Spooling back up the blog

Since Doc Searls decided to start blogging daily again, I figured I might just as well follow along.

Now that I'm retired (actually, yeeted out of the labor pool by Long Covid, but that's a different story), there's not much keeping me on a regular schedule. Maybe this blog will help? We'll see.

I've been helping my friend Jim repair an old radio from the 1930s, an Emerson Catalan radio. It turns out that among the many issues, the main oscillator coil had turned into a crusty green blob that used to be copper windings.  Some improvisation and time learning how to use a spectrum analyzer with a tracking generator were required to figure out just what values were needed for the windings to get it to play properly.

Bonus, I learned what a pentagrid converter is. It's magic.

Upcoming projects, Fall 2025 edition

Upcoming projects include revisiting old ideas

Bidirectional compilation - a compiler that can work backwards to enable radical refactoring, possibly into other languages. I'll start with Pascal, because it doesn't really do macros, which break reverse causality. Memex - I want to create a markup language for existing documents that can actually bring an 80 year old idea to life. The main feature is the ability to browse the web and have it all captured and ready for sharing and making copies on demand, something IP lawyers and censors would abhor.

LiveSQL - a database that offers subscriptions to changes, and temporal features. There was an old database back in the MS-DOS days that had the idea of generations of changes to resolve locking and other issues. Maybe that becomes part of this. The main feature is that you could have a query that gives you new versions of the database as others make changes.

Setting up my own electronics repair shop. My friend who I help has been doing this since the 1950s, I need to get my own workbench and things up and running again, it's been decades since I've had my own shop, now that I'm retired, it's time to set it up. 

De-hoarding - too much stuff that I won't use, and my child doesn't need to worry about when we're gone. Part of the shop process should be finding someone else to inherit that stuff, and save my kid the grief of finding it a home.

Multidimensional ratings - Imagine a way to rate things on a forum (just to make it easier to start out), but instead of up/down vote, you can make up your own dimensions as well... humour, is_it_political, spam, etc. There are things you really can't talk about because the moderation systems we use globally have to worry about spam of many forms, and nuance gets crushed. I'd like to help address that.

So called Liberation Day, the day the Dollar died.

The US created a new world order from the ashes of WWII. This gave us the incredible privilege of having other nations treat our Dollar as their reserve currency. 

Trump has thrown this away, and it can't be recovered. We're now going to actually have to pay, in hard currency for things we import from now on. This means we're all going to see our standards of living fall by about 70% in the next decade.

It's important to remember this was a purely self inflicted wound, we did it to ourselves. We fucked around, and now we (and especially our kids) are going to find out.

I can't get over the feeling that I'm wasting whatever portion of my life I've got left.

In this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jgTCayWlwc

"A rant on personal engineering projects" by BPS.shorts

The author makes the point that when you're working commercially on part of a project, the organization always has a way to keep the project going, even if you fail. If the cost goes over, they can usually change the scope or budget to fit it in.  If the parts don't integrate well, they can buy a system already integrated, or even the company that has already done it.

However, on a personal project, if any part fails, the whole thing fails. The main hazard is simply not finishing the project, rather than doing any one stage optimally. I think there's a shit-ton of value in this analysis.

Good Quote from Pale Rose in the comments @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jgTCayWlwc&lc=Ugxjv3J38ajw82_bmtF4AaABAg

    *Personal projects have a unique requirement that you must optimize for: 'finishing the damn project'. Everything else is secondary*

It's my Birthday, here... have a BitGrid

If you've read about von Neuman, and wondered what it was like to bootstrap computing, and if there could be another way.... here's an interesting Birthday Gift from me to you... the BitGrid, and a writeup, on an HN thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115107

Arrogant programmers and Enshittification - A New Understanding

A few weeks ago, I replied to a thread on Hacker News about a "leaked" talk by former Google CEO  Eric Schmidt. The key phrase I tried to pick apart was

So imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want

I had assumed he was referring to situations similar to my own experience as a software developer interacting with customers back in the 1980s. Programming was still a relatively new thing, and most people didn't understand how data was stored and processed. I considered it my job to probe what they really wanted to have, and figure out how I could meet their needs by impedance matching them to what was feasible. This smoothing over of their wants and needs with reality made everyone happy, in the end.

