> the US system is designed for gridlock

Yup. aka vetocracy

Yes and: USA has been reverting education to its pre-Sputnik arrangement since the end of the Cold War. Without an external motivation, our domestic reactionaries have regained the advantage. Its been a generations long fight to roll back the New Deal (including public and hogher education). I have no clue if / when the pendullum will swing back.

I learned from playing Diplomacy that a competent enemy is preferrable to an incompetent ally.

TIL "vernacular art". I like it.

Am noob. The phrase "folk art" never satisfied me. Is it really all that different? But I didn't have the gumption to learn more. Happily, the critics and philosophers did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_art

Thanks.

Becoming a working artist requires sacrifice and commitment.

Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll podcast) often talks about the practicalities of producing art.

In 1970's a (starving) artist worked part-time job (eg waiter), enabling them to focus on their craft most of the week.

Today, typical artist has to hustle, juggling 3 jobs, and can only focus once per week on their one day off work.

Further, "entry level" jobs are unpaid / underpaid. Such as internships at a museum or newspaper. Ditto teaching positions.

Consequently, only affluent persons are able to break into the creative disciplines (production of culture). Trust funds, nepotism, and other lottery winners.

--

I, for one, enthusiastically support heavily subsidizing both creative and caring work. All those "not-for-profit" gigs and unpaid labor. They're the grease that keeps society working. Despite not being tabulated in someone's payroll accounting system.

Yes and:

IIRC, Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.

>Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.

I've heard Bryan and Co. call it a "mainframe for Zoomers," but it's much closer to what Nutanix or VxRail is/was doing than it is to an AS/400.

It's not really a mainframe because the RAS story (Reliability, Availability, Servicing) story is sorely lacking compared to what a true mainframe gives you. So a midrange machine like AS/400 is probably a better comparison.

An AS/400 has a similar RAS story to mainframes than to Oxide/Dell. Oxide is closer to Dell (Oxide RAS is effectively the same as any sled hyperconverged) than they want to admit.

For modern applications written to seamlessly handle node failures the reliability is perfectly adequate.

For those of us who are unaware of "the value proposition" of an "IBM AS/400," could someone spell it out for us?

When the AS/400 came out circa 1989 or whatever, you could replace an entire mainframe with a box not much bigger than a mini fridge. The hardware is built for high reliability, and the OS and application software stack have a lot of integration. If Unix is "everything is a file" then AS/400 is "everything is a persistent object in a flat 64 bit address space."

The result is a system that can handle years of operation with no downtime. The platform got very popular with huge retailers for this reason.

Then in later years the platform got the ability to run Linux or Windows VMs, so that they could benefit from the reliability features.

High capacity, super reliable box that you could run your entire business stack on, if you could afford it.

The money IBM made with the AS/400 is actually completely mind blowing when you compare it to the rest of the computing industry at the time.

Hi Brendan. Thanks for the update. Ignore the haters.

WRT "AI saving the planet", obviously.

We need ungodly amounts of machine learning. Weather modeling, forecasting, resilience planning, risk mgmt, planning, etc.

To implement virtual power plants (aka P2P distributed grid), everything needs to get smart. Just this transformation alone is a generational project.

There's dozens more of "must have" stacks we need to tackle climate crisis. Replace industrial heat. Decarbonize agriculture. Build out geothermal. Find and stop methane leaks. Pretty much everything needs a makeover, really.

OpenAI is as good a place (for you) to start as any.

Happy hunting.

A fish rots from the head back.

Yup.

My personal counterpoint is Norman's thesis in Things That Make Us Smart.

I've long tried, and mostly failed, to consider the tradeoffs, to be ever mindful that technologies are never neutral (winners & losers), per Postman's Technopoly.

Enforcement.