https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

"The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).[3]"

Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet.

I'd say these "historians of science" you speak of would corroborate that the lost works of Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid

and the near permanent loss of Plato's works to the whole of Europe for hundreds if not over a thousand years as, uh, kind of a big deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_hist...

Largely yes. The term "the dark ages" was developed by Petrarch, a man who was so obsessed with the Romans that he had himself crowned with laurels to signify his inheritance of Rome. And this is also largely unrelated to history of science, since "the dark ages" (as expressed by both Petrarch and pre-20th century historians) does not refer to loss of scientific knowledge.

> Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet.

But Petrarch was hundreds of years before the Enlightenment and would have hated it. He believed that the Romans were the peak of civilization ever. It was not possible to top them. The idea that modern humans could improve upon what they did would have been anathema to Petrarch and most Renaissance thinkers.

But most importantly, these historians of science would take issue with Blow's conclusions from specific examples. He lists a few "lost" technologies and then concluded methods to prevent technological loss that are entirely unrelated to the examples he lists. At most, all they demonstrate is that it is possible for some things to go unrecorded.

meheleventyone has demonstrated how easily even just referencing the article I myself posted could undermine my argument.

I'm not a historian. But my wife is. And she ranted for a while after the first ten minutes of this talk for precisely this reason. I could have provided more scholarly sources. It is an internet forum - I didn't think people would call me names if I didn't. That historians of science don't like the term "The Dark Ages" isn't exactly cutting edge scholarship.

I don't believe that he did put a lot of research into the historical background. It is possible I am wrong. The reason I believe this is because at least one historian I trust who works in an adjacent subfield went on a big rant about these being classic misconceptions.

I believe that Blow is very smart and quite knowledgeable about software. I also believe that a lot of engineers believe that they can make huge claims about the nature of history without consulting professionals. These errors are often harmless but the are also often harmful, either causing us to draw false conclusions about the past or today.

Like you say below, Blow would have been better off skipping the first 10m of his talk.

Unfortunately as far as I can tell, we don't have a circuit of public intellectuals, who happen to be historians, giving well thought through talks to lay people. We have ted talks on a good day, and those are often filled with dumb things said by smart people who should know better.

You and I haven't even touched with a ten foot pole the other side of the coin of that "Western History" implies. I won't attempt to in this thread either.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707236?seq=1

The same wikipedia article says that Petrarch noted for initiating the Italian Renaissance by way of rediscovering letters of Cicero who happens to have died in 43bc. He is then credited with founding Renaissance Humanism in the context of the above.

The above claims seem some plausible given the summary texts that mention Petrarch given by the page on Humanism given by the Library of Congress

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/humanism.html

One recontextualization of the concept of the dark ages of the type implied by UncleMeat (my interpretation what was implied, not UncleMeats) is given by this publication by The University of Michigan.

https://www.press.umich.edu/15299

This is all very interesting, but I'd like to point out absolutely none of it seems to automatically leave the dilettante historian like myself from coming away with the impression that knowledge, scientific or otherwise, has not been lost in a meaningful way and thus throughout history did not necessitate some obsessed persons to resuscitate it.

To quote:

"Science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of 'dark ages' to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity".[52] Historian of science Edward Grant writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".[53] Furthermore, Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".[54] Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire due to the Migration Period a lot of classical Greek texts were lost there, but part of these texts survived and they were studied widely in the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the High Middle Ages stronger monarchies emerged; borders were restored after the invasions of Vikings and Magyars; technological developments and agricultural innovations were made which increased the food supply and population. And the rejuvenation of science and scholarship in the West was due in large part to the new availability of Latin translations of Aristotle.[55]"

ETA: Also didn't realise you're the same person I replied to below!

Your catch proves that issue is not remotely settled, and to my mind, indicates that more rigorous counsel with historians will only add depth to debate, rather than resolve it.

I would suggest UncleMeat just advocate that people like Jonathan Blow take the history out entirely, and argue why this contemporary technology isn't good enough relative to our resources and skills.

Arguments about sourcing feel like face saving rather than legitimate criticism of the view bought forward by UncleMeat. After all the original video is completely unsourced but apparently beyond reproach in that regard. Also where we have sourcing (for example the Dark Ages wiki) it only strengthens the point made by UncleMeat as they were indeed correct about the views of historians.

More broadly if we want discussion to be well sourced we shouldn't apply that selectively and in particular selectively against the people who disagree with us.

I'm not interested in getting suckered into believing some randall carlson gobbledygook, the type I might leap to assume UncleMeat would find quite problematic.

