Hackers
It's extremely easy to fake. I sell you a backrub for 10.000 dollars and after that I buy one from you for 10.000 dollars and we've now in 10 minutes boosted our GDP with 20.000 dollars. I didn't want to sidetrack my comment by getting into PPP and other adjustments[1], but suffice it to say that economists have been aware of these issues for over a century. We are too focused on optimizing, when a lot of what it means to be a human are things that shouldn't be optimized. And secondly, long periods without productivity may actually be the foundation of later quality. And you can't optimize…
That's a bit harsh. He's the one engaging an audience on more than one front performing as both a musician and successful YouTuber which the others aren't, and doing us a service as such exposing us to stuff we'll otherwise not ever encounter. He's publicly learning, including sharing his mistakes and entertaining and tries to keep 'fun' as part of journey. You may consider him a dime a dozen, but he's very far away from where I am, and therefore valueable to someone like me. At some point claiming the person at the top of the ivory tower is the only one that knows the worth of something is…
My take is that it's just too early in biotech. Back in 1973 it was certainly possible to envision Facebook and Twitter. For example, if you read Steven Levy's Hackers you'll learn about the Community Memory project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory But computers and their associated tech like telecom were so expensive in 1973 that Community Memory was impractical at scale. There was no Facebook around to offer Lee Felsenstein an enormous salary and a potential IPO. The infrastructure wasn't yet built out, the audience wasn't yet there, and investor consciousness had not yet…
In the 80s, I got my first access to the internet after reading Steven Levy's book "Hackers". In the chapter on RMS, he mentioned that RMS didn't use passwords and didn't believe in security. I found the dialup number to the MIT media lab, and tried logging in as 'RMS' and viola, no password, and I had my first shell account on an internet-connected Unix machine, although I was only a teenager, and didn't attend MIT. RMS's act of charity benefited me greatly, I was relatively poor growing up in inner city Baltimore, and his account was a life line to a new world of the internet and away…
excerpt from Steven Levy's book "Hackers" Appendix A. The Last of True Hackers Stallman, who liked to be called by his initials, RMS, in tribute to the way he logged on to the computer, used the Hacker Ethic as a guiding principle for his best-known work, an editing program called EMACS which allowed users to limitlessly customize it—its wide-open architecture encouraged people to add to it, improve it endlessly. He distributed the program free to anyone who agreed to his one condition: “that they give back all extensions they made, so as to help EMACS improve. I called this arrangement ‘the…
There's this funny little problem. There's a substantial slice of "hackers" who really enjoy saying Crazy Shit But No Wait It's Totally True And Makes Sense If You're Smart Enough To Process This Obscure Worldview That Makes It Make Sense. I know, I am one of those people. Woz gleefully paying for things with sheets of $2 bills is a perfect example: http://hackaday.com/2012/08/03/woz-prints-and-spend-his-own-... And really, it can be super fun! Most of us get a little rush from seeing something new in the world, and it can be a fun way to give people that rush. It also really pisses some…
I'm sort of confused -- so Google has had this amazing, breakthrough chat tech but just didn't feel like making it available? I asked ChatGPT and it had this to say: > is google's LaMDA available to the public? how does it compare to chatGPT in quality? > Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is not currently available to the public. However, it has been used in a number of Google's products, such as Google Assistant and Google Meet's "smart compose" feature. It is not clear how it compares in quality to ChatGPT, as the models have different training data and…
> I think what drew people to model trains was the ability to create and automate your tracks. The original home of many people who became hackers (old use of the word) was the TMRC at MIT. Tech Model Railroad Club - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club As told in Steven Levy's Hackers book, there were two groups in the TMRC. There was the group that went on train rides and did meticulous models on top of the track... and there was the systems and powers group that worked with wires and automation (from the telephone company) under the track. From the Wikipedia…
At risk of showing my age, it never meant that; or at least, if that's what it means now, it's a very modern interpretation and the word has basically become meaningless. I've got a copy of Levy's "Hackers" on my desk, printed in 1984. The first chapter opens in the late fifties (i.e. almost sixty years ago) in the MIT model railway club. "Hackers" are (or at least, were) people who solved problems in a particular way. A good hack involved some clever dodge around a limitation, or some new creative technical thinking to achieve a task. In code terms, someone might find a way round a memory…
Steven Levy's Hackers of course, but also his Crypto which is in some ways even better. Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning about the heyday of computing research at Xerox PARC isn't universally praised (IIRC it's more or less Bob Metcalfe's version of the story) but it is very readable. Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning, about the golden age of Japanese consumer electronics (wich also covers many events and actors in the US and UK). David Kushner's Masters of Doom, about the heyday of Id Software. The First Computers—History and Architectures is a more academic book, a selection of…