My recent experience switching from Windows to Linux (NixOS) suggests otherwise.
I use a ThinkPad P1 Gen 3. My dGPU actually died due to overheating caused by Windows failing to sleep properly. On Windows, the fans were always noisy and temperatures stayed above 60°C.
Since switching to Linux, the fans are very quiet and temperatures sit between 40–50°C. What surprised me most is that sleep mode works much better on Linux than on Windows, where the frequent failures eventually killed my GPU.
This reminds me of "Thousand Character Text"(千字文), which is a Chinese poem that has been used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century onward. It contains exactly one thousand characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four characters apiece and grouped into four line rhyming stanzas to facilitate easy memorization.
The problem with the new chatbots is not just that they are often stupid and naive; it is that they are not “stupid” or “naive” enough to pick up on the nuances, ironies, and revealing contradictions that constitute human culture and communication. Worse, by relying on them, we risk succumbing to the same obtuseness.
Thank you for that link because this quote is so good!
"It was becoming clear to me that Dr. Forsythe and Dr. Harroit wanted a B5000. But the best that Burroughs would offer was about a 40% discount. IBM was offering them the world to take an IBM 7090. Finally, IBM said that they would give Stanford the 7090 for free plus a gift of $900000 that could be used to build a new computer center. Stanford had a Burroughs 220 and IBM was determined to dislodge us. Stanford accepted the offer and used $400000 to build the computer center and $500000 to buy a B5000. So IBM had unwittingly paid Stanford to buy a B5000, much to their dismay. "
First, a nice illustration of shady practices that get shoddy tech to dominant market share. Windows had its share, too. Second, a rare illustration of it backfiring in an epic way. That the inferior, pretend-to-be-first, mainframe company bought them The Real Deal by mistake is just hard to top. It's better than when Microsoft was called out on NT Server's alleged superiority over AS/400's by pointing out they ran their whole business on an AS/400. These moments just don't happen enough.
The Fortran vs Algol vs people who open mail moment was great, too.
Another pretty good quote about the young Don Knuth:
"We had written our [compiler] in STAR 0, the only assembler that Burroughs supported on the 205. Our compiler took one hour and 45 minutes to assemble. The first week of don's project he spent in writing his own assembler. He could assemble his compiler in 45 minutes. We were green with envy."
That's practical, right? He had limited computer time, and since every change meant a re-assembly, the obvious answer to quicker turnaround was to write a faster assembler...
Maybe it with s-expressions and Wirth-style compilation. Might have made those iterations pretty fast with lots of efficiency. The HLL's too heavy to compile could be mapped to it by hand if they wanted.
Hi Alan, do you still do coding (any kind of, for any purpose) these days? If you do, what's your comfortable setup (say, language, editor, tools and etc)?
I think one thing that scared him away was the word "relevant"... VIM might have as well (very primitive). Emacs tries to do some things that are worth doing, but it brings the user into "textland," not "systemland."
More "textland" than anything else, though that has to do with the medium we're using to communicate "across space and time." What Alan has advocated is that the medium we're using in this particular instance should be a version of "systemland."
It's difficult at this point to come up with an example, since we don't have it yet (that I know of), but to give you an idea, take a look at Lively Kernel https://www.lively-kernel.org/
I use a ThinkPad P1 Gen 3. My dGPU actually died due to overheating caused by Windows failing to sleep properly. On Windows, the fans were always noisy and temperatures stayed above 60°C.
Since switching to Linux, the fans are very quiet and temperatures sit between 40–50°C. What surprised me most is that sleep mode works much better on Linux than on Windows, where the frequent failures eventually killed my GPU.