Yes, I knew. I was being a bit lazy not mentioning that, so thanks for calling me out. I've posted at greater length about those days in the past, but I was trying to keep it short this time.

CP/M was written for the Intel 8080. Other manufacturers came out with other CPUs on a chip and other operating systems, most famously for the Apple 2. They were 8 bit data, 16 bit addressing chips.

Then the 16 bit chips started showing up, the 8086, the Z8000, and the Motorola 68000. IBM took the least of these and released a PC. It wasn't much, but it had the name IBM on the side so a lot of people bought. IBM also did something else that a lot of people thought was very strange. They didn't stop other people from making and selling cheap clones of their PC. So even more people bought the clones.

IBM had decided to purchase an operating system for their PC from Bill Gates' company, Microsoft. There's a lot of stories around that decision because apparently Gary Kildall had written a version of CP/M for the new processor also. The popular account is that IBM executives came to see Kildall but he was out flying and this got them miffed. Another story is that Bill Gates' mother was working a charity event and there was an IBM executive there who told her IBM was shopping for an OS and she passed that on to her son who went out and bought an OS from somebody else cheap and licensed it to IBM, keeping the right to also license it to the clone makers. He also vigorously went after anyone who tried to pirate and sell his software. Gates seems to have been much more focused on the money side than the other pioneers of the revolution.

I don't remember COBOL being considered overly complex. It was used a lot on those old, puny-by-today's-standards, mainframes of the 1970s. Certainly is was no PL/1 monster.

So I'm wondering why it took so long to get this compiler. I'm not complaining or criticizing; on the contrary, I applaud the achievement. But still, it seems late in the day. My guess would be lack of interest and therefore lack of resources, but that's just speculation.

Old Latin saying, means "If you seek peace, prepare for war." If every country decides to forego war and lays down their arms, except that one of them decides not to get with the program, what then?

Your grandpa's car 30 years ago you say?
One of my favorite cars that I ever owned was a '64 Buick Electra 225. I didn't get it new, had it in the 1970s, drove across the country and back in it. Times have changed and I've changed, but the memories.

I had an uncle who was an accountant. He attended Harvard Business School and said he had to work harder there than at any other school he attended. But this would have been back in the 1920s or 30s at the latest. So, maybe in the past things were different, and Harvard built a deserved high academic reputation which now they are coasting on.

So young, so innocent, so earnest, so cool. But more and more serpents entered the garden.

Disclaimer:I don't have any paid service except basic internet. I get my TV over the air, and I'm an old guy so ignorant about a lot of this newfangled stuff. But I have a speculation.

There's all those youtube videos I see that have ads thrown in. If advertisers are putting their money in that, then maybe they're taking it way from other venues.

This has me wondering, not sure how to put this but, does the universe compute?

When I first came across the concept of quantum computing, I thought the notion was that very complicated things happen in physics that require a lot of math to model, so the universe must be doing some equivalent amount of computation to behave that way, and quantum computation was about finding a way to tap in to that computational ability of the universe. It seems like maybe that was a naive assumption of mine because this article suggests that no, the universe can't do that kind of computation. Stuff happens without computation somehow. Is that right?

I remember reading somewhere a comment by Robert Metcalfe that he didn't get rich by inventing ethernet, he got rich by selling ethernet.

There's a hint in your post that "decades of anti-communist/anti-socialist propaganda" are part of the problem. Do you have a solution to the perceived problem in mind?

Automation and mechanization has been taking away jobs since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and there has been luddite reaction just as long. What seems to happen is that yes, some people lose out and suffer, in fact there can be a lot of suffering for those that bear the brunt of it, but the overall benefits are so good that nobody wants to go back. (OK, 'nobody' is probably too strong a word, there's always a few people who are nostalgic.)

I do think there may come a day when there's a fundamental shift in how all this 'progress' works, and that day may be coming soon, but I don't know how it will play out. I don't think anybody knows how it will play out.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about how things work in Hollywood, but it does seem to be very competitive with a lot more people wanting to get into the business than the business needs, which means a lot of vulnerable people. So I wonder how much the suits of the business can lean on these people to get their 'informed consent' without getting called out on it.

The summary says compensation will vary. If I were an actor, I'd feel better if it simply weren't allowed to use my digital replica at any time without compensation until the movie or whatever it's being used in goes into the public domain. No signing it away into perpetuity period.

Elon Musk is supposed to be worth $228 billion, Bernard Assault is supposed to be worth $164 billion, Jeff Bezos $150 Billion. 3 people worth more than the whole of the Hollywood film industry.

I suppose Hollywood seems bigger than it really is because it's part of entertainment which gets more attention than something like say the frozen food industry.

And, I get the feeling that Hollywood is somehow past its prime as a force in American life and culture. Whether that's because of a decline in the quality of movies or because of competition from other sectors that have grown up with new technology like computer games and the Internet in general, I don't know. Probably both.

60 minutes did an interview a few weeks ago with a professional writer who followed Sam Bankman-Fried around and got to know him very well.

Bankman-Fried is apparently a nerd's nerd who is kind of out of touch with a lot of basic realities. The writer said that the worst thing that could happen would be if he were cut off from the internet, that it would drive him crazy, that he'd rather be in a prison cell with access to the internet, to information, than stay in a luxury penthouse with no internet access.

If this writer is correct, and I did find him plausible, then Sam is not some sort of super-villain. (He seems to have spent a lot of money on what he thought were good causes, though they were very misguided.)

I'm not trying to excuse his behavior, but his best defense, if it were only possible, would probably be something like mental incompetence.

I thought the Chinese economy depended heavily on exports and trade, and that right now their economy has some big internal problems. If that is so, (and maybe it isn't, maybe I've watched too many Peter Zeihan videos on youtube lately), then who is going to be hurt the most by this?