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521 points OlympicMarmoto | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.439s | source
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frognumber ◴[] No.45073140[source]
John describes exactly what I'd like someone to build:

"To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers."

As a thought experiment:

* Pick a place where cost-of-living is $200/month

* Set up a village which is very livable. Fresh air. Healthy food. Good schools. More-or-less for the cost that someone rich can sponsor without too much sweat.

* Drop a load of computers with little to no software, and little to no internet

* Try reinventing the computing universe from scratch.

Patience is the key. It'd take decades.

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ksec ◴[] No.45073706[source]
Love this idea and wondering where that low cost of living place would be. But genuinely asking;

What problem are we trying to solve that is not possible right now? Do we start from hardware at the CPU ?

I remember one of an ex Intel engineer once said, you could learn about all the decisions which makes modern ISA and CPU uArch design, along with GPU and how it all works together, by the time you have done all that and could implement a truly better version from a clean sheet, you are already close to retiring .

And that is assuming you have the professional opportunity to learn about all these, implementation , fail and make mistakes and relearn etc.

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killerstorm ◴[] No.45076095[source]
Software is bloated and unreliable. It's clearly a "local minimum".
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1. 01HNNWZ0MV43FF ◴[] No.45077862[source]
If it's so bloated then just start cutting

Whatever expertise you need to prune a working system is less than the expertise you'll need to create a whole new one and then also prune it as it grows old

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2. frognumber ◴[] No.45081952[source]
Absolutely not.

Software is bloated in part because it's built in layers. People wrap things over, and over, and over. Stripping down layers is neigh-impossible later. Starting from scratch is easy.

Starting from scratch fails in practice because you don't get feature parity in time short enough for VC (or grant) funding cycles.

If we build a tech tree around 200MHz 32MB machines, except for things like ML and video, we'd have a tech tree which did everything existing machines do, only 10x more quickly in 0.1% of the memory. Machines back then were fine for word processing, spreadsheets, all the web apps I use on a daily basis (not as web apps), etc.

Need would drive people to rebuild those, but with a few less layers.