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Sunil Pai x.com
some historical computing reading/viewing as I'm working on other stuff:
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19 September
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korrents.com
Tokens are the new computing paradigm on which everything will be remade as computing enters a post-binary era.Their words
Tokens are the new computing paradigm. Everything will be re-made on top of it. We’ve had deterministic computers for 80 years, so we confuse “how computers have worked” with “how computers must work.” We’re entering the post-binary era.
18 September
17 September
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Their words
Historically, whenever companies get power over what people's computing facilities can do, they use it against us, building malicious functionalities, designed to benefit them, into the software they invite us to use.
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Their words
But I think this impulse to gild the lily and attribute the rise of Hitler to deep intellectual trends is an example of a pretty common fallacy of assuming that an incredibly important world event must have incredibly important roots.
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korrents.com
More software is likely to be produced next year than in all of the history of computing.Their words
It's likely that more software will be produced next year than in all of the history of computing.
16 September
15 September
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korrents.com
Relative to historical norms, the market is not pricing any major change in cybersecurity.Their words
But the crucial point is that, relative to the historical norm, the market is not really pricing ANYTHING big to change.
Callum Williams on cybersecurity pricesmarginalrevolution.com
14 September
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Their words
Serverless was the last chapter of the cloud, and Steren helped define the paradigm at Google.
9 September
7 September
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Their words
More and more of our personal and professional computing experiences will come from agents that orchestrate work in the cloud, using sandboxes. Those sandboxes will be Linux.
4 September
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Their words
The footnotes are critically important if you want to understand a world so completely different from the one we live in, and the characters generally behave, think, and feel in ways that are so outdated as to be completely unrelatable.
2 September
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Their words
modern amygdalectomy is as different from lobotomy as your smartphone is different from an electrical telegraph
Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacyastralcodexten.com
1 September
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Their words
Using time for this sounds boring, but time synchronization is unironically one of the most complicated things in computing.
29 August
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Their words
Today is a very historical moment for AI video generation You can now generate AI video faster than you can watch it Before it'd take let's say 2-5 minutes to generate 15 seconds of video @fal made a post-trained Minimax H3 variant called Max which is 50x faster than the original but still maintains quality It generates 15 seconds of video in 9 seconds!
28 August
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Their words
But the existence of old events tells us nothing about whether the odds are changing, and heat waves happened in 1900 too (just less frequently).
26 August
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Their words
300 milliseconds is like an eternity in computing, right? And so if you're talking about like our pitch is that we're not more than 300 milliseconds, that just shows you how the bar was so far past where it probably should have been for something.
25 August
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korrents.com
Defunding public health surveillance systems allows foodborne disease outbreaks to go undetected.Their words
When the public health systems meant to catch and stop this stuff are cut (less funding, less staff, less historical knowledge, and less leadership), outbreaks can, and will, emerge between the cracks.
21 August
19 August
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Their words
By 2027, almost every country-and every non-state group with sufficient computing power-will have the ability to download open-weight models even more powerful than the ones that attacked Hugging Face and use them for whatever they like.
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Their words
if you treat computing as this onion where you just keep peeling back the layers, there's always something interesting behind the scenes. And the more of those layers that you can peel back and understand, I think in some ways the better you can optimize for that world.
18 August
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Their words
Well, we discuss it a lot, but I don't think it gets as much airtime as it should, and and that would be that would be quantum information science technology or quantum computing.
16 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing MachineTheir words
I guess you can’t go wrong with Charles Petzold. This book is excellent and highly recommended to anyone interested in computing. Must read for computer science students and software developers.
14 August
9 August
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Their words
The Sea Peoples did not invade lands to claim them as their own, or extract treasure or slaves to bring back to their homeland. They seemingly torched the great capitals of the Bronze Age just to watch them burn.
2 August
31 July
30 July
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korrents.com
Batching exists only because moving data costs about a thousand times more energy than computing on it.Their words
Um because if you didn't have that thousandx difference then you know you wouldn't have to do batching but you have to do batching of you know many examples or maybe many tokens at once in order to amortize that data movement
22 July
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Their words
Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened.
14 July
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Glorious CountryTheir words
I loved this historical biography of America's greatest landscape painter, and not just because I have an intense personal interest in Church. Johnson's writing is luminously beautiful, her assiduous research never impedes the narrative, and the illustrations are spectacular.
24 June
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Their words
Like every single time there's just like the big innovation like cloud computing, like higher level programming languages, for whatever reason things do not like it doesn't lead to fewer programmers. And I would have expected it would have.
13 June
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korrents.com
The war in Ukraine will prove as historically significant in its outcome as the First World War was.Their words
The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War, and there is every reason to think that its outcome will be of comparable historical significance.
9 June
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Their words
And what's fascinating is today when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty when the Han were subjugated people.
