[HN Gopher] The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann
       Architecture
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 127 points
       Date   : 2024-11-12 04:31 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ankush.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ankush.dev)
        
       | 082349872349872 wrote:
       | the paper:
       | https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/Prelim_Disc_...
       | 
       | > _6.8.5 ... There should be some means by which the computer can
       | signal to the operator when a computation has been concluded.
       | Hence an order is needed ... to flash a light or ring a bell._
       | 
       | (later operators would discover than an AM radio placed near
       | their CPU would also provide audible indication of process
       | status)
        
         | jagged-chisel wrote:
         | I have experienced two or three computers in my life (and least
         | one laptop) that produced barely audible sound when CPU
         | activity changed. The most memorable was a PowerBook G4 with a
         | touchpad, and as I slid my finger slowly across the pad in a
         | quiet enough room, I could hear kind of a tick each time the
         | pointer moved a pixel.
        
           | simne wrote:
           | This was very common with first sound cards (at least on PC).
           | As I remember, only with Creative Sound Blaster, completely
           | finished era of continuous hearing of "machine soul" sounds.
        
           | dantondwa wrote:
           | Still happens to me when using software that is GPU
           | intensive, like Blender. When I drag a slider, I hear the
           | buzzing of the GPU.
        
             | Arainach wrote:
             | That's not what's being described in this thread. You're
             | referring to fan noise; the other comments are discussing
             | electrical interference.
        
               | camtarn wrote:
               | Not necessarily. My GPU audibly sings in the KhZ range
               | whenever it comes off idle, a long time before the fans
               | actually start up. It could be electrical noise from the
               | fan drivers and/or motor coils if they're running at low
               | speed, but it's definitely not the sound of air movement.
               | And if you're e.g. processing photos on the GPU, you can
               | hear it starting and stopping, exactly synced to the
               | progress of each photo in the UI.
        
         | magicalhippo wrote:
         | Similarly, on-board soundcards are notorious for this. Even in
         | my relatively recent laptop I can judge activity by the noise
         | in my headphones if I use the built-in soundcard, thanks to
         | electrical interference. Especially on one motherboard I had, I
         | could relatively accurately monitor CPU activity this way.
         | 
         | There's also audible noise that can sometimes be heard from
         | singing capacitors[1] and coil whine[2], as mentioned in a
         | sibling comment.
         | 
         | [1]:
         | https://product.tdk.com/system/files/contents/faq/capacitors...
         | 
         | [2]:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_induced_ac...
        
           | mycall wrote:
           | I jokingly refer to my GPU's coil whine as a HDD emulator as
           | it sounds like a spinning disk to me.
        
             | RGamma wrote:
             | Depending on workload my mainboard's VRMs (I think) sound
             | like birds chirping.
        
               | magicalhippo wrote:
               | The voltage regulators are really just buck
               | converters[1], one per phase, and so contain both
               | capacitors and inductors in a highly dynamic setting.
               | 
               | Thus they're very prone to the effects mentioned.
               | 
               | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_converter
        
           | dapperdrake wrote:
           | There was a Lenovo docking station compatible with the T420
           | (around 2012). The headphone Jack had shrieky noise on it
           | whenever the Gigabit Ethernet connection got going. Took a
           | while to figure that one out.
           | 
           | The other two docking stations were built differently and had
           | the wires run somewhere else.
           | 
           | EDIT: Typo
        
           | jazzyjackson wrote:
           | I have a dell laptop that makes a high pitched whine whenever
           | I'm scrolling. really strange. GeForce RTX 2060.
        
             | yencabulator wrote:
             | The connection to scrolling is usually increased activity
             | on the bus. CPU feeding the graphics card new bitmaps is
             | just one source of that traffic. In a previous job, I could
             | tell whether a 3-machine networking benchmark was still
             | running based on the sound.
        
         | ysleepy wrote:
         | Some computers ship with an implementation of this using
         | inductor coils which whine depending on the load :D
        
         | wglb wrote:
         | I remember doing this back on the IBM 1130. We didn't see that
         | there was any value in using it as a monitor.
        
           | philiplu wrote:
           | Much of my earliest computer experience was on an 1130 clone,
           | the General Automation 18/30. Never did the AM radio thing,
           | but you could see what phase the Fortran compiler was up to
           | just by the general look of the blinkenlights.
        
