The Gear cutting job shop I worked for had a CNC lathe running with a GE Computer from the late 1970s that stored data on punched Mylar tape, until it was bought out in 2019.
The bevel gear generator setup was some formula calculations running in version 1 of TK!solver, which would have been a $5000 upgrade to get the latest version, so they ran them under MS-DOS in DOSbox, and saved the grief.
Without that software, they would have to pay Gleason $500+ to do the calculations for each new gear setup.
There are strong and reasonable reasons to keep very old systems alive in offline production environments.
>Progressives have, on the whole, abandoned the forum.
That's news to this progressive from Indiana, a deep red state.
Interesting screed, but I mostly don't buy it.
I'm deeply thankful for DanG and the other moderators who keep the noise down, and actively push to keep discussions from bogging down in AI slop, cheap posts, and off topic rants.
Metamine was a language that appeared here on HN a few times, but seems to have disappeared. The thing that made it interesting is that it let you mix imperative and declarative code in the same program. It did this with a "magical equals", after executing it once, the left side auto-updated outside the flow of the imperative code.
= magical equals, which maintains the relation for the rest of the runtime
note: once you use it on a variable, you can't redefine it later, that's an error
:= normal assignment, which only fires once
Sadly the video is no longer available. Seems like they were anticipating signals. I can see some real opportunity for confusion though, I would see the magic equals as invariants defined outside the flow of code, as mixing them into control flows could lead to lots madcap laughs so to speak.
Personal anecdote: It was circa 1985 that I encountered a similar problem. I hand a hand held barcode scanner that had to upload the collected data via a proprietary serial protocol, for eventual reporting, to a PC.
The customer asked "what happens if I disconnect this right now?" during the upload. It was a corner case I hadn't considered. It only took a few days to make it bulletproof.
---
The authors don't seem to consider the case of very slow or intermittent Internet.
I'd be worried about corruption in the download, and check for that. I'd also make very sure the watchdog hardware was on and the code respected it.
It seems to me you need 3 buffers for the OTA code, not 2. There should be a way to keep the last version that runs for X seconds in addition to any new updates, where X is quite large, perhaps a whole day.
If Ed Zitron is to be believed, Anthropic, and all the other LLM based tools companies are bleeding cash at one of the highest burn rates in history, subsidizing your tools, and likely giving them to you at around 5-10% of their costs. Even if you're prepared to pay 10x or more for the same thing, most aren't, and they don't have a sustainable future.
Your best bet is to develop a local capability on your own hardware while you've still got Claude to compare it to.
Second best is to have an LLM model and harness you can run in the cloud independent of Anthropic or any other AI company.
>Now imagine that we had spent all these resources on doing the basics: ensuring your organization has an up-to-date and comprehensive asset inventory with fine-grained package listings; building infrastructure that supports regular, frequent, and automated OS and applіcation updates; automatically rebooting systems when they hit, say, 30 days of uptime to ensure these updates are picked up;
That would still leave the root cause of most of our problem un-addressed, ambient authority based Operating Systems are fundamentally insecure. Unfortunately, all of our systems share that architecture.
What's the most career altering *course of action* you've gone through?
I was an IT guy, and I took a job making gears in a job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but it was immensely satisfying. Some of the gears I helped make will still be in service in a century.
Tbf, it's a little weird now with rolling restarts. I wouldn't call it downtime if there's a seamless transition to a new pod.
Maybe that's not what you're referring to, but do i mess that simple uptime metric... Finding out your server has been trucking along for 5 years without a single reboot.
The bevel gear generator setup was some formula calculations running in version 1 of TK!solver, which would have been a $5000 upgrade to get the latest version, so they ran them under MS-DOS in DOSbox, and saved the grief.
Without that software, they would have to pay Gleason $500+ to do the calculations for each new gear setup.
There are strong and reasonable reasons to keep very old systems alive in offline production environments.
reply