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A Note on Essential Complexity

(olano.dev)
159 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 17 Jun 24 22:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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boznz ◴[17 Jun 24 23:25 UTC] No.40712390[source]▶
Humans simply cannot keep the whole stack for a complex system in memory, that is why we abstract layers with APIs etc and generally specialize on one layer only.

My (Sci-Fi) book postulated that an AGI (a real AGI, after all it was Sci-Fi) would simply discard everything the humans wrote and rewrite the complete stack (including later on the Hardware and ISA) in machine code without anything unnecessary for the task and of course totally unreadable to a human. It is an interesting scenario to ponder.

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1. philipswood ◴[18 Jun 24 04:53 UTC] No.40714181[source]▶
I wish we would refactor our stack!

Each level throws away a lot of the effort of the preceding layer.

E.g. after heroic engineering for the OS and memory management systems to present the illusory abstraction of a flat memory address space to the runtime, it almost immediately chops it up into smaller independent "packets" that don't interact directly.

Or the whole storage <-> memory <-> slow cache <-> fast cache <-> register divide.

I think we should be building processors that are made of tens of millions of very simple processors, each with their own memory and with dedicated "network on chip"-like communication electronics. These processors would directly map to language structures like objects/structs/functions.

Essentially flattening the stack so that there is just one level between language and silicon.