I just think UncleMeat initially came in, said something along the lines "this is bad, don't do this, ask people who know better" and it has been made clear they had the capacity to contribute more that what read to me as nothing more than the logical fallacy that is an appeal to authority. They have clarified their position enough to where I can no longer be left with such impression.

The same game, replicated in Unity, requires a several gigabyte download just for the developer to light up a white pixel on a black background in Unity.

Is the juice of Unity worth the squeeze? It depends on the game I think. Using Unity to get a Super Meat Boy clone on a Nintendo switch starts to ride the line of absurdity (i.e. using a massively complex and capable game engine to make a knock off of a beefed up version of a flash game that was paying homage to games written in 6502 assembly and booted instantly and never crashed).

You have a good point to make, but the argument you've employed is bad. When you said,

> In the days of the Amiga or the Archimedes, it was quite possible to boot entire app or os/app combo and just leave the computer on indefinitely, without it crashing itself even if untouched.

You've mixed up reliability with understandably & maintainability. In an uptime competition, a retrocomputer will lose the game to many modern computers, it's almost guaranteed. But it's not the point. The point is what happens after it's down. If it's a retrocomputer, it's possible for a single person to understand every aspect of the computer and to perform troubleshooting down to the component level. It's also easy for a single hobbyist to build one's own computer using the 6502 chip. But it's usually impractical or impossible on modern hardware. My personal understanding on the thesis of the talk is that modern computers have much less understandably & maintainability than retrocomputers, and this, in the long term, makes the civilization as a whole, less reliable. It's not a question of how durable we can make a single computer to be.

You can make a better argument if you stop saying how reliable retrocomputers are and focusing on understandably and complexity.

Notice I said "even if left untouched." Perhaps that was too charitable, as these retropcs, without memory protection, would often crash if metaphorically "touched." It would happen often with productivity apps, much less so with games. As time has gone on with pcs, this seems to have flipped, a fair trade for the time being.

I think I now understand your argument now.

There are tradeoffs being made in all three choices and each will suit a different context.

Maybe you'll think "What about Celeste?" at which point you'll have only proven both of our points equally at best.

I thought your whole point was that everyone already has a stable browser, and shipping games as some bare metal or in some half bare metal form is really the developers imposition if the game could have just as well run in a browser.

[0] https://godotengine.org/

From the Godot download page:

"Godot is currently not code-signed for macOS. See the last section of this page for instructions on allowing Godot to run anyway. Alternatively, you can install Godot from Steam to work around this." So what does that leave, Windows and Linux on x86-64?

Isn't this the kind unjustified hoops that Jonathan is criticizing, that people criticize Apple for not making it viable for a clearly legitimate OSS project to have to deal with? It definitely isn't something that would make me confident recommending a middle school game programming class to depend on working one semester to the next.

You've decided to take one of those options and attribute a bunch of arguments to me I've never ever uttered.

I still don't think you've addressed my core point, and it's quite probable I wasn't clear enough to make that possible.

My white pixel example was referencing the talk, where I interpreted Jonathan saying almost verbatim about the barriers to just lighting up a single pixel on a modern computer. I made the assumption that everything he opines on publicly is in the context of him making games.

Is this whole stack overflow thread just a bunch of masochistic programmers, or is it needly complex to achieve consensus on how to plot a pixel in a browser canvas? I'll take responsibility for begging the question in jest. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4899799/whats-the-best-w...

If one wants to start the game they are going to make in the same engine the are going to finish making it in, for most people, unity is going to be worth the gigabyte download. If you just want to teach kids html/css, the server stack in python, and how to change the color of one pixel in the browser is lesson one day one on a raspberry pi, fantastic. If one wants to write a mario clone and ship it in electron, bravo.

I actually did this whilst playing about with Zig a while ago. I made an offscreen buffer, rendered pixels to a frame buffer array in WASM and then copied them into the offscreen buffer. Not going to win speed awards but it worked, was fast enough and was super simple. Also it meant I could scale the canvas to scale my image. This was for a very small screen representing windows in a building. My proof of concept was approximately 30 lines of JS and the same again in Zig. Most of the latter is type definitions.

Although given that Canvas is supposed to be a friendly abstraction it definitely feels like a weird oversight. Personally for pixel sized things I love PICO-8.

The crucial part here is that software caused the hard drive to fail. That was my point - I think it's easy to forget how fragile most home computer OS:es were 25-30 years ago compared to today.

Abstraction fosters ignorance and complexity is fragile, I agree with him on those points. But I also think he makes very sweeping, erroneous statements about software and development.

