One year ago today: May 15, 2024, sextants are boring.
Five years ago today: May 15, 2020, a drone test.
Nine years ago today: May 15, 2016, WIP
Random years ago today: May 15, 2006, a plan-ahead day.
One tube sale. Ten bucks. Those tubes are a priority the moment that floor is done. They will get moved one way or another. They are not the gold mine I’d hoped for, the database is probably worth more than the tubes. The upside is lessons were learned, experience gained. And my conclusion is eBay is not suitable for such sales. That advice alone is worth a good dollar.. That reminds me, I was on the phone for 41 minutes with my executor. You know how to play safe with bank fees, I always round down any withdrawals? She says there is now $768 bucks I can have. That means a trip this summer after all, barring any surprises.
Here’s the raccoon clan, now brazenly prancing around the yard as they please. Not a care in the world. The cages to the right were JeePee’s new castle and tower when he passed away last December. I can’t yet bring myself to dismantle them. JeePee will be missed forever.
Calendar says mention food. Okay, I made a super batch of rice, taking half to fry up some chicken, celery, and onion. John was on the phone, there is a new category of expenses that I want her to take directly out of my account. But she finds the procedure cumbersome, so we may revert to good old hand-written checks and I don’t care if the banks don’t like it. The convo quickly turned to the operation she had on her backbone some years ago. She said is was fine long enough that I quit asking.
And it turns out not so fine. Even as a child I learned when you fix something old, it throws off a worn-in system of balance. Turns out she has been going in for treatments and acupuncture for a couple of years, but never mentioned anything. We all know how much I love needles. I was clearing up the yard a bit this morning and this will put me into a deep siesta soon.
To really put myself to sleep, I decided to finally devote an hour to understanding how MOSFETS work as RAM. MOSFETS are a type of transistor and RAM is the active memory in your computer. Like most, I’m familiar with the concept and know that RAM comes in two forms, slow or expensive. I know MOSFET stores memory be charging a capacitor, what I did not know was that the MOSFET can also discharge the capacitor. It’s like a transistor that can run backwards on command. I do not know how that works, first I ever heard of it. But obvioiusly it works like a hot damn. The rest is all just registers, decoders and some sort of multiplexer.
Welsh tapestry machine
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The cancer of the Internet, advertising, takes another step into your privacy. Called “Peak Points”, it analyzes content to find the point where the view is most engaged. That where they plop and ad. Fortunately, I use the best and latest of ad-blockers and am foremost for banning intrusive ads. I did not say all ads, just the intrusive ones. If GenZ is as smart as they claim to be, they’ll work something out. Or at least we thought they would by now. Then there’s the Greek woman who filed for divorce after asking ChatGPT to read a photo of her husband’s coffee grounds.
MicroSoft is canning another 6,800 of which 1,900 or so are from their headquarters. Strange, how that company has over 200,000 employees and I’ve never met even one. My computer system is still 85% XP and works fine, so I was delighted to hear about a thought experiment called “Zero Tape-Out Day”. Rather than today’s focus on faster and newer CPUs, the latest designs are frozen and the market shifts to optimizing older chips to become nodes in a vast “sneakernet”. That’s where programs and data are walked over by an employee wearing sneakers, the precursor of the Internet.
Now the important aspect of this is, to me, the concept that most of the world can be run on older software if it is simply optimized. The researcher, named Carmack, knows that older software is more efficient because it was written before patches and producing “hardened” software paid off better than being first to market. Good point. I’m not going to link to Techspot, but here are some of my favorite comments (redacted) from their home site:
√ people have been calling out lazy software developers for eons now.While the focus is on game evolution, I was hardly the only one who lamented the rise of C+ cranking out code that could not be debugged. During the early 90s I had an Apple ][ on my work desk where I would demonstrate how it could do anything the latest PCs could do. I was also an early advocate of building in security, which is suddenly big business—but it will never be secure because they ignored the requirement at byte-level.
√ MicroSoft’s releases exist solely to push new hardware and mandate DRM.
√ would deliver performance increases by a factor of ten.
√ it would eliminate bloatware.
√ we need less software of higher quality, not today’s deluge of trash.
√ when memory got cheap, developers said why bother with code quality.
√ Z-day would force a return to craftsmanship in code.
For the record, the system I proposed back in 1984 was the use of binary separation. All data was split into two parts, which then used separate software to recombine the elements into useful information. Yes, it was expensive, but not as expensive as trying to fix it later. A thief would need to heist both sets of data and the host program. The data was never intact except at the moment of use, which was always logged by user ID. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an idea.
I’ve not seen any of this optimization software, but I’ve read reports of people testing it on ancient computers. They describe amazing results in multi-tasking and video performance using old Pentium chips. This would also mean increased demand for older chips. That would help offset the astronomical cost of new chips and the breakdown of Moore’s Law as design reaches the molecular level. I believe the technology is centered on a plug-in package that allows older computers to store and process memory far beyond their design.
I studied computer science as well as programming. One of my favorite techniques was to design a highly efficient but tiny core set of instructions, then use the format of the memory to blast through the data. Since the only computer I had access to that could process anything like that was at my college in those days, I never pursued the concept. I kept records, but they are hand-written. These were the days when student programs were often compared and I the problem I often met was people thinking my software had not run because it was finished by the time they released the Enter key. I was ten years too early.
ADDENDUM
Here’s a trip down memory lane. I have not been in Mexico on holidays since around 1985, except for a second trip to Chichen Itza. Back then there were fewer conveniences and certainly no satellite views. So I pulled up the Google map to see what’s changed. Plenty, and it is not longer the world class adventure. There is a sweeping new highway that bypasses the entire known site a massive museum to the north.
The old highway is still there and I see all the old pathways, I recall it like y’day. Now they’ve got health spas and tourist hotels in the area, but mercifully away from the ruins. I can see they have excavated more of the “thousand columns” to the east and there is some development neat the old Inn where we drank out first pina coladas. There are some new bungalows and hotels. I never stayed there long, as it was cheaper to commute from Merida.
However, remember that Mexican yahoo who bought the old Hotel Doralba? He had been to New York and was charging New York prices. I never liked the guy and whenever he asked I’d tell him his prices were too high. We’d eat there on Sundays or when it was late, as the only other place was walking distance to the ruins. For the Doralba, you needed a taxi, which was a long wait. I talked to the guy a few times, but he was headstrong about what things cost in New York City, figuring people did not know his overhead was maybe one-tenth of Manhattan.
He also gouged us on the last stay, some kind of room tax and we told him off. The satellite view shows almost three sides of the pyramid have been restored. This is oppressive work because the Spaniards carted off thousands of the stones to build Catholic churches all over the peninsula and kept no records. I can see it costing millions to get as far as they have, and I’ve not been there in forty years. And I can tell by looking I’m not going back there again.
It shares a feature with Rome and Cairo. That is, a feeling of incredulity how the people living there today think it was their ancestors who build all those things. Impossible, I tell you, there was some form of elite or ruling class that has disappeared. That’s who got things done, the rest, if there is any link, were just the gronk laborers of the day. At best.