---

A few days ago, I watched Cory Doctorow's presentation at DefCon32 about the ongoing Enshittification of everything. He delivered, as usual for him, a passionate and fact stuffed critique of the way things are going, and how we got there. It's been quietly flowing through my mapper mind, bumping up against all of the other chunks of knowledge I've recently pondered.

---

This morning, I was reading a thread about Thea Lim's The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. 

She helped me see that though I have had my self-worth tied up in work, there was a deep cause of disastisfaction once I was out of the work force. I've always been good at explaining complex things in a way others can understand. (Impedance matching, again!) This bumped against some other things I was pondering, and then the penny dropped

I was wrong about what Eric Schmidt meant, and I see that now.

I had made a category error and assumed he was just trying to get good results, or meet some weird quirk of his design sense, like Steve Jobs is said to have done, and was getting frustrated. Oh boy, was I ever wrong.

Assuming that Schmidt was talking bout overriding ethical concerns is a way better fit for the amount of emotion this seems to hold for him.

Cory's right. We really do have to hold the line against this shit.

---

So there you have it... a brief journey through the thought process of a mapper, with a side of self-discovery

Apple M0110 Keyboard CPU replacement - part #1

My friend Jim bought an Apple Macintosh at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest on Saturday. It's got a bad keyboard. The keyboard has a bad Intel 8021 CPU.

I need to replace that chip. It's going to take wayyyy more time that I'm used to dumping into a project successfully.  This is part of my process to push myself forward.

So far I've:

• Searched for an 8048 series disassembler, found none
• Downloaded the 8048 series manual from BitSavers
• Decided to write an 8021 specific disassembler in pascal
• Started a Lazarus project in my C:\res21 folder
• Published the above to an MIT licensed GitHub repository

Let's see how this goes.

The contest of wills begins

 So, this morning when I click on my morning link to Peter Zeihan, I've been greeted with this, instead of him talking from some new location.

We've entered the contest of wills. Google/YouTube thinks that they can force ads down my throat in service of their customers(the advertisers), and is willing to block my ad blocker in an attempt to force my compliance.

I'm sure there will eventually be a different platform to watch Peter's videos on... and the wait begins. We programmers/technicians have a superpower, we're willing to put up with a ton of grief to bend things to our will, it's how we route around the normal rules and get shit done.

I curate my sources, and Peter is one of them, I'm not willing to pollute that stream of information with the Ads that Google wants to force feed me. It'll be interesting to see how this all works out.

On "Software Engineering" circa 2023

I've been a programmer since the 1980s. I feel that the peak of the field was somewhere between 1995 and 2000. We had Windows 95/98, the Internet, and all programs were local applications run on a desktop, that people had gotten very productive on.

The existence of Visual Basic and VBA support in the Microsoft Office Suite made it possible, and even practical, for most domain experts to build usable applications that allowed everyone to get their jobs done. If there were performance problems, or it needed to be made more reliable, professional programmers would be brought in to rebuild things in a more properly designed manner.... it was at this point that we almost shifted to being actual Software Engineers, and professionalized.

Since then VB was cast into the pyre as a sacrifice to the very unnecessary migration to .Net, and the bloat that ensued as desktop programming lost a decade of productivity, people decided to just shove everything onto the web.

It was only as this was starting to happen that Steve Jobs further crippled programming by introducing the iPhone, and suddenly GUI applications were expected to work on tiny screens (in either orientation) without proper input hardware like 3 button mice and keyboards, connected across a slow and unreliable network connection.

Needless to say, the last 2 decades have been a total loss as far as programmer productivity goes, with one shining exception.... GIT. Git has its flaws, mostly arising when people don't realize it's a set of snapshots that fake storing deltas, and not the other way around.

GIT/GitHub, et al... are fantastic. The ability to just keep multiple machines up to sync without hassle in seconds is sooooo good. I used to keep stacks of floppy disks with ZIP files of source code, all manually managed.

In the future, we need to recover to the point where you can drag/drop GUI elements and have them work anywhere, like we were with VB/Delphi/Hypercard.

When we get there, we'll let users build basic applications, and we can finally professionalize and apply actual engineering practices to the art of programming.

