Book Club: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (8-10-18)

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

MP3: https://soundcloud.com/luke-ford-666431593/book-club-hackers-heroes-of-the-computer-revolution-by-steven-levy

From Amazon.com:

This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy’s classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution’s original hackers — those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early ’80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as “the hacker ethic,” that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today’s digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.

Amazon.com Exclusive: The Rant Heard Round the World
By Steven Levy

When I began researching Hackers–so many years ago that it’s scary–I thought I’d largely be chronicling the foibles of a sociologically weird cohort who escaped normal human interaction by retreating to the sterile confines of computers labs. Instead, I discovered a fascinating, funny cohort who wound up transforming human interaction, spreading a culture that affects our views about everything from politics to entertainment to business. The stories of those amazing people and what they did is the backbone of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

But when I revisited the book recently to prepare the 25th Anniversary Edition of my first book, it was clear that I had luckily stumbled on the origin of a computer (and Internet) related controversy that still permeates the digital discussion. Throughout the book I write about something I called The Hacker Ethic, my interpretation of several principles implicitly shared by true hackers, no matter whether they were among the early pioneers from MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (the Mesopotamia of hacker culture), the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club (who invented the PC industry), or the slick kid programmers of commercial game software. One of those principles was “Information Should Be Free.” This wasn’t a justification of stealing, but an expression of the yearning to know more so one could hack more. The programs that early MIT hackers wrote for big computers were stored on paper tapes. The hackers would keep the tapes in a drawer by the computer so anyone could run the program, change it, and then cut a new tape for the next person to improve. The idea of ownership was alien.

This idea came under stress with the advent of personal computers. The Homebrew Club was made of fanatic engineers, along with a few social activists who were thrilled at the democratic possibilities of PCs. The first home computer they could get their hands on was 1975’s Altair, which came in a kit that required a fairly hairy assembly process. (Its inventor was Ed Roberts, an underappreciated pioneer who died earlier this year.) No software came with it. So it was a big deal when 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote a BASIC computer language for it. The Homebrew people were delighted with Altair BASIC, but unhappy that Gates and Allen charged real money for it. Some Homebrew people felt that their need for it outweighed their ability to pay. And after one of them got hold of a “borrowed” tape with the program, he showed up at a meeting with a box of copies (because it is so easy to make perfect copies in the digital age), and proceeded to distribute them to anyone who wanted one, gratis.

This didn’t sit well with Bill Gates, who wrote what was to become a famous “Letter to Hobbyists,” basically accusing them of stealing his property. It was the computer-age equivalent to Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church. Gate’s complaints would reverberate well into the Internet age, and variations on the controversy persist. Years later, when another undergrad named Shawn Fanning wrote a program called Napster that kicked off massive piracy of song files over the Internet, we saw a bloodier replay of the flap. Today, issues of cost, copying and control still rage–note Viacom’s continuing lawsuit against YouTube and Google. And in my own business—journalism–availability of free news is threatening more traditional, expensive new-gathering. Related issues that also spring from controversies in Hackers are debates over the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Apple’s iPad.

I ended the original Hackers with a portrait of Richard Stallman, an MIT hacker dedicated to the principle of free software. I recently revisited him while gathering new material for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hackers, he was more hard core than ever. He even eschewed the Open Source movement for being insufficiently noncommercial.

When I spoke to Gates for the update, I asked him about his 1976 letter and the subsequent intellectual property wars. “Don’t call it war,” he said. “Thank God we have an incentive system. Striking the right balance of how this should work, you know, there’s going to be tons of exploration.” Then he applied the controversy to my own situation as a journalism. “Things are in a crazy way for music and movies and books,” he said. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now. Who knows? Maybe you’ll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night.”

So Amazon.com readers, it’s up to you. Those who have not read Hackers,, have fun and be amazed at the tales of those who changed the world and had a hell of time doing it. Those who have previously read and loved Hackers, replace your beat-up copies, or the ones you loaned out and never got back, with this beautiful 25th Anniversary Edition from O’Reilly with new material about my subsequent visits with Gates, Stallman, and younger hacker figures like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. If you don’t I may have to buy a scissors–and the next bad haircut could be yours!