         | jjkaczor wrote:
         | My favourite was troubleshooting an already ancient original
         | IBM XT in 1992... The operator was complaining about the screen
         | giving her headaches.
         | 
         | Sure enough - when I went onsite to assist, that "green" CRT
         | was so incredibly wavy, I could not understand how she could do
         | her job at all. First thing I tried was moving it away from the
         | wall, in-case I had to unplug it to replace.
         | 
         | It stopped shimmering and shifting immediately. Moved it back -
         | it started again.
         | 
         | That's when we realised that her desk was against a wall hiding
         | major electrical connectivity to the regional Bell Canada
         | switching data-centre on the floors above her.
         | 
         | I asked politely if she could have her desk moved - but no...
         | that was not an option...
         | 
         | ... So - I built my first (but not last) solution using some
         | tin-foil and a cardboard box that covered the back and sides of
         | her monitor - allowing for airflow...
         | 
         | It was ugly - but it worked, we never heard from her again.
         | 
         | My 2nd favourite was with GSM mobile devices - and my car radio
         | - inevitably immediately before getting a call, or TXT message
         | (or email on my Blackberry), if I was in my car and had the
         | radio going, I would get a little "dit-dit-dit" preamble and
         | know that something was incoming...
         | 
         | (hahahaha - I read this and realise that this is the new "old
         | man story", and see what the next 20-30 years of my life will
         | be, boring the younglings with ancient tales of tech
         | uselessness...)
        
           | glhaynes wrote:
           | _My 2nd favourite was with GSM mobile devices - and my car
           | radio - inevitably immediately before getting a call, or TXT
           | message (or email on my Blackberry), if I was in my car and
           | had the radio going, I would get a little "dit-dit-dit"
           | preamble and know that something was incoming..._
           | 
           | I remember this happening all the time in meetings. Every few
           | minutes, the conversation would stop because a phone call was
           | coming in and all the conference room phones started buzzing.
           | One of those things that just fades away so you don't notice
           | it coming to an end.
        
             | mrandish wrote:
             | At a certain large tech company, at the peak of GSM data-
             | capable phones (eg Palm Treo, Blackberry) it was accepted
             | practice for everyone turn off data or leave their phone on
             | a side table due to conference speaker phones on the tables
             | amplifying the data.
             | 
             | Also, during this era I was on a flight and the pilot came
             | over the PA right before pushing from the gate saying
             | exasperatedly "Please turn your damn phones off!" (I
             | assumed the same RF noise was leaking into his then-
             | unsheilded headset).
        
             | MBCook wrote:
             | The "GSM chirp". I never got to hear it much because my
             | family happened to use CDMA phones in that era, but I do
             | remember hearing it a few times. I know it was well known.
             | 
             | I haven't thought about that in a long time.
        
           | mikewarot wrote:
           | I had an IBM in a Electrical Generating Station that had a
           | HUGE 480 volt 3 phase feed not far from the monitor in the
           | next room. The display would swirl about 1/2 of an inch at
           | quite a clip.
           | 
           | The solution I picked was to put the machine in Text/Graphics
           | mode (instead of normal character rom text mode, this was
           | back in the MS-DOS days), so the vertical sync rate then
           | matched up with the swirling EM fields, and there was almost
           | zero apparent motion.
        
         | vincent-manis wrote:
         | Many years ago, I was a user of an IBM 1130 computer system. It
         | filled a small room, with (as I recall) 16K 16-bit words and a
         | 5MB disk drive, which was quite noisy. I would feed in my
         | Fortran program, then head down to the other end of the
         | building to get coffee. The computer would think about the
         | program for a while, and then start writing the object file.
         | This was noisy enough that I'd hear it, and head back to the
         | computer room just in time to see the printer burst into
         | action.
         | 
         | (Please feel free to reference the Monty Python "Four
         | Yorkshiremen" sketch. But this really happened.)
        
       | simne wrote:
       | > 10^5 flip-flops is about 12.2KiB of memory
       | 
       | It is reasonable amount for CISC CPU cache, as for CISC normal to
       | have small number of registers (RISC is definitely multiple-
       | register machine, as memory operations are expensive with RISC
       | paradigm).
        
         | Someone wrote:
         | I don't think that's correct. Ideally, your working set fits
         | into the cache, and that doesn't get smaller or larger when you
         | use a RISC CPU.
         | 
         | (There may be an effect because of instruction density, but
         | that's not very big, and will have less of an effect the larger
         | your working set)
        
           | simne wrote:
           | > Ideally, your working set fits into the cache
           | 
           | Ideally, your working set fits into the registers, and that
           | was most win feature or RISC, having relatively simple
           | hardware (if compared to genuine CISC, like IBM-360
           | mainframes) they saved significant space on chip for more
           | registers.
           | 
           | - Register-register operations are definitely avoid memory
           | wall, so data cache become insignificant.
           | 
           | Sure, if we compare comparable, not apples vs carrots.
        
