I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!
Universities are effectively ultra-anchors. You have large numbers of students from mostly middle class backgrounds, many of whom have free time and disposable income. (Or at least they're not worried about their loans yet.)
And then you have the academics. Tenured profs are relatively well paid. Adjuncts/assistants not so much, but they still like nice things.
The UK's public school towns (Marlborough, Harrow, Winchester...) often have a prosperous independent store economy on a smaller scale, for the same reasons.
Clusters work well in these towns.
If you try them elsewhere, like one of the UK's many run-down towns, they're more likely to fail because the prosperity just isn't there.
The general theory of most malls was that you had anchor stores. My local one has a couple of stores adjacent to the mall (a local chain supermarket and and Home Depot) that are very busy, almost too much so. The mall itself is pretty much dead and has been on the market for ages. The anchor stores--JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's are all long gone. Haven't been in the actual mall in ages but I assume it's pretty sad and there seem very few cars in the lots.
Oh, yeah, the Toys 'R Us in the complex is long gone too.
It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.
Luxury malls in cities aren't really my thing and there are even some higher-end suburban malls where Apple stores seem to have become an anchor store in this day and age that I would have laughed at once upon a time--shows how much I know.
I will say I have walked into some malls in Vegas and only half-hyperbolically thought I couldn't (and/or wouldn't want) to have afforded pretty much anything.
I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.
After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.
Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.
Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.
The natural ("prehistoric") state used to be a low density distribution of mobile tribes, which sidestepped a lot of the problems that afflict civilizations, like pandemics and local resource exhaustion.
I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.
Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?
Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.
There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.
I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.
> It so happens that on the 80386 chip of that era, the fastest way to get from V86-mode into kernel mode was to execute an invalid instruction! Consequently, Windows/386 used an invalid instruction as its syscall trap.
I also read this part but I wonder how did they benchmark back then?
> Schulman’s Unauthorized Windows 95 describes a particularly unhinged one: in the hypervisor of Windows/386 (and subsequently 386 Enhanced Mode in Windows 3.0 and 3.1, as well as the only available mode in 3.11, 95, 98, and Me), a driver could dynamically register upcalls for real-mode guests (within reason), all without either exerting control over the guest’s memory map or forcing the guest to do anything except a simple CALL to access it. The secret was that all the far addresses returned by the registration API referred to the exact same byte in memory, a protected-mode-only instruction whose attempted execution would trap into the hypervisor, and the trap handler would determine which upcall was meant by which of the redundant encodings was used.
And if that’s not unhinged enough for you: the boot code tried to locate the chosen instruction inside the firmware ROM, because that will have to be mapped into the guest memory map anyway. It did have a fallback if that did not work out, but it usually succeeded. This time, the secret (the knowledge of which will not make you happier, this is your final warning) is that the instruction chosen was ARPL, and the encoding of ARPL r/m16, AX starts with 63 hex, also known as the ASCII code of the lowercase letter C. The absolute madmen put the upcall entry point inside the BIOS copyright string.
(Incidentally, the ARPL instruction, “adjust requested privilege level”, is very specific to the 286’s weird don’t-call-it-capability-based segmented architecture... But it’s has a certain cunning to it, like CPU-enforced __user tagging of unprivileged addresses at runtime.)
Also the hardware and software are so complicated, that probably no single person on this earth can carry any 64-bit CPU into his brain -- unlike back in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, good programmers NEED to do that. I think the year 2,000 was sort of the thresh line.
Thanks for sharing, never heard about it before. What was kernel programming back then? Briefly checked the wikipedia and looks like CTOS was kinda big in the government space back in the 80s.
It was popular with govt because it came with an HDLC network build-in, server/client depended on the OS you booted. This saved you a network administrator.
The kernel was in Intel ASM86 but the rest of the OS was written in PLM86. When I joined it was 2MB of code on a 128K 8086 cpu. By the time I left it was 9MB of code running on an 80386.
I can't imagine people enjoying web based IDEs. I used to work for a company that has everything made internally, including IDE -- they used the same method OP described -- using VSCode on web. The experience is horrible.
I guess maybe it was fancy back in mid 2010s, but my experience was a couple of years ago.
From the article:
“ Cider was a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. All the magic happened on a backend that indexes the entire codebase, so that all the data was ready whenever someone opened the webpage.
”
Sounds like all other editors were slow compared to Cider.
I have used something like that (mentioned in my original reply ^). It was even worse -- there were about 3-4 plugins available.
Basically that company (a well known social media company, not FB) tried to implement everything on their own. Infra is their own (kinda makes sense because it is so huge), IDE is their own, communication is their own (which has an interesting feature that if someone screen shares an internal doc, other people can click a link to access that doc, too, very useful).
I was very jealous about their tooling team (that's what I call real programming), but nevermind I quit after a few months due to some unrelated reason.
Large monorepos have tradeoffs that may or may not make sense for a particular use case. Google's monorepo--in its form as a monorepo, not just the software it contains--is one of its biggest assets and creates enormous leverage.
And an enormous set of problems that must be managed. But multirepos have their own set of issues, and which set of problems you want is highly situation dependent.
I have always had this itch to work on some real life serious system programming projects, with the most recent wave OS kernels. I completed the MIT xv6 labs (a very small repo) and did a few Linux device driver labs (very large repo and it was the first time I experienced compilation time > 5 minutes).
I got burnt out after a while, so that kinda wrapped up my experience working on large repos.
But they are so profitable, and we need them to track people around and create a police state efficiently. Ah let's keep them but just fine them as well for the show.
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