I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with "Carbon Dysphoria".

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@glyph @whitequark @jason Huh. Just registered a thing: I'm very good at writing high-performance C code, but for some reason that just doesn't parse in my brain as a *software* skill? If anything, C lives in the maths part of my brain.

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @jason It's a mess, but I think it does also give us a good opportunity for realigning the industry along slightly more reasonable lines. I'm writing an article about it now, as it happens.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@iris_meredith @glyph @jason so, this is a topic I am fascinated by!

I work with RTL. from a mathematical perspective, every modern digital system consists of a few clock domains, with each clock domain defined by a transfer function: s', o = f(s, i). these domains communicate, but are typically implemented in a way where each is relatively autonomous—e.g. a multicore CPU can reasonably be implemented in a single clock domain.

learning how to express myself in a HDL by studying the correspondences between the designs I'm entering and the resulting function and its logic implementation is how I got good at logic design. but this type of thinking also made me a better programmer; in terms of this abstraction, a CPU is just a certain type of state machine, and you can (if you are designing your own computer architecture) move logic across the ISA boundary to make certain things easier or harder to express, which helps you think about the instructions you're giving the CPU in a broader context

writing HDL to me is both a math-type skill and a software-type skill: the math is to come up the transfer function, the software is to communicate it to others

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@iris_meredith @whitequark @jason there is historical precedent. c.f. SV culture in 1999 vs. 2002, or 2007 vs. 2009. Post-bubble culture is, counterintuitively, a lot more *fun* here, because there is still plenty of money for a lot of people to live, but not enough money for the money bastards to get up to bastarding.

this time might be different given the absolute depths to which things have decayed, and the literally world-historically unprecedented amounts of money involved.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@iris_meredith @whitequark @jason so I am not exactly optimistic, but I am not a complete doomer either

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@glyph @iris_meredith @jason yeah. my plan is definitely to outlive my adversaries

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @iris_meredith @jason this is, regrettably, my main motivation for currently doing many self-maintenance tasks which I find extremely unpleasant. every day I write in my journal my yearly theme, “the horrors persist but so do we”. I intend to persist longer.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@glyph @iris_meredith @jason my `lifehack' is to find joy in outliving my enemies, but this is admittedly a matter of taste.

[iris_meredith@mastodon.social]

@whitequark @glyph @jason Well, everyone ends up in the grave, so the only thing to distinguish one life from another is how it's lived. And I think I prefer to live in the way that I'm living to the way that my enemies live.