             | simne wrote:
             | If you are unlucky, so your working set don't fit into the
             | registers, in this case you sure will deal with memory bus
             | and with cache hierarchy. But best if you just don't touch
             | memory at all, making all processing in your code in
             | registers.
        
       | mikewarot wrote:
       | If you've read the article, and thought to yourself... _I wonder
       | what it was like back then, and if there might be some other
       | direction it could have gone_ , oh boy do I have a story (and
       | opportunity) for you!
       | 
       | It's my birthday today(61)... I'm up early to get a tooth pulled,
       | and I read this wonderful story, and all I have is _a tangent I
       | hope some of you think is interesting._ It would be nice if
       | someone who isn 't brain-foggy could run with the idea and make
       | the Billion dollars or so I think can be wrung out of it. You get
       | a bowl of spaghetti, that _could_ contain the key to Petaflops,
       | secure computing, and a new universal solvent of computing like
       | the Turing machine, as an instructional model.
       | 
       | The BitGrid is an FPGA without all the fancy routing hardware,
       | that being replace with a grid of latches... if fact, the whole
       | chip would consist almost entirely of D flip-flops and 16:1
       | multiplexers. (I lack the funds to do a TinyTapeout, but started
       | going there should the money appear)
       | 
       | All the computation happens in cells that are 4 bit in, 4 bit out
       | Look up tables. (Mostly so signals can cross without XOR tricks,
       | etc) For the times you need a chunk of RAM, the closest I got is
       | using one of the tables as a 16 bit wide shift register, which
       | I've decided to call isolinear memory[6]
       | 
       | You can try the online React emulator I'm still working on [1],
       | and see the source[2]. Or the older one I wrote in Pascal, that's
       | MUCH faster[3]. There's a writeup from someone else about it as
       | an Esoteric Language[4]. I've even written a blog about it over
       | the years.[5] It's all out in public, for decades up to the
       | present... so it should be easy to contest any patents, and keep
       | it fun.
       | 
       | I'm sorry it's all a big incoherent mess.... completely replacing
       | an architecture is _freaking hard_ , especially when confronted
       | with 79 years of optimization in another direction. I do think
       | it's possible to target it with LLVM, if you're feeling frisky.
       | 
       | [1] https://mikewarot.github.io/bitgrid-react-app/
       | 
       | [2] https://github.com/mikewarot/bitgrid-react-app
       | 
       | [3] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid
       | 
       | [4] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid
       | 
       | [5] https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/
       | 
       | [6] https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/2024/09/bitgrid-and-
       | isolinear-m...
        
         | NetOpWibby wrote:
         | Happy birthday!
         | 
         | I have no idea what you're talking about but I'm gonna follow
         | these links.
        
         | gradschool wrote:
         | I don't like to rain on anyone's parade, but this is at least
         | the third time I've seen one of these comments, and if it were
         | me I'd want someone to point out a drawback that these young
         | whippersnappers might be too respectful to mention. Isn't it a
         | truism in modern computer architecture that computation is
         | cheap whereas communication is expensive? That "fancy routing
         | hardware" is what mitigates this problem as far as possible by
         | enabling signals to propagate between units in the same clock
         | domain within a single clock period. Your system makes the
         | problem worse by requiring a number of clock periods at best
         | directly proportional to their physical separation, and worse
         | depending on the layout. If I were trying to answer this
         | criticism, I'd start by looking up systolic arrays (another
         | great idea that never went anywhere) and finding out what
         | applications were suited to them if any.
        
           | kije wrote:
           | Not sure why you're saying that systolic arrays never went
           | anywhere. They're widely used for matrix operations in many
           | linear algebra accelerators and tensor units (yes, largely in
           | research), but they are literally the core of Google's TPU
           | [1] and AWS EC2 Inf1 instances [2].
           | 
           | [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-
           | learning/a...
           | 
           | [2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ecs-now-supports-
           | ec2...
        
         | glitchc wrote:
         | Sorry to burst your bubble but modern FPGAs are already
         | designed this way (latches paired with muxes and LUTs across
         | the lattice). Take a look at the specs for a Xilinx Spartan
         | variant. You still need the routing bits because clock skew and
         | propagation delay are real problems in large circuits.
        