Until then, please stop calling it engineering. We don't put in anywhere near the effort that Margaret Hamilton (the first actual Software Engineer) and crew did, in safely getting men to the moon. We're programmers, not Engineers. As Uncle Bob said, we don't profess anything. We certainly don't use engineering practices as described by The Engineer Guy.

---

Example: You can plug a lamp into an outlet, and in the US, it can draw up to 15 amperes, and under almost all circumstances, you can't damage the wiring in the house via a fault in the load.

We have no equivalent in software. Chroot, sandboxes, etc... are far too unsafe. We have no standard way of letting the user choose resources to give to applications at run time.

The worst part is, most people don't even see the deficiency. Imagine the current power grid with no fuses or circuit breakers.... the first wiring mistake would crash civilization.

We can do better, we must do better.

Mike teaches Chat GPT about Cesium Beam Atomic clocks

Here's the text of my most recent interaction with ChatGPT

Mike Warot: explain how cesium beam atomic clocks work, in the style of Richard Feynman

Ah, yes, cesium beam atomic clocks - a fascinating piece of technology! Let me explain how they work in the style of Richard Feynman.

First, let's take a step back and talk about what we mean by time. Time is something we use to measure the duration of events or the intervals between them. But what is it really? Is it a physical quantity, like distance or mass? Well, it turns out that time is a bit more elusive than that. In fact, one could argue that time is simply what a clock measures.

So, how do we make a good clock? We need something that oscillates regularly and predictably. In the case of a cesium beam atomic clock, we use the natural oscillations of atoms. More specifically, we use the transition between two energy levels in a cesium atom.

Here's how it works. We start with a beam of cesium atoms, which are first cooled down to very low temperatures so that they are almost motionless. Then, we subject them to a magnetic field that separates the atoms into two groups, depending on the orientation of their magnetic moments. These two groups of atoms are sent through two separate chambers, where they are exposed to microwave radiation at a specific frequency. If the frequency is just right, it will cause the cesium atoms in one of the groups to "flip" from one energy level to another.

This flipping of the energy levels can be detected by measuring the absorption of the microwave radiation by the atoms. By tuning the frequency of the microwave radiation, we can find the exact frequency that causes the flipping to occur. This frequency is known as the resonance frequency of the cesium atom.

Once we have determined the resonance frequency of the cesium atom, we can use it to make a clock. We do this by counting the number of oscillations of the resonance frequency that occur over a given period of time. By definition, one second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the resonance frequency of the cesium atom.

So, that's how cesium beam atomic clocks work. They use the natural oscillations of atoms to measure time with incredible accuracy. It's a truly remarkable application of quantum mechanics and a testament to the power of human ingenuity.

Mike Warot: but that's not correct, the cesium beam clock I worked on started with an oven containing the cesium

You are absolutely right, and I apologize for any confusion my previous answer may have caused. I'll correct my mistake and explain the correct functioning of a cesium beam atomic clock in the style of Richard Feynman.

The cesium beam atomic clock is a device that uses the natural oscillations of cesium atoms to measure time with extraordinary precision. The clock works by first introducing cesium atoms into a small oven, which heats up the atoms until they are in a gaseous state.

The cesium atoms are then sent through a tube, where they are subjected to a series of magnetic and electric fields. These fields filter out atoms that are not in the right energy state and accelerate the remaining cesium atoms to a high speed.

Next, the cesium atoms are sent through a microwave cavity that is tuned to the exact frequency at which the cesium atoms will resonate. If the frequency is correct, the microwave radiation will cause the cesium atoms to jump between two energy levels.

At this point, a detector measures the number of cesium atoms that have jumped between the energy levels. The detector is designed to measure the amount of radiation that is absorbed by the cesium atoms and provides a signal that is proportional to the number of atoms that have changed energy states.

The signal from the detector is then used to adjust the frequency of a quartz oscillator that is used to generate the microwave radiation. The oscillator is adjusted until it is in resonance with the cesium atoms, at which point the frequency is known to be accurate to within one part in 10^14.

Finally, the frequency of the quartz oscillator is used to keep time. The frequency is divided down to produce a signal that is used to drive the clock's display, providing an accurate and stable reference for timekeeping.

