A few basic rules for buying and using computers can save anyone significant amounts of money and produce the confidence required to try new things with computers.

Few people know how to use computers.

Semiconductors are not sustainable, we need mechanical relays for a truly sustainable computer.

The coolest thing I've seen today!

An open source RISC based balanced ternary computer research project

I guess the point I'm trying to convey is that I do the same things with my computers today that I did one or even two decades ago. The hardware has become monumentally more powerful, but my user experience hasn't really changed a bit. And most of all my level of productivity and enjoyment from my devices stays the same.

The dominant use of personal computers in the 21st century is the functional simulation of non-computers.

Today I spent unnecessary hours chatting online. It could've been... a visit to a bar? Do I have to drink every day? A park? Huh? Where do people talk nowadays? And at winter?

Then I watched some moving pictures. Sure, it could've been a video disk. But the moving pictures I watched would probably never get to me here, in a less-computer world.

Then, I've read some posts in Solderpunk's gemlog. It could've been a book which I don't think would've read.

Then I saved it to this Betula. What would I do elsewise? Cut the article from the book? Rewrite? Hmm, there is photocopy. Oh wait, I don't make copies of content in Betula (although it's a planned feature), I merely comment on them. Yeah, it could've been a notebook. No search though. And no RSS...

I'm not sure I want a world with less computers. Maybe just a little less.

Computers got slow. An extended version of the famous tweet.

The author mentioned that M1 was incredibly fast. I don't believe that. M1 was just ok. I bought one back then. But I guess being ok is incredible now.

This may seem a strange heading for someone whose career is in computers, yet I feel that this article has been a lifetime in the making. It is the product of intuitive observations and things that have stood out to me, even as a child, who even then could sense the sinister side of the most banal of technologies.

И, кстати, самое интересное начинается, когда возникает вопрос о том, что понимать под "эффективностью"? Что лучше: иметь сто рук или уметь хорошо пользоваться только двумя? Вопрос далеко не праздный, поскольку количественное увеличение разрядности ещё не означает автоматическое увеличение производительности. Например, чем плотнее код, тем лучше он кэшируется и тем быстрее работает. Поэтому, например, ARM имеет thumb mode. И поэтому же уже упомянутые мной компиляторы удалось вместить в 512 байт, а попробуйте сделать то же с 64-битным кодом.

Different parts of computers improve over time with different speed. For example, CPU is much faster than RAM, but it wasn't always like that. Because of that, and other cases like that, there are extra abstractions in the computer design.