
Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038 - robertelder
http://blog.robertelder.org/jeri-ellsworth-robot-uprising/
======
cbennett
"Well, magnetic core memory is the only data storage format that is robust
enough to withstand high-radiation environments. Jeri is clearly interested in
magnetic logic and memory because it is the only computing platform that will
be able to survive the first wave of nuclear blasts that will unavoidably come
from the beginning of the third great world war. "

Erm, this premise is factually untrue though. A lot of next generation
resistive RAM devices, especially OxRAMs, have been demonstrated to be rather
rad hard, making them good candidates for future space electronics platforms
or.. all the other attendant apocalyptic scenarios.

~~~
sitkack
Radiation hardness is different than sensitivity to EMP. It is the eddy
currents from an EMPT that build up in and burn out small traces in micro
electronics.

~~~
std_throwawayay
But magnetic cores are resistant to the M in EMP?

~~~
platz
I'll offer a wild guess - perhaps they are only temporarily affected (i.e.
mem-wiped) and function as normal after device reset, being made of iron, in
contrast to semiconductor doping materials being hard-killed by the emp.

------
dustfinger
I have not read the article, but I find the choice of date interesting. 2038
is unix rollover time [1]. It does not appear to be mentioned in the article
so it might be a coincidence.

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)

\---Edit---

> but the meek will inherit the earth when judgement day begins on the 19th of
> January 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC.

I stand corrected, Unix rollover time is exactly why this date was chosen. It
must have broken AI safety protocols in the robots which turned them into
killing machines. Cool, I will read this article tonight.

------
skrebbel
Wow that was... Extremely weird. Is this supposed to be some kind of tribute?

~~~
Animats
Weird article. Author isn't technical enough to get how Jeri thinks. I've met
her. She sees the physical world in terms of first principles, like Feynman.
She built a short range radar from a satellite downlink dish by turning one of
the transistors around. I would never have thought you could use a transistor
from a low-noise amp to produce enough power to emit a usable signal. I'd be
thinking "small-signal transistor" vs "power transistor". But it's an amp,
it's got gain, it's fast enough, and she made it work.

~~~
dmoy
If you like learning about low power or messy signal stuff, there's some
research at UW several years back about using e.g. a combination of em
interference from human bodies and normal house electrical wiring/lightbulbs
as motion detectors.

That sort of stuff is really cool, and I'm very impressed by people like Jeri
who can actually make it work.

------
lifeisstillgood
FYI:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth)

There is a youtube talk linked in the articles references which is ... just
watch it. I am always amazed by these stories - especially as I tried the
opening a store in mid nineties flogging computers and internet cafes.

------
falcor84
I for one really liked that Blade Runner reference with the repetition of
"interlinked". My initial vision of the post's future was of The Terminator,
but that reference made me consider a more interesting future with different
kinds of artificial beings.

------
platz
What makes core memory resistant to EMP?

Wouldn't the pulse change the polarizations stored in the iron cores?

> The highly irradiated port-war landscape will be unable to make use of
> standard silicon computer memory for centuries to come.

So we really couldn't use any silicon that was hit to make new semiconductors?

~~~
Dangeranger
The author’s argument is that a highly irradiated landscape would be too
energetic for silicon based memory to work as it’s now designed. I’m not an EE
but I’ve spoken with some engineers of early silicon systems which had to
account for high energy cosmic rays flipping the bits within RAM in a random
fashion. My guess is that using a solution like Hamming codes would not work
when retrieving arbitrary data at a large scale.

~~~
amaterasu
Off topic, but with smaller lithography, ANY subatomic particle of sufficient
energy becomes a problem:
[https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/white_papers/wp...](https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/white_papers/wp208.pdf)

I've spent months chasing random crashes on another vendor's device which
turned out to be solder ball alpha emission issues.

------
MegaDeKay
"My dad had bought me a 101 electronics kit from radio shack..."

Proud to say I had the same kit. Santa is _the man_.

------
thedrbrian
>"I ended up dropping out of high school when I was racing cars because I was
making so much money."[3] "I started seeing how far I could push the rules.
One of the things I built was a traction control system for my race car. I
built a single-board 6502 computer (wire-wrap) and I measured the front-wheel
spin by putting a hall sensor on it, and I measured the engine RPM." "I had a
rev limiter in the car and it would just tell the rev limiter you're over-
revving if the back tires were spinning more than the front tires." "Then, I
started dominating, just completely dominating.

Sounds a lot like cheating......disruption