4 June
31 May
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Doxies PenaltyTheir words
Mind candy: continuing Robins's series of historical mysteries set in a very-slightly-alternate Regency London. (I re-read the last one, Sleeping Partner, before turning to this.) Robins continues to be great and I hope that many more of these will flow from her pen.
14 May
13 May
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Their words
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
22 April
From one piece Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Scalability is not a property a system has; it is the set of mechanisms it has for coping with a change in load.Their words
Scalability is just like what mechanisms we have for dealing with changes in load. If load increases, how can we add computing capacity to a system, for example, so that the system still continues working?
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Their words
generally, like you just want the the cost and the computing capacity to be roughly proportional to the load that you have. And at the low end, that means actually being able to scale down to something that is extremely cheap to run.
15 April
From one piece Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the work that we do with building our our computing platform. If we don't if we don't do it, I genuinely believe it doesn't get done. If we didn't take the risk that we take, if we didn't build MVLink the way we built, if we didn't build the whole stack, if we didn't create the ecosystem the way we did it, if we didn't dedicate ourselves to 20 years of CUDA while losing money most of that time, if we didn't do it, nobody else would have done it.
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Their words
the ability for general purpose computing to continue to scale has largely run its course and the only the the not the only way but the the way to do that is through domain specific acceleration
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korrents.com
Nvidia did not build a tensor processing unit — it built accelerated computing, whose market reach no ASIC can match.Their words
Our market reach is far greater than any any TPU can any ASA can possibly have. And so if you look at our position, uh we're the only company that that accelerates applications of all kinds.
+ 2 more
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Their words
Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.
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Their words
Nvidia's computing stack is the best performance per TCO in the world, bar none. Nobody can demonstrate to me that any single platform in the world today has better performance TCO ratio. Not one company.
9 April
7 April
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Their words
So you kind of got these two separate things that just for historically contingent reasons had both sort of matured around sort of let's say 1980 or so.
6 April
4 April
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Their words
Something I've been thinking about - I am bullish on people (empowered by AI) increasing the visibility, legibility and accountability of their governments.
3 April
2 March
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Their words
That now ubiquitous timeline names eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive in the dirt.
22 February
13 January
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korrents.com
Knowing that poverty and child mortality have actually fallen is what makes people think the future can improve.Their words
Only 17% of those who got no correct answers on historical development changes thought the world would be better off. 62% of those with more than five correct answers did.
1 January
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Their words
So, add all that up, 5%. In many categories, we're north of 50% in market. So, that just totally changes.
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Their words
Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.
10 December 2025
9 December 2025
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Their words
If that enthusiasm doesn’t produce a bubble conforming to the historical pattern, that will be a first.
16 November 2025
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Their words
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
31 October 2025
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Inequality: A Genetic HistoryTheir words
I think a great book could be written on all this. (Among other things, it should be catnip to anyone who wants to call themselves a historical materialist.) This book, however, is merely OK.
17 October 2025
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Their words
And it just so turns out that um this was extremely early, way too early. so early that we shouldn't have been working on that, you know, uh because um if you're just stumbling your way around and keyboard mashing and mouse clicking and trying to get rewards in these environments, um your reward is too sparse and you just won't learn and you're going to burn a forest uh computing and you're never actually going to get something off the ground.
12 September 2025
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korrents.com
Robotics has a bootstrap that computing never had: making robots is physical work, and robots do physical work.Their words
robots help with uh physical things uh physical work. And if producing robots is itself physical work, then getting really good at robotics should help with that. It's a little circular, of course.
29 August 2025
8 August 2025
23 July 2025
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Their words
So my betting is that it's mostly it is just classical computing that's going on in the brain, which suggests that all the phenomena are modelable or mimicable by a classical computer.
25 June 2025
18 June 2025
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Their words
I think computing supply chains are much easier to monitor than nuclear ones - there is only one TSMC and one ASML, but there are nine and maybe soon ten nuclear powers
5 June 2025
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korrents.com
AR is the next paradigm shift in computing, the way the GUI, multi-touch and voice were.Their words
The best innovations in computing have come through a paradigm IO change, right? When with GUI, and then with a graphical user interface, and then with multi-touch in the context of mobile voice later on. Similarly, I feel like AR is that next paradigm.
4 May 2025
30 April 2025
5 April 2025
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Their words
But with AI, it’s different: it’s often only a couple of years between when you need a world-class computing cluster to do something and when you can run it on a high-end gaming chip on your laptop.
22 March 2025
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Their words
there's been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result in more jobs.
21 March 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True CallingTheir words
A nice personal + historical deep dive into finding your dharma by embracing both your gifts and limitations in service of something greater than yourself.
13 March 2025
10 February 2025
3 February 2025
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Their words
It's an objective fact that the world has been the most peaceful it's ever been when there are global hegemons, or regional hegemons in historical context. The Mediterranean was the most peaceful ever when the Romans were there.
