I’ve been fascinated with artificial life since reading about Conway’s Game of Life in one of my granddad’s copies of Scientific American. Within the last few years we’ve developed the technology to synthesize entirely new species here in the analog world. Craig Venter describes his Institute’s work on the first synthetic organism in a 2010 TED Talk.
Author: insecure_automaton
Little bit of this, little bit of that.
Multi-attribute utility
Helpful in decision-making when preferred weights of risks vs benefits need some structure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-attribute_utility
PDP-11 Basic Programming Manual
PDP11 / 20/15/r20 Processor Handbook
Golden Age of Ham Radio
WinWorld, archive.org and abandonware
I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately (again) for vintage computing. Luckily, most of the stuff I’m interested in is old enough that it can fly under the radar and be shared as the companies who created it have long since folded/merged as business entities or have stopped supporting the software altogether.
LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation
Interesting concepts here and relevant at today’s networking speeds: https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/22/legoos-a-disseminated-distributed-os-for-hardware-resource-disaggregation/
Link to the original paper: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/shan
“Ironies of Automation” by Lisanne Bainbridge
Published in 1983 but still timely: ~5K words – 18-20 minutes
watch multiple Linux commands
Occasionally I’ll have the need to watch screen output of multiple commands on the Linux CLI. Supremely easy but I don’t do it often enough to remember that I need to wrap the sequence in single (‘) or double (“) quotes. Correct formatting is below:
“Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching” by Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark
Great read – ~8K words and 25-30 minutes.