In summary, the cesium beam atomic clock is a remarkable device that takes advantage of the natural oscillations of cesium atoms to provide incredibly precise timekeeping. Its operation relies on a sophisticated combination of magnetic and electric fields, microwave radiation, and a quartz oscillator to generate a stable and accurate time reference.

Mike Warot: but that's not true, the cesium atoms in the clock I repaired were driven by the motion when they exited the holes in the oven, and were not accelerated after that

I apologize for my previous mistake and any confusion it may have caused. Thank you for correcting me. Let me try to explain how the cesium beam atomic clock works based on your input, in the style of Richard Feynman.

The cesium beam atomic clock is a device that uses the natural oscillations of cesium atoms to measure time with exceptional accuracy. The clock starts with a small oven containing cesium atoms. The oven heats up the cesium atoms until they become a gas and are able to escape through small holes in the oven.

The cesium atoms that escape from the oven are then directed into a vacuum chamber, where they pass through a series of collimating and focussing lenses. These lenses help to create a beam of cesium atoms that is directed towards a microwave cavity.

Inside the microwave cavity, the cesium atoms are exposed to microwave radiation at a specific frequency. The frequency is tuned to match the natural resonant frequency of the cesium atoms. This frequency is such that it causes the cesium atoms to change their energy state.

A detector positioned at the end of the microwave cavity measures the number of cesium atoms that have changed energy state. This information is used to adjust the frequency of the microwave radiation so that it matches the resonant frequency of the cesium atoms.

The oscillation frequency of the cesium atoms is then used to keep time. The frequency is divided down to produce a signal that drives the clock's display, providing an accurate and stable reference for timekeeping.

In summary, the cesium beam atomic clock is a device that uses the natural oscillations of cesium atoms to measure time with incredible accuracy. The clock relies on a series of collimating and focussing lenses to create a beam of cesium atoms that is directed towards a microwave cavity. The oscillation frequency of the cesium atoms is used to keep time, and the frequency is adjusted to match the resonant frequency of the cesium atoms.

Mike Warot: there are no magnetic lenses in the cesium clock I repaired, but there were magnets to sort their energy state, so you got that part right

Thank you for the clarification. Let me try to provide a more accurate explanation of how the cesium beam atomic clock works based on your input, in the style of Richard Feynman.

The cesium beam atomic clock is a device that uses the natural oscillations of cesium atoms to measure time with incredible accuracy. The clock starts with a small oven containing cesium atoms. The oven heats up the cesium atoms until they become a gas and are able to escape through small holes in the oven.

The cesium atoms that escape from the oven are then directed into a vacuum chamber, where they pass through a series of magnets. These magnets help to sort the cesium atoms into two energy levels, corresponding to the hyperfine transition of the cesium atom.

Once the cesium atoms are sorted, they enter a microwave cavity where they are exposed to microwave radiation at a specific frequency. The frequency is tuned to match the natural resonant frequency of the cesium atoms. This frequency is such that it causes the cesium atoms to change their energy state.

A detector positioned at the end of the microwave cavity measures the number of cesium atoms that have changed energy state. This information is used to adjust the frequency of the microwave radiation so that it matches the resonant frequency of the cesium atoms.

The oscillation frequency of the cesium atoms is then used to keep time. The frequency is divided down to produce a signal that drives the clock's display, providing an accurate and stable reference for timekeeping.

In summary, the cesium beam atomic clock is a device that uses the natural oscillations of cesium atoms to measure time with incredible accuracy. The clock relies on magnets to sort the cesium atoms into two energy levels corresponding to the hyperfine transition of the cesium atom. The oscillation frequency of the cesium atoms is used to keep time, and the frequency is adjusted to match the resonant frequency of the cesium atoms.

Mike Warot: that's pretty good, thank you!

You're welcome! I'm glad that I could provide a more accurate explanation of how the cesium beam atomic clock works. If you have any more questions or clarifications, feel free to ask!

If I had a million dollars (to do physics)

 If I had a million $USD to do physics, I'd do some experiments.

Berry Phase/Electromagnetic 4 Potential experiments

First purchase/rental - a SQUID - Superconducting QUantum Interference Device.