           | mikewarot wrote:
           | Yes, I know about clock skew and FPGAs. They are an
           | optimization for latency, which can be quite substantial and
           | make/break applications.
           | 
           | The goal of an FPGA is to get a signal through the chip in as
           | few nanoSeconds as possible. It would be insane to rip out
           | that hardware in that case.
           | 
           | However.... I care about throughput, and latency usually
           | doesn't matter much. In many cases, you could tolerate
           | startup delays in the milliseconds. Because everything is
           | latched, clock skew isn't really an issue. All of the lines
           | carrying data are short, VERY short, thus lower capacitance.
           | I believe it'll be possible to bring the clock rates up into
           | the Gigahertz. I think it'll be possible to push 500 Mhz on
           | the Skywater 130 process that Tiny Tapeout uses. (Not outside
           | of the chip, of course, but internally)
           | 
           | [edit/append]
           | 
           | Once you've got a working BitGrid chip rated for a given
           | clock rate, it doesn't matter how you program it, because all
           | logic is latched, the clock skew will always be within
           | bounds. With an FPGA, you've got to run simulations, adjust
           | timings, etc and wait for things to compile and optimize to
           | fit the chip, this can sometimes take a day.
        
             | glitchc wrote:
             | Latency is only part of the problem. Unmanaged clock skew
             | leads to race conditions, dramatically impacting circuit
             | behaviour and reliability. That's the reason the industry
             | overwhelmingly uses synchronized circuit designs and clocks
             | to trigger transitions.
        
             | simne wrote:
             | The goal of an FPGA is to get cheap prototype and/or for
             | applications which don't need large batches, enough to ASIC
             | become cost effective.
             | 
             | Low latency links are just byproduct, added to improve FPGA
             | performance (which is definitely bad if compare to ASIC),
             | you don't have to use them in your design.
             | 
             | If you will make working FPGA prototype, it would be not
             | hard to convert them to ASIC.
             | 
             | Happy birthday!
        
             | simne wrote:
             | BTW have you hear about asynchronous FPGA programming (and
             | asynchronous HDL design)? It was very popular subject some
             | years ago.
        
       | WillAdams wrote:
       | For those who don't recognize the title, this is a reference to
       | the classic:
       | 
       | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_M...
       | 
       | which was one of the first computer books I ever read --- I
       | believe in an abbreviated form in _Reader's Digest_ or in a
       | condensed version published by them (can anyone confirm that?)
       | 
       | EDIT: or, maybe I got a copy from a book club --- if not that,
       | must have gotten it from the local college after prevailing upon
       | a parent to drive me 26 miles to a nearby town....
        
         | bayouborne wrote:
         | "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will [In my mind I've
         | always heard a 'henceforth' inserted here for some reason] deal
         | with no unit of time shorter than a season"
         | 
         | One of my favorite quotes in the book - when an overworked
         | engineer resigns from his job at DG. The engineer, coming off a
         | death march, leaves behind a note on his terminal as his letter
         | of resignation. The incident occurs during a period when the
         | microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level.
        
           | rjsw wrote:
           | He didn't join a commune though, still working [1].
           | 
           | [1] http://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/Resume.html
        
             | cmrdporcupine wrote:
             | Wow, I love that web page / resume and that era of HTML
             | authorship. Brings back memories.
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | I don't know about an abridged version but it's one of the best
         | books about product development ever written. I actually
         | dotted-lined to Tom West at one point though a fair bit after
         | the events of "the book." (Showstopper--about Windows NT--is
         | the other book I'd recommend from a _fairly_ similar era from
         | the perspective of today.)
        
         | ConfiYeti wrote:
         | Thanks for sharing this. I forgot to add the link in the
         | original post.
         | 
         | I also highly recommend the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. It's
         | not related to the book but very similar spiritually.
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | While far from perfect, Halt and Catch Fire definitely
           | captured a lot of the spirit of the early PC industry at
           | about the same time (early 80s).
        