Posted in Computers | Comments Off on Book Club: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (8-10-18)

The Jewish Urge To Schmooze

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Frame Game Radio tweets: 1. This is a thread about SCHMOOZING. I was at a business lunch today with a fellow Jew and it suddenly hit me – one reason for Jewish success is *The Jewish Urge To Schmooze.*

2. Yes, I know I’ve developed a reputation for being a Jewish guy who relentlessly chronicles the abuses and corruption within the Jewish Affinity Network. But allow me to proudly explore a perfectly innocent and totally powerful aspect of Jewish success dynamics.

3. I’ve noticed a pattern to human communications that differentiates “the median Gentile” and “the median Jew”. It’s not universal. It’s a bell-curve, where Jewish instincts appear, ON AVERAGE, to be 1-2 standard deviations more inclined to “schmooze” than Gentiles.

4. First a definition of terms. The charitable definition is that schmoozing is “intimate, cozy gossip.” The cynical definition is that schmoozing is “manipulative sweet talk to get what you want.”

5. Now, THE MAGIC: SCHMOOZING IS NOT NETWORKING. Networking is professional. Schmoozing is personal. Networking makes formal pair-bonds. Schmoozing makes implied pair-bonds. Networking is a firm handshake. Schmoozing is whispering in your ear.

6. I’ve deduced that schmoozing involves two critical mechanisms. The first is *VULNERABILITY*. The second is *BENIGN VIOLATION*. Let’s explore these two dynamics in turn:

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on The Jewish Urge To Schmooze

Why Adopted Children Still Struggle Over Time

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Greg Cochran writes: “I noticed an article in the Atlantic, about much higher rates of disability, behavior and learning problems, suspensions. Lower achievement on reading, math, and science assessment tests. They can’t figure it out.”

* Steve Sailer writes: In the postwar era, you’d sometimes see adoptions from higher class biological parents to lower class adoptive parents, as with Steve Jobs, whose genetic parents were grad students (and his biological father was the nephew of the Foreign Minister of Syria). His biological parents then had another child together, the accomplished novelist Mona Simpson.

Jobs’ adoptive parents were high school dropouts. But they had been checked over by the adoption agency and were extremely stable and made fine parents for him.

Jobs’ adoptive parents were so pleased with little Steve that they adopted a sister for him. I’ve felt sorry for her, being a presumably average girl whose conniving older brother is (literally) the World’s Greatest Salesman.

* GC: A Harvard faculty member told me that Chinese girls were the adoptee of choice among his colleagues.

Posted in Adoption | Comments Off on Why Adopted Children Still Struggle Over Time

Japanese Strategists

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Greg Cochran writes: “In World War II. It’s not clear that there actually were any. This isn’t always mentioned in histories, but a lot of what Japan did in the Pacific made no sense at all.”

COMMENTS:

* The US Navy’s “island hopping” strategy involved establishing as few bases as possible, whose strategic location allowed the US to make the bypassed, Japanese-occupied islands irrelevant and unsustainable strategic absurdities. On the few occassions when the US dropped the “island hopping” strategy, e.g. McArthur’s ego-driven invasion of the Philipines, the result was a blood-drenched catastrophe. If the Philippines had not been invaded by the US, the Japanese forces there would have surrendered when Japan did in August 1945. Instead, there was a brutal, eleven-month, totally unnecessary battle for the Philippines that did not end until Japan’s total surrender in August 1945, cost untold numbers of American, Philippine, and Japanese lives, and ravaged the Philippine’s, including the total destruction of Manila.

Japan’s biggest mistake was thinking that its far-flung island bases in the Pacific could provide mutual military support to one another and then be resupplied by Japanese maru and submarines. In fact, the island bases were too far apart to support one another and unrestricted US submarine warfare and absolute air superiority ensured that their regular ressuply was a logistic impossibility.

