ImperialViolet

Zooko has been away for ages and his mail server is down. Since IV is the backup MX the queue has been filling for a while and it's now at 101 messages and counting. I've just upped the queue lifetime to 2 weeks to make sure they don't die, but still no sign of Zooko

Full book: "Are We Spiritual Machines?" posted by Kurzweil. Also available in dead-tree format.

An old (1993) talk by Vernor Vinge about the Infosingularity.

When Knuth wrote the Art of Computer Programming he used a fictional assembly language to do the examples in, called MIX. Well, MMIX - the 64-bit updated version of MIX - has been around for a while. You can get the documentation here

Well, someone has ported GCC to MMIX and it works pretty well. Grab the latest GCC 3.1 and binutils 2.12.1 and build gcc with the --target=mmix option to configure and it all goes swimmingly.

Not sure why you would want to do this, but it works

# 1 "test.c"
! mmixal:= 8H LOC Data_Section
	.text ! mmixal:= 9H LOC 8B
	.p2align 2
	LOC @+(4-@)&3
	.global main
main	IS @
	SUBU $254,$254,8
	STOU $253,$254,0
	ADDU $253,$254,8
	LDOU $253,$254,0
	INCL $254,8
	POP 0,0

	.data ! mmixal:= 8H LOC 9B
	

I think I need some simple project to code on. Either helping with an existing one or something nice and short term that I can see the end of. (or someone could give me a real job - heh, yea right).

All my ideas are far too far out and I keep cycling. At one point I'm thinking that I'm nuts and will never manage any of what I'm planning so I cut the plan down hugely. Then I start thinking and designing and pretty soon I'm right back to where I started, by a different path.

This is getting really annoying because, by the time I'm at to the `cut it all back' point I'm planning a Turing-capable AI.

Landscape (there is a page for Landscape in the sitetree - but it sucks) mearly involves:

• Implimenting a dynamically typed, safe language which is incrementally compiled at almost every key stroke with a GUI which highlights errors at you type them and can construct proofs of the code, on-the-fly
• Building a virtual machine for the language to target which maps the disk as a huge single-level store (SLS) of persistant objects which have an `in memory' format (EROS style).
• (this VM (which is a MMIX machine, by the way) is capable of running programs backwards for debugging with the aide of a store journal. This, of course, ties in perfectly with the language GUI)
• Ripping out everything, to the level of replacing the consoles etc, with code written for the VM, which all runs as a single process (it's a safe-language, remember?) and can access the SLS
• The SLS contains Xanadu style, super linked objects of everything and code is just another object. Basically a fully object orientated system where, say, an email object would have From links to a Person object, which would have links to all the emails from and to that person, thier PGP key etc

And that's a sane idea by my standards!

Oh crap