I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.

The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.

I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".

Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

Most algorithms to do this use the time between keypresses, measured to very high precision so that the lower bits are chaotic. So it doesn't really matter what keys you hit, and it doesn't matter how rythmic your typing is.

The problem with FM static is that you could start receiving a station, and if you don't happen to realize you are now getting low-entropy data, that's a problem.

There are many well-characterized forms of electronic noise: thermal noise, shot noise, avalanche noise, flicker noise, all of these are easy to produce with parts that cost a few dollars.

True randomness comes from quantum mechanical phenomena. Linux /dev/random is chaotic, yes, enough to seed a software "R"NG. But we can do better and devices to do so are cheap these days.

I wouldn't trust anything but diode noise for randomness. If I had a need to transmit messages privately, I'd only trust a one-time pad.

There's a problem with mobs: they gang up and lynch anyone who isn't part of the mob.

This doesn't happen just in westerns. It's been happening since the dawn of time, because it's a natural property of crowds: the least able thinkers are the ones most likely to be swayed by group-think. And one of the strongest group-think arguments is "Outsider, danger to group, kill it", which is a very effective survival M.O. for life below a certain threshold of intelligence. The combination of these two aspects of mob behaviour is predictable.

That makes TFS and TFA a bit of an exercise in wishful thinking. Development by mobs could (in theory) work well, but only in the very unlikely situation that the mob has a statistically improbable makeup in which independent thinkers are dominant and are also well informed and technically experienced. Unfortunately that scenario lies in "pigs will fly" and "hell freezes over" territory.

The perfect number in team programming is two people of similar experience, because then they can't gang up and form a lynch party. If they don't immediately agree then it creates a stalemate which can be broken only by rational explanation / defence or by terminating the pairing. It's an ideal situation, yet not too hard to arrange.

Mobs don't really have a place in intellectual endeavours, and programming is one of those.

Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.

I didn't actually work on GPUs very much at Pixar, the image computer I worked on was the grandfather of the SIMD image processing instructions on modern CPUs. What would become a GPU later on was a very expensive box from Silicon Graphics, I had one that cost at least a quarter Million dollars.

If they actually told us how to program their microengines, something good might come of it. But they'll probably just BSD-license a list of numbers, as others have.

I liked writing bit-slice microcode at Pixar. I really could get every last bit of power out of the hardware.

Maybe you should learn what communism is before calling anyone "commiefriend". (Which I have to say, is really repulsive. It's sort of like picking your nose over the internet.) I think you are discussing the difference between lasiez-faire ecomomics and regulated markets. Communism is a very great difference in scale from that. And it's never been tried on a national scale just as "free market" has never been tried because there are always economic biases that make it impossible. What there has been so far is socialism.

I think you're missing the fundamental economic issue that drives all of this. It's the provision of essentially infinite amounts of credit. This is done by government, not banks. Essentially all home loans come from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, banks and finance companies are really just front-ends for them and sell their loans to the government once financed.

Given infinite credit, any scarce but necessary resource is going to be bid to absurd values.

It is by no means being a hippie to assert that government should not distort the market for credit, and to expect that urban and suburban land values would return to more realistic rates once the distortion was removed. Too bad that lots of people have already invested in unrealistic land values. They would have to lose.