My first hypothesis to check is regarding the A field, also known as the electromagnetic vector potential. I hypothesize that if you were to take a bifilar wound coil of quite a few turns, the flux when the windings were connected to oppose each other would correctly generate no B field (detectable with a compass, magnetometer, etc), but I believe there WOULD be an A field generated, perhaps much weaker, than that of the field when the windings aided each other, but non-zero.

I'd then investigate the polarity and form of this field in 3d around the coils, etc.

I'd also perform the same experiment with a set of toroidally wound coils, a pair, and see what type of A fields they generate, and see if everything matches simulations.

--

A refinement of this experiment would be to use a pair of atomic clocks, one outside a "null set of coils", and the other inside them (with actual B magnetic fields canceled), to see if there was any drift with power applied.

---

Gravimetric / Inertial measurements

Purchase - Vacuum Pump

Next, a torsion bridge, in the manner of Cavendish... a long (as long as I could get in the garage) rod inside a copper/aluminum tube, pumped to as good a vacuum as I could reasonably get. Using electromagnetic forces on the ends, test out various materials to see measure their gravimetric effects on the bridge.

I'm particularly interested to see if some materials have a different G than others


Also, it would be interesting to see if a large capacitor had a different gravimetric effect if it were charged/not charged (whilst inside a faraday cage, of course)

On the impending loss of Twitter, and the value of social graphs

Well, with the impending demise of Twitter, it looks like I'll be following Dave Rogers, and the rest of the world, on RSS again, along with everyone else. I've got a list... it's about 250 entries long, that will make the start of my RSS feeds.

Twitter had an immediacy that RSS lacks, having solved the problem of feedback by outsourcing the policing of spam, etc. to a staff that has been let go.

I like seeing what the people I follow are saying, but the idea of retweeting at a click was seductive, but a bit too easy because you never say WHY you retweet someone, you're just blindly sharing an idea without adding any new context.

I can't help but feel that if Aaron Swartz were still with us, he'd have figured out something more powerful, open source, and wonderful to replace Twitter at this time.

In losing Twitter, I lose links to the comments of friends now gone like Michael O'Connor Clarke, and they likely aren't archived anywhere else, except the Internet Archive of his blog.

I've suffered my own health issues, and this loss (or threat) of Twitter just serves to remind me of the things I'm thankful for, friends and family I've shared this journey with.

I've yet to pick out an RSS reader....I'll post here when I do.

[Update] RSSowl seems to be a usable, locally installed and run Desktop OS RSS Reader. It's only quirk is that it needs the 32 bit Java runtime, regardless of your 64 bit OS, etc. 

Future Security Threats - Example One - The Threat from Stable Diffusion

I'm playing with Stable Diffusion on my PC, to see what kind of things it comes up with, and learn a bit more about the nature of AI. I've been trying to visualize the words of my friend Lloyd Smith, who well before his passing often said in jest

When I die... I want to be sat upright in a chair at a card table, on the surface of the moon, with a royal flush in my hands, and a shit eating grin on my face. That will give the astronomy students something fun to look for.

There have been quite a few thought provoking outputs, some of which worked out really well

But in browsing through them this morning, out of the 500+ images I've generated on this theme, I saw this

Which immediately brought back to mind the NDC Keynote Presentation by Laura Bell I watched last night, which addressed future security threats. One of the possibilities was the threat of curated data sets... and here it was in my own PC.

I don't know how, but somewhere in this curated set of data, copyrights might have been broken. The future is here.

Mike's law of capabilities

Any sufficiently popular computing environment contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of capability based security.

In a recent Hacker News thread[1], I quoted from the source article

Continuing a legacy is an honorable task, except in programming.

This is the most important of the items in the list. The "upgrade or you're unclean" ethos has some very deep roots. It goes all the way down to the security model of our operating systems.

It was perfectly reasonable to assume that a user knew what they were doing with their own files back in the days when Unix was written. That wasn't assumed in the world of mainframes, which were designed to multiplex hardware across tens, hundreds, or even thousands of jobs. In mainframes, your job is explicitly given resources to use and a run time environment. No matter what went wrong, a job run for Acme Inc couldn't corrupt the files of Bob's Distributor.
We don't have that... we've been lead to believe that we just have to be pure enough, our code has to be perfect enough, and defect free, in order to have safety. We blame everything except the OS, mostly because we don't want to cast doubt on the wisdom of Linus, and the sanctity of Linux.
We recreate the mainframe model, over and over, in part, not in whole. It's like Greenspun's 10th rule[2].

