> I started my first real, full-time job in 2010. We wrote Java...
I started my first real, full-time job in 1992. Back here we write C, or maybe C++ if we're feeling cutting-edge. The Sparc 10 can get a bit slow when we're all on it, but I have a shelf full of O'Reilly X Windows books to look through if I can't figure something out. My mate in London sent me a QIC tape with something called "gcc" on it: sounds exciting, but before I can install it I have to find a spare day to update SunOS first.
This 2010 programming setup seems pretty amazing tbh... can't wait to get me some of that. Nice languages and tooling, no more having to edit makefiles by hand in emacs or laboriously debug in gdb. Bet they don't even use sourcesafe anymore.
I reckon by 2025 they'll have god-like stuff: fast, reliable hardware with more memory and storage than you can eat; powerful development and collaboration tools; lots of ways to find answers without having to ask that guy over in the other building. And a lot of it will be basically free! I wonder how they'll feel about all that awesome dev power, and whether they'll still use X terminals.
Programming has evolved several times since the early 90s (when I got in this business) and I had the impression it had already evolved several times by the 90s (especially talking with old mainframe or COBOL programmers).
It's evolving again now, and that process is painful. Nobody knows what the future holds.
A C programming course that I casually enrolled on as an undergrad in 1989. It meant that I had a head-start in learning C++ (cfront) the following year, just as it was becoming the new hotness. Which in turn got me my first two dev jobs and kept me employed for the next decade as a C/C++/Unix dev.
So, you never really know how its going to turn out.
Course materials? I devoured Michael Waite's Quick C Prpgramming book (the one with the pink and yellow cover) in a day, and then the next day I read it all again. Did the same with Stan Lippmann's C++ book the following year, and carried the at&t cfront manual around in my backpack for ages.
I've been working pretty much exclusively in .net for the last twenty years, but C remains my favourite language - even if I almost never write any code in it nowadays.
This is the first time I read that someone uses an acronym for ragebait purposes. The acronym "RL" is very well known. Dwarkesh's podcast is mostly AI related, so it's not a surprise that he will freely use acronyms. I think your take is very cynical.
That is a bizarre take. Dwarkesh Patel is publishing in a very specific domain, where RL is a very common and unambigous acronym. I'd bet it was immediately clear to 99% of his normal audience, and to him it's such a high frequency term that people finding it ambiguous would not even have crossed his mind.
(Like, would you expect people to expand LLM or AGI in a title?)
Ok so now it's stupid or malicious to use RL as reinforcement learning on a blog about AI where everyone in the field has been referring to it as RL forever? Even wikipedia puts (RL) after reinforcement learning.
That's the normal way to introduce an acronym in an article.
Anyway, I was just saying that however irritating, it's likely just an omission out of forgetfulness, not deliberate clickbait. A minor application of Hanlon's razor.
Seeing the downvotes and even a flag, it appears I'll have to lower my expectation of people's cultural baggage here.
Counterpoint: much of academia is creating and learning these shorthands. They are genuinely useful - humans have limited context space in their heads, so this compression allows them to work in larger problem spaces. Classic example: Einstein and tensors.
Upshot - don’t hate - pick up the vocab, it’s part of the learning process.
Interesting article, and he sounds like a clever (and, as the article says) humble guy.
> On the way home from one of those trips, Whitfield had an idea. “He was on an airplane, and he whipped out a tablet and basically drew out the whole schematic of how the clean room should work,” said Whitfield’s son Jim, who was 6 years old at the time. “It was just a simple sketch. It just took a few minutes, and it’s the basic principle that is still used today.”
This was in 1960 and he clearly drew it on paper. So is/was "tablet" a common term for a pad of paper? I've never heard it used in any context other than a slab of stone or a derivation of such.
This exact product is referenced quite often in John Kennedy Toole’s hilarious A Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans of the early 1960s. The main character, Ignatius J Reilly, is essentially a neckbeard stereotype.
Also, typically glue bound along the top edge and having a solid backing, as if you took a hardbound book (of blank pages) and ripped off the front cover and spine. Pages could easily be peeled off, if glued at the edge, or torn off if perforated.
Etymonline states: "The meaning 'pad of writing or blotting paper' is by 1880".[1] Also see the variety of meanings listed it the Webster 1913 edition, including: "1. A small table or flat surface. 2. A flat piece of any material on which to write, paint, draw, or engrave; also, such a piece containing an inscription or a picture. 3. Hence, a small picture; a miniature. [Obs.] 4. pl. A kind of pocket memorandum book. [...]".[2] -- No information on the frequency of use, though.
I picture it as a legal pad, more or less. If I really think about it, I imagine a "legal pad" as having that very specific paper (lined, with that nice margin), whereas a "tablet" could perhaps be any type of paper bound together in that same way.
I'm not entirely sure where I got these impressions from over the years, though I certainly used to use a lot of legal pads. I still really like stumbling across a nice one in the wild, even if I usually just get them from Amazon nowadays. (Aside: Is it just me, or are legal pads not as good these days as they used to be?)
Looks like paper tablets even predate that 1902 use. This source has newspaper ads for "Pencil Tablets" and "Writing Tablets": bound ruled and un-ruled paper with and without covers from 1894-1895: https://www.kristinholt.com/archives/3205
I wonder if binding at the top was necessary to be called a tablet? Or perforation to easily tear off sheets?
I was looking to see how long ago marble composition notebooks (which are side-bound) were created and what they were called and it looks like they existed in the mid-1800s but I couldn't find any evidence they were called tablets.
Single AOC 27" UHD monitor on my desktop Windows system at home. I use multiple desktops for context switching. No gaming, just a bit of dev and photo stuff.
At work, a couple of Dell 27" UHD monitors attached to my Windows laptop via DP ports on a dock. Single desktop as I have plenty of screen space. I mostly live in Visual Studio and Outlook/Teams.
No complaints about either - all works pretty well.
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