1 January 2025
31 October 2024
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
At the MidwayTheir words
Mind candy, historical creature-feature thriller: in which the US military, in the form of the very worst ship in Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, comes up against beasts which are not oversized plesiosaurs. (Exactly what they are instead would be a minor spoiler.) I have no idea how I found this online, but it's perfectly enjoyable as a specimen of the genre.
30 September 2024
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korrents.com
Graham Hancock's research is good; his conclusion that one lost civilization seeded all the others is not.Their words
I do not believe Graham’s idea that a single, now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis.
19 August 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Dream MachineTheir words
The Dream Machine -- probably the best overall book about the early days of computing and the internet.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Man-Computer SymbiosisTheir words
Man-Computer Symbiosis -- established the vision of computing that inspired Engelbart, Kay, etc., to pursue what they did.
14 July 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
MaccyTheir words
Maccy for lack of better words, a copy-paste manager? allows you to search through your historical copy-s, super helpful
29 June 2024
10 March 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
China’s World ViewTheir words
Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.
4 March 2024
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Their words
So in historical terms and intellectual terms, what is happening today in the war between Russia and Ukraine is the vision on one level or another level that was formulated by the noble laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, half Russian, half Ukrainian.
30 January 2024
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Their words
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
27 November 2023
9 November 2023
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Their words
After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world in any country, we’ve got nukes, nobody else has got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything and it didn’t. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries.
14 September 2023
29 August 2023
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Their words
Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.
19 May 2023
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Their words
So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word "about," that I've ever encountered.
1 March 2023
8 December 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Fellowship PointTheir words
There have been many novels written in historical modes this year, and I've hated all of them except Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark precisely because that novel feels vibrant and lively and full of characters and it reminds me of early 20th century literature.
13 October 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de ZoetTheir words
It was surprisingly unliterary and unpostmodern for Mitchell, but in exchange, he nailed the historical details and gave us an adventure which subverted many of the usual tropes
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World WarTheir words
This is incredibly interesting because from our perspective, we have forgotten (if we ever knew) what went into the process of taking the thousands of villages and regions differing in all sorts of ways
26 August 2022
From one piece Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent.
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Their words
As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables.
11 May 2022
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Their words
So, historical evidence suggests that the US is short at least several million housing units.
14 March 2022
23 February 2022
21 February 2022
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Their words, before
One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression.
Their words now
But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting.
25 January 2022
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korrents.com
Open access to information makes a closed information regime on the Soviet model fundamentally impossible to sustain.Their words
it's like could you ever have another Soviet Union like in the era of the internet? Um you know North Korea's doing their damndest to try to maintain that model you know but without going full North Korea like I'm not sure you can. I I mean, I guess I'm an optimist on this point. Like I tend to think open access information basically makes a lot of these historical things, you know, fundamentally impossible.
26 October 2021
15 July 2021
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Oxford historical thesaurusTheir words
Have you seen the Oxford historical thesaurus? Fantastic. It must be one of the last great books produced as a printed object.
21 June 2021
31 May 2021
23 February 2021
1 January 2021
29 September 2020
9 July 2020
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Their words
I am going to contend that the primary purpose of the discipline of history is to foster greater historical knowledge in the public, in order that the public can use that knowledge (and the skills that come with it) to make better decisions.
20 June 2019
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Usesrcmnd.app
DropboxTheir words
I'd say the central piece of software I use is Dropbox, which syncs subsets of my entire filesystem across all of my computing devices: iPhone, iPad, laptops, and desktops.
10 February 2019
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Soul of a New MachineTheir words
Since reading it over two decades ago, I have recommended The Soul of a Machine at essentially every opportunity, believing that it is a part of computing's literary foundation – that it should be considered our Odyssey.
29 January 2019
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Likedrcmnd.app
Lectures of Sidney Coleman on Quantum Field TheoryTheir words
David Kaiser has contributed an introduction to the book (available here , or, if this doesn't work, try here ) which does an excellent job of putting the material in historical and intellectual context
31 August 2018
29 November 2017
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Classic Food of ChinaTheir words
Classic Food of China was really her great work, though. I think it was the last book she produced before she died, some years ago. It's one of the few really well-researched historical and cultural Chinese cookery books.
13 April 2017
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Lovedrcmnd.app
UP3216QTheir words
My display is a 32-inch 4k Dell – I think it's a UP3216Q. It's a wonderful screen for editing photographs and for rendering lots of xterms, which, let's face it, is 90% of my computing life.
1 October 2016
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Probability and ComputingTheir words
I've probably gotten more mileage out of this than out of any other algorithms book.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Probability and Computing: Randomized Algorithms and Probabilistic AnalysisTheir words
I've probably gotten more mileage out of this than out of any other algorithms book.
19 August 2016
Nothing matches.
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