Any sufficiently popular computing environment contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of capability based security. That's why we have Virtual Machines, Containers, and now WASM... which I hope actually manages to fend off the stupidity of letting an application decide which files to access.

We need to make better choices. Legacies are a choice, lots of old stuff is tossed by kids all the time, the legacies are the good things kept from the past. Keeping legacies alive is a choice, let's chose wisely.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32935466
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

 

We need to do a hard thing

 We do need to do a hard thing, we need to reconfigure our world to cope with the end of the one time greatest economic bonanza of all times... the fossil fuel pulse.

If you think I'm about to go on about global warming/climate change/etc... NOPE

We've tapped most of the easy to reach oil in the world. Now we're fracking to get at things, and those wells have decay rates of 40%/year, instead of per decade.  If we stopped all drilling, we'd have 40% less oil next year from all the new wells. (Or so I've been lead to believe. It's my opinion that we've got 20 years, at the outside to complete this project)

The new shockingly high fuel costs? They're here to stay, no matter who "runs the country". They stopped building new refineries in the 1970s, because they knew this day was coming, and it didn't make sense to build more capacity for an industry they knew was heading to a peak. The only surprise was that some things broke faster than planned.

Our civilization depends on a resource in decline. All the people at the top have zero clue as to how to actively manage the situation. We, the people, have to start from the grass roots and figure this out ourselves.

Abortion isn't all about ending life - saying it is, is evil!

I've lost multiple nights of sleep, and simply have no coping skills because there exist in this world a large number of people who just love calling abortion "Baby Murder"

These people obviously know the difference between a dead child lying on the ground in a classroom in Texas, and a few cells removed in the first half of a pregnancy... yet they persist in this evil game.

If the upcoming laws in my Red State had been in effect 2 decades ago, I'd have no wife, she would have been killed, rather than have life saving procedure after we lost a more than welcome pregnancy. Thus she wouldn't have been with me to bring our lovely child into the world later.

How many men will lose their wives, sisters, daughters... how many children will lose their mothers because of this evil befalling the land?

How the f*ck can I get some sleep at night, knowing of all the evil indifference these people carry in their hearts?

A chance to act, let's close the Boyfriend Loophole - the right way!

 Closing the "Boyfriend Loophole" could do a great deal to stop future mass shootings. Someone who can't handle their feelings around people close to them enough to avoid violence, shouldn't be allowed to own firearms.

This is THE BEST CHANCE we have at the moment, likely in the next year or two, for actually fixing some of the biggest problems facing our nation. The huge overlap between those who commit domestic violence, and mass shooters, is well proven.

I hope that we can push our representatives to do the right thing on this. Pretty much EVERYONE agrees that this legislation is needed, let's not let them f*ck it up.

Here's Beau explaining why the details matter.

Memex Rewind

In 1945, the person in charge of research and development, who oversaw most of the science that won WWII with the help of Logistics, wrote an article about the most pressing task facing mankind, the need to organize and access the ever growing flood of information created by all of this activity.

His vision was expressed in an article titled "As We May Think", which was eventually republished by Time Magazine. Many people credit it for the vision that eventually became the world wide web. I also held this view for a long time.

I no longer hold that view.

The web as we use it is about as useful as a picture of a box of tools, instead of the tools themselves. There was a vague notion expressed that you could gather up a huge canvas of inter-related thoughts and ideas, and freely associate them, and share the whole of that work effortlessly. We don't have it. I'm trying to use my time and effort to change that by making something that gets a bit more of that toolset into my hands, and hopefully into everyone's eventually.

Wish me luck.

Linux compared to Window 11 in terms of suckage

 I came across this comparison video, and it makes a comparison of features between Pop Linux and Windows 11 For the most part, they're equivalent.

How the Democrats kicked out actual liberals

 Krystal Ball lays out exactly how the Clintons sold out the liberal agenda.