Anecdote About the Timex Sinclair

Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted bo...

 Immersion in the Simulation Makes it Hard to Question It

Individuals become immersed in the beauty and coherency of simulation; indeed simulations are built to capture us in exactly this way. A thirteen- year- old caught up in SimCity, a game which asks its users to play the role of urban developers, told me that among her “Top Ten Rules of Sim” was rule number 6: “Raising taxes leads to riots.” And she thought that this was not only a rule of the game but a rule in life.3 What may charm in this story becomes troubling when professionals lo...

 What Will be Left After the AI Bubble Pops?

Every bubble pops eventually. When this one goes, what will be left behind? Well, there will be little models – Hugging Face, Llama, etc – that run on commodity hardware. The people who are learning to “prompt engineer” these “toy models” have gotten far more out of them than even their makers imagined possible. They will continue to eke out new marginal gains from these little models, possibly enough to satisfy most of those low-stakes, low-dollar ap­plications. But these little...

 We build our computers the way we build our cities -- ove...

The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. He...

 Compatible Connectivity

Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information. Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that ...

 Unwritten Rules are Not Part of the Game

In all games, within game contexts, you may only do things expressly allowed by the rules. This is what it means to have rules; it is the covenant you have agreed to by agreeing to play. You can play tic-tac-toe in a van while yodeling, but putting a Z in a box is out of the question. It is not up to any rulebook to say that you can't use a memory aid; rather it is up to the rulebook to specifically allow it, or else you can't use one. It doesn't matter how much the game for you is not about...

 The Pattern of Decentralization-Centralization

There are two categories of true believers, in my mind. There are those who, for example, are building a new decentralized user-empowering financial system. And to them, history teaches us that there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized. In fact, the entire history of the computer industry was radical openness, which led to a lot of innovation, which later led to closing it down. For example, IBM released the PC specs. Everybody could build a PC. Michael Dell was a col...

 Fruitless Recursion as a Strategy

Luring an opponent into fruitless recursion can be an effective strategy in other games, too. One of the most colorful, bizarre, and fascinating episodes in the history of man-vs.-machine chess came in a 2008 blitz showdown between American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and leading computer chess program Rybka. In a game where each side got just three minutes on the clock to play all of their moves or automatically lose, the advantage surely seemed to be on the side of the computer�capable of e...

 Loss of Legacy Programmers Means Loss of Systems Understa...

At Livermore, a legendary senior weapons designer is about to retire. At the Spring 2005 MIT workshop, his colleagues discuss this retirement and refer to it as �a blow.� They are anxious about more than the loss of one man�s ability to make individual scientific contributions. He has irreplaceable knowledge about the programming that supports current practice.10 His colleagues fret: �He has such a great memory that he hasn�t written down lots of important stuff. How will people know it?� Th...

 Don't Let the Simulation's Beauty Convince You It's Real

The architecture faculty who designed Project Athena�s Garden dreamed of transparent understanding of design process; today scientists are reconciled to opacity and seeing only a CAVE�s shadows. Over the past twenty years, simulation has introduced its dazzling environments and we have been witness to our own seduction. A mechanical engineer instructs his students: �Don�t be fooled by the graphics.�17 Luft says that beautiful codes promote the �illusion of doing really great science.� Kinney ...