mikewarot

111 ms·

1. 1981.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   I watched that video... it was awesome! Thanks for putting it out there.
2. 1982.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   When I was young, I wanted to be a computer programmer, but I was totally convinced there wasn't any money in it, so I picked a EE major instead when I started college in 1981.... Boy was I wrong!!! I ended up dropping out (I picked th
3. 1983.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   Not much, but it's only about 16 Gb of space, and it makes me happy. 8) Eventually I would like to see it run STOIC and Teco, if I can figure out how to get the appropriate languages and libraries installed. I have a fondness for Teco
4. 1984.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   Termux is amazing, I'm able to run my VAX/VMS 11-780 machine on my phone now, thanks to it and SimH. I always wanted a VAX, now I have one in my pocket. 8) I really appreciate the keyboard handling they add, so you can do almost e
5. 1985.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   Memory access can still be O(1) if you pipeline everything, instead of making everything wait for all of the RAM at the same time. Lots of things get wickedly faster, if you can ditch the Von Neuman model of computation.
6. 1986.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   0. Ahead of the pattern recognition, is a set of layers (with an intentional bottleneck in the middle) that have taken a ton of tokens in small random chunks, and have been trained to reproduce the input, despite the bottleneck. This networ
7. 1987.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   What about the local library? They usually have meeting rooms. Yes, it's an unusually disfunctional hacker space.
8. 1988.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   There is currently a satellite in orbit, Barry-1, which has a purely electric thruster, it uses no propellant! They will be attempting to raise its orbit by 100 Km starting in a month or two (after they get a baseline) using this new thru
9. 1989.▲
   by mikewarot 3y ago

   If we get to the point where a silver dollar has no value, we're either in a Star Trek where you can make as many as you want, at no cost... or we're past Nate Hagen's "Great Simplification", and worse off than the
10. 1990.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    1632 by Eric Flint, it turned into a series, it's alternative history, with a lot of infrastructure education baked in.
11. 1991.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    I don't mess with coin collecting, just the melt value.
12. 1992.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    I first encountered VAX/VMS on a VAX 11/780 at Rose-Hulman in 1981, and was in awe of a machine that could do a million floating point operations per second! Recently, I got one running in SimH in my android phone, and it runs Ope
13. 1993.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Soft money is a contract with the state, hard money doesn't expire. A $1 silver dollar coin from 1901 is worth a heck of a lot more than a $1 bill from the same time.
14. 1994.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    I carry around a piece of hard currency (1901 Silver Dollar) to remind me of what real money is like... it's always been worth about 4 retail gallons of gasoline. I expect that trend to continue for at least another decade. Soft money,
15. 1995.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    As one of the very lucky people who have a house with no mortgage, it's only that fact that has kept me away from homelessness in the past 3 years after getting long covid, and being yeeted out of the work force permanently. We own the
16. 1996.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Solid lumps of Plutonium eventually end up with helium bubbles in them over time, which degrades their structural integrity. If we want to have reliable weapons over time, we'll have to make new Plutonium pits as time progresses. Here&
17. 1997.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    You could get 2-40 watt "appliance bulbs" meant for use in ovens, etc... and use a RAID-1 adapter* to fit them into a single socket... that'll get you 80 watts of pure incandescent joy. If you were a tetrachromat, you'd
18. 1998.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Fiber to everyone's home in the US was already paid for, it's obscene that cable internet with usage caps is a thing in urban and suburban areas. We need a repeat of the rural electrification act, but with regulatory teeth.
19. 1999.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Israel propped up Hamas, and this is blowback. We made the same mistake training Tim Osman at The School of the Americas. Genocide of Palestine in reaction isn't justified.
20. 2000.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    This question is kind of like asking what kind of camera a photographer uses, vs the amount they are paid for their photography. Sure, better gear makes some things easier, but without the skills to utilize it, you're down to pure luck
21. 2001.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Thanks to the Halliburton Loophole , the compounds used to do fracking are legally protected against disclosure. You don't need to know what they're using, according to Congress.
22. 2002.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Either Lisp or Stoic would work very well if you have a lot of mental stack space to keep track of parameters
23. 2003.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    I think it would need far more space, time and nuance than most people are willing to give, to have a productive discussion of this, even here on HN.
24. 2004.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Radians, gradians, degrees, minutes, seconds, thirds, revolutions are all ways of dividing up a circle
25. 2005.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Hacker, polymath, programmer, amateur scientist, geek, ham, nerd, grumpy old man, citizen, machinist.. I answer to all of those and more. One who does the "impossible" is my favorite mode of being. I fix things, sometimes without
26. 2006.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    I forgot to say NO macros, those evil things need to go
27. 2007.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    A same way to handle strings, or return a complex structure without having to preallocate a buffer to write into, etc. Clear semantics for dealing with threads and multiple cores. Static type checking
28. 2008.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    When a new technology is discovered, it takes a while for it to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. There are many new connections to the existing ways of doing things that get discovered in due course. Stephen has a head start on th
29. 2009.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    Switching to regenerative farming, which cuts the demand for fertilizers, and sinks massive amounts of carbon into the soil as it regenerates it from plain old dirt, can take about 1/5 of our carbon out of the air on its own, while con
30. 2010.▲
    by mikewarot 3y ago

    "Quantized Inertia further predicts that for objects with very low accelerations, such as stars at the edges of galaxies, the Rindler horizon moves so far back that it is close to the cosmic horizon so the waves of Unruh radiation are