           | ngai_aku wrote:
           | The Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus[0] has a lot of awesome
           | content worth checking out as well.
           | 
           | [0] https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-
           | syllabus/
        
         | Angostura wrote:
         | The full length version is a _really_ good read
        
           | bayouborne wrote:
           | Indeed, one of the more memorable set pieces in chapter 1:
           | 
           | "He traveled to a city, which was located, he would only say,
           | somewhere in America. He walked into a building, just as
           | though he belonged there, went down a hallway, and let
           | himself quietly into a windowless room. The floor was torn
           | up; a sort of trench filled with fat power cables traversed
           | it. Along the far wall, at the end of the trench, stood a
           | brand-new example of DEC's VAX, enclosed in several large
           | cabinets that vaguely resembled refrigerators. But to West's
           | surprise, one of the cabinets stood open and a man with tools
           | was standing in front of it. A technician from DEC, still
           | installing the machine, West figured.
           | 
           | Although West's purposes were not illegal, they were sly, and
           | he had no intention of embarrassing the friend who had given
           | him permission to visit this room. If the technician had
           | asked West to identify himself, West would not have lied, and
           | he wouldn't have answered the question either. But the moment
           | went by. The technician didn't inquire. West stood around and
           | watched him work, and in a little while, the technician
           | packed up his tools and left.
           | 
           | Then West closed the door, went back across the room to the
           | computer, which was now all but fully assembled, and began to
           | take it apart.
           | 
           | The cabinet he opened contained the VAX's Central Processing
           | Unit, known as the CPU--the heart of the physical machine. In
           | the VAX, twenty-seven printed-circuit boards, arranged like
           | books on a shelf, made up this thing of things. West spent
           | most of the rest of the morning pulling out boards; he'd
           | examine each one, then put it back.
           | 
           | ..He examined the outside of the VAX's chips--some had
           | numbers on them that were like familiar names to him--and he
           | counted the various types and the quantities of each. Later
           | on, he looked at other pieces of the machine. He identified
           | them generally too. He did more counting. And when he was all
           | done, he added everything together and decided that it
           | probably cost $22,500 to manufacture the essential hardware
           | that comprised a VAX (which DEC was selling for somewhat more
           | than $100,000). He left the machine exactly as he had found
           | it."
        
             | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
             | That reminds me of the US, during the cold war,
             | intercepting the soviet "Lunik" satellite, in transit by
             | truck, which was being exhibited in the US(!), and
             | overnight completely disassembling/reassembling it before
             | letting it go on it's way with the soviets none the wiser.
        
               | throw0101a wrote:
               | > _" Lunik" satellite_
               | 
               | * https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/lunik-loan-
               | space-...
               | 
               | * https://greydynamics.com/the-lunik-plot-how-the-cia-
               | hijacked...
        
         | shon wrote:
         | Such a great book... should be required reading for anyone
         | managing engineers.
        
         | Robotenomics wrote:
         | There is a post Where are they now. In Wired magazine about the
         | team 20 years later https://www.wired.com/2000/12/eagleteam/
        
         | favorited wrote:
         | I'm about 75% through the audiobook, and it's absolutely
         | fantastic.
         | 
         | The most surprising thing so far is how advanced the hardware
         | was. I wasn't expecting to hear about pipelining, branch
         | prediction, SIMD, microcode, instruction and data caches, etc.
         | in the context of an early-80s minicomputer.
        
         | adamc wrote:
         | It's also the best non-fiction book I've ever read. And won the
         | Pulitzer, I think.
        
       | drcwpl wrote:
       | This is a great read. von Neumann was pivotal in the design of
       | architecture, I think his contribution is way under appreciated -
       | did you know he also wrote a terrific book The Computer and the
       | Brain and coined the term the Singularity?
       | https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/the-architect-of-tomor...
        
         | defphysics wrote:
         | I see this in wikipedia:
         | 
         | "The attribution of the invention of the architecture to von
         | Neumann is controversial, not least because Eckert and Mauchly
         | had done a lot of the required design work and claim to have
         | had the idea for stored programs long before discussing the
         | ideas with von Neumann and Herman Goldstine[3]"
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
        
           | jazzyjackson wrote:
           | Yes, von Neumann was tasked with doing a write up of what
           | Eckert and Mauchly were up to in the course of their contract
           | building the eniac/edvac. meant to be an internal memo.
           | goldstein leaked the memo and the ideas inside were
           | attributed to the author, von Neumann. this prevented any of
           | the work being patented btw, since the memo served as prior
           | art.
           | 
           | The events are covered in great detail in Jean Jennings
           | Bartik's autobiography "Pioneer Programmer", according to her
           | von Neumann really wasn't that instrumental to this
           | particular project, nor did he mean to take credit for things
           | -- it was others that were big fans of his that hyped up his
           | accomplishments.
           | 
           | I attended a lecture by Mauchly's son, Bill, "History of the
           | ENIAC", he explains how eniac was a dataflow computer that,
           | when it was just switches and patch cables, could do
           | operations in parallel. There's a DH Lehmer quote, "This was
           | a highly parallel machine, before von Neumann spoiled it."
           | https://youtu.be/EcWsNdyl264
        
