When I started teaching at a medical school in 2018, a couple of friends and I put together a web page with which to inflict pain and suffering on the MD/PhDs there: “Bitcoin v. Medical School”. Here’s what a session looks like:
There was a threshold of $150 billion that, if reached, would point out that the user’s med school tuition could have, if invested in Bitcoin, made him/her/zir/them (the medical school in question is Harvard and, of course, it was officially gender expansive at the time) the richest human on our beloved, yet imperiled, planet:
Despite not having made any money from being the Father of Modern AI Systems (Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015), Elon is still so rich as to make the $150 billion threshold absurd. (Even without Elon, the tech boom and inflation have pushed roughly 8 additional guys over that threshold.) Today I went into Emacs and updated it to $1 trillion. Just another way in which Elon’s extreme and unconscionable wealth makes life painful for the rest of us.
(Note that while Emacs is popularly associated with Richard Stallman, a Massachusetts resident canceled for pointing out that Jeffrey Epstein’s activities would have been legal in Massachusetts (age of consent: 16), the text editor was actually originally built by Guy Steele. Thus, we may use Emacs without any moral conflict over using the work of someone who has been canceled. Separately, could we all get on board with supporting the Iranian missile and nuclear weapons programs if they would chant “Death to vi” instead of “Death to America”?)
Related:
- Elon Musk Net Worth Tracker (in the /envy/ subdir)
Phil, so Proud to learn that you are a member of my Harvard Meritocracy, and a Medical Doctor like Dr. Jill Biden too…I never knew!
Claudine: you were my inspiration. Prior to becoming aware of your spectacular career at Harvard, it never would have occurred to me that a person with zero knowledge of medicine could become a teacher at Harvard Medical School.
Oh, c’mon Phil, you know this isn’t the *real* Claudine. You know full well that if it were, we would all be so nervous about addressing such a majestic creature as Dr. Gay, we would all be at a loss for words.
Phil and OAG, you both flatter me with your Idolatry! In terms of words, I’m never at a loss for them. With the advent of computer word processing in the 1990s, I was a bit ahead of my time and learned the copy and past functions by keystrokes (no mouse needed!).
Claudine is real to me.
@Gay
Just a little correction, I know you are new to original thought, but I think the word you are looking for is not “Idolatry”, but “idolization”. Idolatry would be commissioning a little statue of you, made of black marble, in the form of a fertility goddess. There I go thinking out loud again — but I’m sure Phil and OAG were *not* thinking that. My best to you too, kew-tee-pie.
I admire Gavin Andresen (ne Bell) more for his work at Silicon Graphics than bitcoin. My admiration doesn’t pay the bills, though, even my own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Andresen
VRML kind of flopped, IMO because it wasn’t as dirt simple as HTML in the early days. Imagine communicating in 3D as well as these 1.5D JavaScript text boxes (which are about 1% of the power of Emacs running on TOPS-20 in 1985). I’m not sure which markup language this box I’m in speaks. (Newspeak Markup Language? Would be fitting.)
Impressive to find The Greenspun started up emacs, if only to change 1 number. Wouldn’t know what to do without vi. Busybox is based on only vi. Surprised to find modern vi had grown to 2MB while pico was only 280kb before everything was rewritten in rust.
Nah, real programmers don’t use Emacs or vi. They use EDLIN.
I’ve used emacs in various incarnations since the 1980s, but now it seems emacs has gone to hell. It’s in some sort of ancient-hobbyist state now where a lot of half-baked complex stuff is released, other stuff is deprecated, keys are rebound willy-nilly, etc etc. At one point, after upgrading, all of a sudden I couldn’t save a text file anymore. Many such cases!
Release 31.1 (not even a major release) has commentary that would print to 230 pages and not much of it makes sense. It’s nuts.
https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-311
In fact, the first emacs I used was written in TECO, which presumably was done by GLS and crew. Cool.