Devine Lu Linvega - An Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired from Permaculture

This is really, really interesting. There's a lot here, not just for vintage software buffs. Goes back to Alan Kay (Smalltalk and The cuneiform tablets of 2015 available from https://archive.org/details/tr2015004_cuneiform). "Smalltalk was made portable by having each “bag of bits,” called an “image,” that constituted an entire system also carry the microcode for each machine Smalltalk was to run on El . When an image was brought to a particular machine, the appropriate microcode was extracted and executed to create a Smalltalk virtual machine. All the rest of the “bag of bits” was completely machine independent." Even relatively modern systems like Moscow ML end up shipping compiled bytecode with the source. Kay continues: "This led to the somewhat interesting conclusion that one could store media as a “process” if the system that created it were carried along, and if the “microcode” for the system were also supplied." and "Furthermore, if the “microcode” were thought through a little more carefully, it would be much more compact to describe what it did than to describe how to make a Lisp. The idea then would be to have a Lisp-like system, or in this case Smalltalk, in the rest of the bag, and the real beginning part of each bag should be the simplest description of the simplest machine that would bring the rest of the bag to life. An important motivation back in the 1970s, which carries through to the present essay, was that a good goal would be to entice the programmers of the future into revitalizing a piece of media by showing them that it could be “an afternoon’s hack.” " Hence the connection with Kolmogorov Complexity, which I hadn't made before.



Also, David May (who worked on the Inmos Transputer) has recently done some work on simple languages, one called X: http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/xarmdoc.pdf. He gives compiled bytecode for the compiler, in principle verifiable by eye. May is also interested in hardware garbage collectors. See http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/gcolls.pdf. 

50:50 On telecommunications, you can "go to the wire" if you want: see Visible Speech and Photophone.


Subscribe to Strange Loop.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Turner Obituary by Sarah Nicholas Fri 24 Nov 2023

Image
This was in The Guardian: David Turner obituary , only eight days after I posted  David Turner Talking About Sixty Years of Functional Programming History : This talk was given in London in 2017: See  Turner, D. A. "Some History of Functional Programming Languages" also  John Hughes - Why Functional Programming Matters  and David MacQueen's talk at ICFP 2015 in  Numberphile - Sophie Maclean on the Catalan Numbers . At 10:30 This whole discussion abut combinator reduction is especially interesting. I didn't know Arthur Norman had tried building hardware for combinator machines. I'll look that up: maybe start here A.C. Norman  Faster combinator reduction using stock hardware  in LFP '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming. At 26:25 on the ISWIM virtual machine implemented in the PAL compacting garbage collector?! This work Reynolds and others did was at MIT in Masecheusetts and Argonne National Laboratory Illinois. Did
Read more

Live Science - Leonardo da Vinci's Ancestry

Image
... and his posterity too? See  On Communication in Linear Time And Hypertext And The Gospel of Sophia . So it looks like El Cielo of the cistine [sic!😂] chapel is not the limit anymore.  I think I just met one of his descendents. A guy called Versailles Toledo who is from Chiapas. That might explain the murals I mention in my recent untitled post , just before the post mentioning this video. I also just took this photo of Rafael Gonzales, born here in Tecate, B.C., who told me about a spring near here called Agua Fría , half way from Tecate to Loma Tova , where, a few decades ago, people used to go to have barbecues and stuff, but now he thinks it may be private land. If someone reading this has a Facebook account, please write a link to this post onto his FB page. To see why I took the photo, look at his T-shirt and the horse-shoes and ponder this: Subscribe to BeatrizER and her video(s?) about mathematical logic, ... Sounds like Edith (II) Rix has been online all the time, ...
Read more