we were "roughly on-track on" with certain technologies - the notion of an emergent sense of structure that was certain to unfold - could map to some point in between points (1) and (2) in the maxim above. An objective analyses would instead recognize "success" as the survivorship bias that it is; but we're not objective :) - and I find that endlessly fascinating!