Oddbean new post about login | logout I firmly believe that there will be no real breakthrough until we invent (or accept) something to abolish complexity instead of hiding it under multiple abstraction layers so that we could more of it unnoticed. Here's an example. Although I'm not a guru in Lisp and certainly not in Forth, I like early Forth and even earlier Lisp systems for being self-sufficient. Because your early Lisp/Forth IDE doesn't run on top of an operating system, it *is* an operating system. You have less layers and tighter integration, less space to plant bugs or backdoors. Here's what I'm talking about: https://www.exemark.com/FORTH/eForthOverviewv5.pdf They described an implementation on top of an early DOS, but the same could easily have been done over bare metal.
I work in embedded systems, but that is a different environment. The complexity for end user systems remains, even if you collapse the layers. You would have to create a new sort of system, that required less complexity. Which is a tall order.
Why? Whatever happened to Spectrums, Amstrads, Commodores, incl. C64 and Amigas? Where I live, people *soldered* Spectrum clones themselves as soon as they got access to the necessary chips and other stuff. And booted them off cassette recorders. And did all sorts of shit on that bootleg hardware. Because it's not as complex at its core. I'm not a programmer now (was until 2016) and I didn't have any Spectrum clone, but I first started learning programming on MK-52, a soviet programmable calculator. Still have it here in a pretty much working state (but MK-61 is more practical if running on batteries). So, do you know how many program RAM it has? 105 bytes (yes, bytes) and 15 direct registers and 4 stack registers, and that's it. It also had 512-byte EPROM, but it went dead about 10 years ago. My call is to treat every system like embedded and optimize every byte accordingly. Those who disagree should be sentenced to 2 years of MK-52-only coding like myself in the childhood.
The times... They have moved on.
The fact that something is available doesn't necessarily mean we should buy it ASAP. When and why did we start *needing* more RAM, more CPU speed, more disk space? Who pushed this on us?
The cost is simply so low, that there is no economic justification for not making the purchase. This could change, but it hasn't changed yet.
Making no purchase is always justified as opposed to making any purchase you don't really need. It's sad to see that most of the technology is driven by consumerism, not science.
Human evolution is driven by consumption. We are not to decide what other people's needs are.
Consumption and consumerism are different things.
Perhaps I also didn't make myself clear enough about one more aspect. Even with store-bought Speccies, people could repair them themselves. Maybe replace a chip or a capacitor or a resistor or a transistor. It was as opensource as it could get. x86 came with modularity, but the overall architecture already was much more complex _and_ individual components could not be just repaired at home anymore. Corporations took the monopoly over these things. They told people didn't need it. And now, people are being fed with monolith touchscreen bricks with zero repairability (+ all-on spyware) and they don't ask any questions why. The software side of things is even worse, but remember it started when IBM+M$ mafia took over.
I'm not the one you have to convince. I'm in embedded, my husband is a telco electrician and an EE M.Sc., my BIL is a mechatroniker, my father is a network engineer, and my son is studying Mech Eng. Our entire basement looks like an electro workshop, replete with an old washing machine, ancient cell phones and old monitors, homemade robots, soldering station, and a particle accelerator. 😂 We could open a museum. I'm just saying, don't fight the market.
Sometimes I dream that I could someday launch a zeppelin with pirate NMT and AMPS base stations to put all those ancient phones to work again (I hope you don't consider any GSM phone ancient, even Ericsson GH172 Hotline, which I have two of them... but no, I'm not that old, I got my first own GSM phone in 2005, and it was Nokia 3100 from 2003), and "Pirate Zeppelin" actually is my poet alias. I'm just saying, there should be some ways to transform this market. Even if it requires a major shakeup for people to wake up.