I'm a geek and have shared my home with housemates for 50 years. When I was poor and when I was prosperous. When I was married and when I was not. It's almost always been good for me, including for growth in my social intelligence. It was especially valuable when my wife died. Some of my housemates have been challenging. More became close friends. Living together people take their masks off. Quality social connections have been invaluable to me.
Hmmm, but if you’re the landlord and you only care about money as you imply, why wouldn’t you move out and just rent, mrather than dealing with roommates?
Landlords have much more power. Usually more money too, but always more power.
Source: I am a landlord and I could temporarily destroy either of my roommates' livelihoods at the drop of a dime whenever I please. As a result, they are basically my permanent friends until they save up enough to move out. The difference between me and others in my position is I understand these are material relationships more than social relationships, and the only way to change that is not being the landlord.
When Marxists want to get rid of landlords, this is what they mean. They simply want more social relationships rather than material relationships. That's why it's called socialism.
I do agree that this is not being roommates but rather having (paying) guests.
I just would like to nuance the power a landlord holds. It really depends where you live. I live in Germany since a while now and renters have very very strong rights, they can just as well make the life of the landlord impossible. They can stop paying and it’ll be months, maybe even years, before he can kick them out.
AI used to refer to the extensive range of techniques of the field of Artificial Intelligence. Now it refers to LLMs and maybe other multi-layer networks trained on vast datasets. LLMs are great for some tasks and are also great as parts of hybrid systems like the IBM Watson Jepardy system. There's much more to Artificial Intelligence, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and... et al.
I learned to read by being read to: typically on a relative's lap with the book in my lap. They were not trying to teach me how to read, but my language centers took care of the job, just like they did for spoken language, long before schools could muck it up. Reading has always been fast and effortless for me, requiring no conscious attention - again, just like spoken language. Much later I studied the linguistics of language, grammar, spelling systems, etc. which revealed the wonders of our natural language skills. I recommend the natural method for everyone. Be sure to check for eyesight problems, though.
The biggest difference between now and the 1990s is in the reduction of abject poverty worldwide. Death and disability from food shortage was extremely common in many countries. A huge improvement in the 1990s over the 1980s is that I could own my own computer (I bought a Sun-2 with Solaris) instead of having everything I created owned by the institution which owned the computer I needed. Today's consumer products, though, are a mixed bag. As an example, I wish I could buy a microwave oven as good as my first one. It was larger, had a temperature probe that could be used instead of time and it used a small internal metal wheel to distribute the microwaves evenly throughout the oven instead of wasting space for the silly rotating platter.
When the UC sold the UCSD P-System the profiler and native code compiler were abandoned. With P-Code optimized for size and hot spots native compiled, small P-System programs ran comparably to programs fully compiled to native code and large programs ran thousands of times faster by reducing (usually eliminating) swapping and paging on those early memory-starved systems. I too migrated to Sun-2s but I purchased them myself. I'd learned the hard way that software developers need to own the means of their production!
The UCSD "Computer Scientists" were a small group of undergraduates working in Ken Bowles' lab. We were supposedly following Professor Bowles' directions but he was a fairly conservative physicist and we had lots of radical ideas - fortunately he was tolerant. The p-code was not just machine independent - by careful design it was approximately 1/4 the size of native code on those early 8 and 16-bit microprocessors, allowing us to effectively almost quadruple the amount of code we could fit in 64K - minus the interpreter which was 8K of machine code and minus another 8K on PDP-11s for I/O space. We would also use native code for hotspots without appreciably expanding code size. This key idea is what allowed us to have a high-level OS and development environment on those dinky machines when everyone else was compromising quality to get things to fit. Alas, CopyLeft had not yet been invented, the UC sold the P-System and we lost legal access to the code we'd written.
When I get around to analyzing the p-code instruction set, the code-compression aspect will definitely get a mention.
Stack-based vs register-based instruction sets are a very clear size vs speed tradeoff. That's also one reason that the Java VM was designed with a stack architecture, though in that case, it was download time they wanted to minimize.
The whole thing with UCSD having to essentially "give away" the p-System to a separate commercial entity is a sad part of the history, for sure.
The saddest part of the UCSD Pascal giveaway: SofTech in fact achieved its goal with the purchase, which was not to keep the p-System competitive, but rather to polish their 1981 public stock offering:
> Alas, CopyLeft had not yet been invented, the UC sold the P-System and we lost legal access to the code we'd written.
Compare with UC Berkeley's BSD UNIX, which was originally open sourced in 1988 (though hamstrung from 1992-94 by the Unix lawsuit, opening the way for Linux), and happens to be running in the system I'm typing on...
It appears that UCSD eventually (2006?) made the p-System 1.5 source code available for download, but unfortunately non-commercial only (CC BY-NC-SA?) rather than BSD, etc.
The power languages of the late 1960s and 1970s were awesome! I loved APL, InterLisp, Snobol-3, Smalltalk and SETL. Turtle Graphics with a robot turtle. Writing graphics for the Evans & Sutherland Picture System was awesome. Instead of C or Java we could build anything UCSD Pascal. But look around and you'll find all of these and more available now. Just ignore the blub languages and platforms!