~~~
jperras
Finding loopholes or under-specified gray areas in rules to gain an advantage
is the secondary activity, besides actually racing, in almost all motorsports.

------
sebringj
Crazy genius. This is an example of someone born to do something.

~~~
tw1010
I know that's just supposed to be a complement, but sometimes that kind of a
comment contributes to people thinking there's such a thing as a "math person"
(or a "non math person"). Having comments like that thrown around in the
aether makes it seem like technical subjects have "you either have it or you
don't" characteristics, which I think most people on HN know is BS. I prefer
to emphasize hard work over any kind of genetic advantage.

~~~
chrissam
My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than
not.

> I'm pretty good at what I do, and when people tell me they're jealous of my
> talent, and kind of hint that it's innate, I get a bit insulted. I had to
> work a shitton to get where I am, and comments like that makes it sound like
> I had it easy.

This is a common sentiment, but I don't find it convincing. The discussion
here is about nature vs. nurture. There's a lot of data points on that
subject, and, from what I've seen, they mostly support nature (twin studies,
intelligence being 60-80% heritable, etc).

The fact that you _like to think it 's mostly nurture_ isn't really relevant.
I'd _like_ to live in a world where ability and virtue were absolutely
correlated and everyone got what he or she deserves based on how much good
that person does in the world. But I don't think we live in that world.

~~~
lsc
>My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than
not.

Maybe that's correct, but is it more useful than the nurture view?

It's a debate; I mean, clearly, you don't want to spend a lot of time trying
to get better at things you will never get better at, but sometimes it's not
easy to tell you will be good at a thing until you spend a lot of time on
prerequisites.

This is the argument that even if it's true that nature is more important than
nurture, it is sometimes more useful to believe that nurture is more
important, and that you can learn things.

I think there are a fair number of studies showing that people with a 'growth
mindset' as they say, who believe it's about hard work and not just innate
ability, tend to do better than people who believe it's fixed.[1]

I mean, in the usual case, of course, people who are smarter are more likely
to think than anyone can learn things, 'cause their experience is that
learning things is easier, and the way work and education is segmented, quite
often people are put near others of their ability. but... I think a lot of
these studies control for that.

[1][https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.h...](https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.html)

~~~
lsc
My own personal view is that some attributes are mostly fixed, and some are
not, and it's pretty hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes you need to struggle for a long time through stuff you aren't any
good at to get to something you are good at. I love reading and read very
quickly, with above average, but less impressive compared to speed,
comprehension.