Lets say the delay is 15 seconds, you hear the composite, including your part delayed, and you "think, cool, I played the right thing at the right time, I'll keep going with my same assumptions" or you hear "my part was way off, but the rest sounded decent enough, better do something different."

The part where everyone is just playing terribly isn't a concern or doesn't manifest because you've got a bunch of intermediate or better musicians playing.

This literally is marketed as a speech jammer.

The amount of times I'm tripping up on my own words because the last thing I said is blaring out a friends/family mobile speakerphone and then back into the mic is disappointing on all levels, to say the least.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25714719

Jonathan does a better job than I did explaining the premise of how retrocomputing isn't just a means to nostalgia, but a means to make sure and verifying we've improved personal computer hardware/software since the initial boom. Emulators don't give us the insight into the whole stack or understanding on the true reliability of these old systems.

As Jonathan says, if our laptops today aren't capable of 99.999 percent uptime, then none of the software runnning on it can be either.

In the days of the Amiga or the Archimedes, it was quite possible to boot entire app or os/app combo and just leave the computer on indefinitely, without it crashing itself even if untouched.

I assume Vygr has at least a working copy of a Taos derivative or Taos itself (maybe not the working source code) but doesn't share screenshots of it working because it could put ChrysalLisp in a greyer area potentially to Cloanto.

From what I've been able to find on the internet, it seems like Taos in its Amiga Anywhere incarnation can be resuscitated/cobbled together from contemporaneous Gnu tools for amiga (I found some that were downloadable), some specific things that were bespoke to the grid computing concept (it was inconclusive to me what these were), and the demos that Chrysalisp has replicated (I wasn't able to find these that could be distinguished from regular opengl demos for amiga).

When we say "Black Church" in America, we don't mean a church for Blacks only, we mean churches that historically arose because other races would not allow Blacks in their congregation (be it illegal to discriminate or not). There is no connotation that a "Black Church" wants to exclude other races.

So the line is drawn somewhere between those two, I just wonder where.

You seem rather concerned with college admissions, where is your concern for the fact that many if not most elite public American high schools would be out of reach for racial minorities even if their child has has perfect grades since Kindergarden. These kids can't simply 'apply' to whichever high school in the country they please.

In Europe it is illegal to label a wine Champagne if the grape is the wrong color or not grown in a particular bespoke part of France. Yet, you are baffled the line for racial equity in America is somewhat gray, absurd.

I do not for the record think it is strange that only wine made in Champagne can be called Champagne. What could be offensive about that?

I talk about college admission because that's where discrimination seems to be legal.

> out of reach for racial minorities even if their child has has perfect grades since Kindergarden

As we know, when applying to college their race is actually an advantage, so why would they not be admitted, given their perfect grades?

I think there should be systems in place to help all disadvantaged people, regardless of race.

Since there are some black kids with wealthy parents, and many white kids with poor parents, it seems obvious that race is a very unfair basis, why not simply assist people that need assistance without looking at their skin colour?

For some reason the US has it in it's head that we can balance the scales by putting our thumbs on one group and lowering the bar for others. Weirdly they don't see the hypocrisy or outright foolishness behind "fixing" racism with more racism.

Of course, like all things like this it has almost no effect on the ultra rich and truely privileged, and will negatively effect the underprivileged "whites" of all races (weirdly, just like every other race, white people are not just some big homogenous color but makeup diverse individual cultures with distinctive history).

But I guess those privileged trailer trash should use their privilege to buy themselves access to an ivy league education.

Honestly Apple's little PR stunt is the least insulting of this stuff recently. If you want to see really stupid, look at reddits CEO stepping down and saying his job will go to a black person (and it did). That is illegal but it was just ignored. Or the incoming US president who said he VP pick would be a "woman of color". Of course I'm sure someone will defend picking VPs based on their genetics and chromosome amounts by saying "we already pick that way anyway, its why its all white men in politics!". Because clearly you fix something by propagating it.

The world is so upside down now that suggesting we be colorblind is racist.

To steelman Grustaf further, I suppose Grustaf doesn't see an irony that dark skinned grapes aren't even allowed to be called Champagne, because Grustaf would say that grapes are not people, and that sparkling red wine made in Champagne tastes entirely different, but were it to taste the same, then the red Champagne and the white Champagne would almost certainly be given equal shelfspace and cost roughly the same if made by the same winery. Grustaf would on the other hand say that human beings transcend such issues, and certainly any person of any color can be and achieve and have the same intelligence and thoughts as any other so long as they are given equal opportunity. Grustaf believes that what Apple has done here is erode the principle of equal opportunity in attempt to try to provide equal opportunity.