       | mannykannot wrote:
       | I like the idea of identifying 'bit flips' in papers, which are
       | (if I am following along) statements which precipitate or
       | acknowledge a paradigm shift.
       | 
       | Perhaps the most important bit-flip of this paper's time (and
       | perhaps first fully realized in it) might be summarized as
       | 'instructions are data.'
       | 
       | This got me thinking: today, we are going through a bit-flip that
       | might be seen as a follow-on to the above: after von Neumann,
       | programs were seen to be data, but different from problem/input
       | data, in that the result/output depends on the latter, but only
       | through channels explicitly set out by the programmer in the
       | program.
       | 
       | This is still true with machine learning, but to conclude that an
       | LLM is just another program would miss something significant, I
       | think - it is training, not programming, that is responsible for
       | their significant features and capabilities. A computer
       | programmed with an untrained LLM is more closely analogous to an
       | unprogrammed von Neumann computer than it is to one running any
       | program from the 20th. century (to pick a conservative tipping
       | point.)
       | 
       | One could argue that, with things like microcode and virtual
       | machines, this has been going on for a long time, but again, I
       | personally feel that this view is missing something important -
       | but only time will tell, just as with the von Neumann paper.
       | 
       | This view puts a spin on the quote from Leslie Lamport in the
       | prologue: maybe the future of a significant part of computing
       | _will_ be more like biology than logic?
        
         | Pannoniae wrote:
         | And the next paradigm shift _after_ that will probably be
         | "programs' own outputs are their input"
        
           | cmontella wrote:
           | That sounds like a feedback control loop. That's the basis of
           | a programming language I'm writing ^_^
        
         | mk_stjames wrote:
         | This is essentially the paradigm what Karpathy deemed to be
         | "Software 2.0" in an article in 2017:
         | 
         | https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
        
       | tromp wrote:
       | > We should not accept this. If we don't, then the future of
       | computing will belong to biology, not logic.
       | 
       | In this quote from Leslie Lamport, I took "If we don't" to mean
       | "If we don't accept this". But the rest of the sentence made no
       | sense then.
       | 
       | Could it be a really awkward way to say: If we don't "not accept
       | this", i.e. if we accept this?
        
         | MBCook wrote:
         | I think you're right, it means something like "if we don't
         | refuse to accept this".
         | 
         | That is rather awkward isn't it.
         | 
         | I really liked that whole block quote though.
        
         | yencabulator wrote:
         | Maybe an earlier draft said "We should reject this. If we don't
         | [...]", and was edited to be less harsh.
        
       | ctenb wrote:
       | I just realized that the word for organ the music instrument and
       | the body part is one and the same in English. (In dutch they're
       | called orgel and orgaan respectively.) Which of these meanings is
       | being referred to in the article? To me both could make sense.
        
         | tomesco wrote:
         | The definition of organ in this article is closest to the body
         | part definition. The use of organ here relies on a less common
         | definition: roughly a constituent part of some larger whole
         | that performs a specific function.
        
           | MBCook wrote:
           | I think that's a great summary.
           | 
           | As a native English speaker, it was understandable but feels
           | rather foreign because you never hear parts of computers
           | referred to that way these days.
        
       | bloody_bocker wrote:
       | > When people who can't think logically design large systems,
       | those systems become incomprehensible. And we start thinking of
       | them as biological systems. And since biological systems are too
       | complex to understand, it seems perfectly natural that computer
       | programs should be too complex to understand.
       | 
       | For some time I've been drawing parallels between ML/AI and how
       | biology "solves problems" - evolution. And I also am bit
       | disappointed by the fact the future might lead us in a different
       | direction than mathematical elegance of solving problems.
        
         | l33tbro wrote:
         | Are you able to share what these parallels are that you've
         | drawn? I've always thought them to be slightly different
         | processes.
        
         | MBCook wrote:
         | I really loved that quote in the article. It's such an
         | excellent description of the "computer voodoo" users come up
         | with to explain what is, to them, unexplainable about
         | computers.
         | 
         | You're right though, we're basically there with AI/ML aren't
         | we. I mean I guess we know why it does the things it does in
         | general, but the specific "reasoning" on any single question is
         | pretty much unanswerable.
        
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