But it took me longer than usual to learn to read. I assume because I'm
terrible at memorization; and to learn to read, you need to memorize enough
words that you can start puzzling out the words you don't know from context. I
would not have done well if I had given up on reading because I was inherently
bad at one of the prerequisites.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time trying to run a business... and that
turned out to be something I didn't get good at after a decade of trying; so
yeah, sometimes it's best to give up early, but it can be really hard to
predict which side of that equation a particular problem is on.

~~~
lsc
A better comparison to reading is writing. My handwriting is terrible. Like
not doctor-terrible; there's at least dignity in that. It's a grade-schooler's
block letters. It's terrible. And I spent so much wasted time and effort on
it.

I mean, I've had access to a computer since the mid-80s, so I could write, I
just couldn't hand write. And it turns out? nobody cares about my handwriting
anymore. It's not that useful when you have portable computers. (In the mid
'90s I took a tandy TRS-80 model 100 to high school. Such a nice keyboard)

I argued and fought with my parents who made me practice handwriting, arguing
even in the early '90s that it was an obsolete skill; but they sat with me for
hours a day, making me copy letters. Just like they did earlier, when they
were making me learn how to read.

But reading, well, it went from a struggle to make me practice to the thing I
got in trouble for doing when I was supposed to be doing other things almost
overnight. It was like I finally memorized enough of the words to figure out
young adult fiction, and a whole new world opened up to me.

Handwriting never got to that point, even though there was a lot more struggle
involved. To this day, I can't write coherently with a pencil and paper for
more than a sentence or two; it takes too much focus to make the letters, and
the thoughts about the sentence or paragraph evaporate.

How much of this is my own motivation? I do remember arguing that handwriting
was useless 'cause I could type, and that was better. If I had access to a
state of the art screen reader (they existed at the time, and I think were
okay?) I maybe would have made the same arguments about reading. Would that
have made it harder for me to actually learn to read?

------
tomrod
I found a new person to follow! From this blogpost and her wikipedia page I'm
impressed.

I wonder though -- is the fear of the Robot Uprising of 2038 founded, to her,
or is that applied drama by the blog author?

~~~
zrobotics
I don't know her personally, but I've followed her for a while and I've never
heard her mention anything of the sort. Also, the author didn't mention
anything about her work with augmented reality, I guess it didn't fit the
narrative. To be fair though, I only read the first 1/4 and skimmed the rest
b/c I couldn't stand the robot uprising slant. Can't she just like cool old
tech without being a cyberpunk pepper?

If you're interested, she has done some excellent interviews on the amp hour
podcast. The episode referencing her semiconductor making experiments:
[https://theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-52-carnassial-chip-
chemi...](https://theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-52-carnassial-chip-chemicals/)
All episodes: [https://theamphour.com/?s=jeri](https://theamphour.com/?s=jeri)

(edit: copy/paste error)

------
vbuwivbiu
Highly recommend Jeri's youtube channel

------
thesimp
I have a bit more positive look on the future: Jan-2038 is just before my
retirement. I can make some money with old computer knowledge while the post-
post millennial generation does not even know what the inside of an old
operating system looks like.

~~~
platz
Your old computer knowledge will be about the same worth as what income that
can be generated today having extensive knowledge of Multi-User Dungeon forum
software.

~~~
edoo
MUDs were advanced data processing systems. As a kid I wrapped my head around
one with a 100k line code base. That has led to quite a successful career and
I still use a lot of the same techniques I learned.

~~~
platz
That's cool, yeah. Must've seen some interesting coding practices in that code
base

~~~
edoo
[https://github.com/smaugmuds/_smaug_/tree/master/src](https://github.com/smaugmuds/_smaug_/tree/master/src)

I still do C so it isn't so far removed.

------
DoctorOetker
brilliant,

but for

>Triboluminescence with household chemicals - Keep your eye on what happens
when the battery falls over in this video.

I watched it over a couple of times, but never actually catch the battery fall
over, the subject matter is constantlly grabbing my attention. at what time
does it fall over?

------
KaoruAoiShiho
But now that she's on the internet the robots will know to find her after the
uprising.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Jeri likely would find a way to defeat the robots by building a machine gun
that shoots pinballs and is controlled by a brainwave interface to a SID chip.

------
edoo
Catch 22. The killer robots will be quite proficient in tracking
electromagnetic radiation.

------
plasticchris
The robot uprising will begin and I predict the battle turns at 12am Jan 1st,
UTC, as the 32 bit system clocks overflow in many of the small micros
controlling subsystems.

------
agumonkey
starts with a typo

------
platz
> Jeri Ellsworth _hates_ this article

probably used in jest - but playing along - probably because premise of
article is heavy on summoning up ethos & pathos to generate interest whereas,
from what I can tell of Jeri's style, she is more centered on direct logos.

in a way, the way OP uses ethos/pathos method is somewhat deceptive/dishonest,
because it's trying to get you interested in source material for reasons that
are entirely make-believe.

