[pixelsort]

I was 7 in 1987, learned LOGO and C64 BASIC that year, and I relate to this article as well.

It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity. Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the atrophy of forgetting than anyone.

But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish. The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted computers to be nothing more than an appliance.

The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.

From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.

It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting back.

[tavavex]

This proposal feels really vague to me, I don't really understand what this actually does. Can you explain more? What exactly is a computer with permanence? What is software that forces a user to treat the computer it runs on "as an appliance"? In what ways is this different from any general-purpose computer, and what's the reason why a user would pick this over something standard?

[pixelsort]

Re: Permanence

I mean "permanence" in the same vague senses that I think the OP was hinting upon. A belief that regardless of change, the primitives remain. This is about having total confidence that abstractions haven't removed you the light-cone of comprehension.

Re: Appliance

I believe turing-completeness is over-powered, and the reason that AGI/ASI is a threat at all. My hypothesis is that we can build a machine that delivers most of the same experiences as existing software can. By constraint, some tasks would impossible and others just too hard to scale. By analogy, even a Swiss-army knife is like an appliance in that it only has a limited number of potential uses.

Re: Users

The machine I'm proposing is basically just eBPF for rich applications. It will have relevance for medical, aviation, and AI research. I don't suppose that end-users won't be looking for it until the bad times really start ramping up. But, I suppose we'll need to port Doom over to it before we can know for sure.

[chasd00]

> We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.

it's kind of strange to think about but i guess now there's a new incentive to do something truly new and innovative. The llms won't be able to do it for you.

[pixelsort]

My goal isn't to make LLM-assistance impossible; it will still be possible. In fact, GPT2-level inference is one of launch demos I have planned if I can finish this cursed self-hosting run.

My goal is to make training (especially self-training) impossible; while making inference deterministic by design and highly interpretable.

The idea is to build a sanctuary substrate where humans are the only beneficiaries of all possible technical advancements.