* This seems to be a basic aspect of Japanese culture. An acquaintance was invited to Japan to act as a software consultant to the Japanese tech industries during their big 4GL push in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was ideal for this position since he was an experienced software engineer and had enough Japanese to get by. (For those who don’t remember, Japanese 4GL was intended to give Japan a permanent edge in computer technology. Despite the hype it turned out to be a total bust.) When my acquaintance returned after three years working in Japan he explained the Japanese failure. Their culture was totally unsuited to the give and take he thought necessary for efficient software engineering. He told us that there was a phrase he learned to dread. It would pop up after a subordinate had been given marching orders by a superior. Its essential meaning was, “Yes. I will attempt with all my power to achieve what you ask. But you and I both know this task is hopeless and doomed to failure.”

* Greg Cochran: “In WWI, the Germans were assholes. Judging from their actions and stated intentions, they would have been far harsher in victory than the Allies were – for example annexing Belgium, and parts of Northern France, along with all of Poland and huge chunks of Russia.

In WWII they were monsters.”

Posted in Japan | Comments Off on Japanese Strategists

Economists and Merkel’s migrants

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Greg Cochran writes:

Someone polled a number of prominent economists whether the influx of refugees into Germany beginning in 2015 will generate net economic benefits for German citizens over the succeeding decade.

About half said yes, a little less than than half were unsure. 2% disagreed.

As of late 2017, the job status was as following:

~20% had any job.

~largely those were low-skilled jobs

Now you have to understand that Germany is a fairly plush welfare state, one that spends a lot of money on its inhabitants. School, medical care, housing, the whole ball of wax. In order to be a net contributor, you have to have a pretty high income. Even higher, if we’re thinking of someone being a net contributor over a lifetime – you have to consider retirement and old-age costs. The occasional gaudy acts of terrorism hardly help: protection is costly. Maybe it boosts GDP like an epidemic of broken windows?

Next, your typical Syrian or Afghani immigrant doesn’t speak German and doesn’t have a lot of human capital: he isn’t a fresh graduate of a German technical high school. If typical of his home country, he has an IQ in the 80s. He finds both beer and blood sausage abhorrent – fitting in is difficult.

The birth rates are very low in Germany and the big companies would like more skilled labor. But after a year, out of a million-some refugees, less than 100 got jobs in those big German companies.

So.. On this not-terribly-difficult, not-terribly rare kind of problem, economists are worse than useless. I could put it more strongly !

Comments:

* I’ve always been mystified by this nonsense, too, but whenever you ask economist like Caplan, Hanson, Cowen, Tabarrok, Easterly, etc, etc. They always come up w/ econometric papers proving immigration to be a net benefit. Anyone at Cato, Reason, Bloomberg. They all think alike. Depressingly to me, I think they are not lying; they rly believe it….

Even IQ realist economist Garrett Jones argues for more immigration. I once read that even Charles Murray believes immigration, whatever kind, is always a good thing.

Economist youngsters like Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman, who are HBD realists, also believe “free labour movements” are a net plus to GDP. Not just Poles and Chinese, Somalis and Syrians too. They will gladly show you papers by open border economists “proving” lowskilled to be a net benefit to GDP.

I never needed immigration-benefits-GDP papers or even IQ research, I can just visit my old neighbourhood and see its sorry state today…

* All of these guys accept the Von Mises argument as an axiom. That is, unless a society has reached maximum population size, more labor makes everyone richer. It’s a basic libertarian argument, that like most of libertarianism, only works in imagination land.

* According to von Mises it was a meaningless question whether immigration benefits the receiving population because he quite explicitly assumes that there is no real difference between populations.

* Von Mises was nuts. By the same logic, when a nation is attacked, it should worry just as much about casualties to the enemy as to its own forces… No country can solve its problems by importing an extra underclass.

* Prof. Heiner Rindermann? Ostracized since he honestly and scientifically answered a question about possible race differences in intelligence in a German radio interview, he is one of a few left psychometricians in Germany. When the migrant crisis hit its peak in autumn 2015, he wrote an article for the journal Focus that formally educated African Academics and engineers most likely would have an IQ around 93 according to his best estimates and numbers. That would just equal the average cognitive ability of graduates of the German Realschule (secondary high school with diploma but no qualification for higher/tertiary studies, normally completed with 16 years). Result: Everyone offended.

* Economists, like almost all academics and servants of the deep state, are mainly interested in their own economic status….Which would be harmed by telling the truth about 3d world immigration….

Posted in Economics, Germany | Comments Off on Economists and Merkel’s migrants