I tend to think Grustaf might still think that if they were an American living in the country, but based on what Grustaf has said, they would be equally shocked at how not universal our basic social services are, even to elites. Grustaf would say "All men are created equal" should be made true in America so much so that racial language need no longer apply.

I just happen to find that either naive, or not pragmatic enough given the state of America in 2020. I can give Grustaf the benefit of the doubt, to a degree, because they admit to not being an American and seem to imply they don't live in America. It is easy to see how they do not have a full picture, and they admitted to as such.

I happen to feel that Apple's move is their best intentioned pragmatism to take a stand for something.

Zacmcloud on the other hand seems to have no such positions as above, and calls people "trailer trash" in jest. If zacmcloud is referring to me as the type of person who thinks any Whites are "trailer trash" let me correct the record. If working class Whites in Appalachia or Detroit were given access to an elite education through social programs, I'd be all for it, and presumably so would Grustaf. We just disagree that racial language in such initiatives kills the intiatives altogether. One reason being is American descendants of slaves aren't given popularized names for their heritage like Appalachia, and such terms typically exclude such people implicitly or explicitly in their definition, and often not by the people who coin the terms, but by the people who apply them. In my view, Grustaf's position is untenable in America at this time in the same way that if MLK's I have a dream speach would have been unintelligible had he not kept the words Black and White in.

"I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls." MLK

Someone maybe believe MLK could have said "of all races" and accomplished the same thing. To that position I say, then why wasn't "All men are created equal" sufficient to address slavery, much less racial inequality in America.

Addressing such issues will take time and ideas, and even when race has been transcended, I think it is a fair bet that class will not have been. And by the way, MLK spoke about that increasingly towards his later years, and soon after he was assassinated.

It's almost as if investing in communities that have been underserved, could somehow, trickle through the economy as a whole at a disproportionally high rate of return. You know, as opposed to investing it where monetary wealth is already largely concentrated.

Regarding your second point, it is bot really relevant and if the project will “deliver returns” or not. Setting up a program that explicitly only invests in anglo-american harvard grads would probably give good returns too, but it would still be pretty racist.

See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_reservation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

> According to dictionaries, the word is commonly used to describe prejudice and discrimination based on race.

That seems to match what I wrote above.

I agree that it does not indicate "antagonism" or "superiority", but you left out "discrimination", which is right there in the definition in your comment. I believe that apple's program "discriminates" on the basis of race, and therefore is racist.

"Discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions between human beings based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they are perceived to belong.[1] People may be discriminated on the basis of race, gender, age or sexual orientation, as well as other categories.[2] Discrimination especially occurs when individuals or groups are unfairly treated in a way which is worse than other people are treated, on the basis of their actual or perceived membership in certain groups or social categories.[2][3] It involves restricting members of one group from opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group.[4]

Do you think Apple giving 100MM specifically to "Black and Brown companies" is unjustified?

In your quote: "It involves restricting members of one group from opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group."

Apple is restricting people who are not black or brown from this opportunity.

https://harlem.capital/pitch/

The first of their five pillars:

"We invest in founders from all backgrounds, genders and walks of life"

From the two citations: [48]

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.

[49] a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

Apple choosing to invest in educational and entrepreneurial programs for "Black and Brown companies" is in no way antagonism towards other races nor is it an indication that Apple supports a belief that any race is superior.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/#1

If they notarized your prefpane/daemon combo, I suspect they would notarize quite a few .app applications that are properly signed and not malicious or frowned upon use cases.

Anything that doesn't follow all the steps here wouldn't be notarized, I'm assuming. If a whatever.o file compiled from whatever.cpp with gcc from the command line wouldn't have any viable way of just being uploaded to a website for notarization. You'd have to at least go through all these steps. As far as I can tell, you'd need to have xcode to do that.

Packaging and notarisation is a pain, but it is possible, even though the app we’re distributing is self-contained, so it includes a minimal JRE distribution, dynamic libraries, utility binaries, and a loader. All of these components must be code-signed and notarised (not individually, only the complete bundle is submitted, but all components are inspected).

Nearly any file can be set as an executable, and surely a bash script set to launch an un notarized app in your application folder wouldn't magically bypass the gatekeeper security prompt for that app.

I agree that the $100 fee in no way guarantees proper identity verification has been done. I also see plenty of other unnecessary barriers the fee creates, I just don't know what an obvious alternative would be.