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Graydon Hoare

@graydon-pub.bsky.social

2.4K followers 346 following 624 posts

extremely dubious of "everything is public" social network

Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

every time i see a link preview for a gist here my heart quickens because i briefly think i'm seeing a link to something else

the link preview tile for a github gist. grey on black with a distinctive pattern of dots and squiggles.

a 3rd edition amiga rom kernel reference manual, with a very similar graphic design on its cover

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I often think of her CBC interview on Sept 13 2001; I remember thinking at the time that hers was about the only rational voice I heard in public discourse. "Be quiet. Let people think."

UF: Quite. It's how the human imagination works: when I talk in times of peace about nuclear weapons, in times of tranquility about biological warfare, people go off to the movies. It's only at the time of crisis that you might get people to think.

Wouldn't it be nice if a day of mourning for what happened on September 11 was a day of quiet? It's not the thing to say to the CBC, but what about shutting up for a day? Be quiet. Let people think. Communicate the essential. The weather, okay. The traffic, okay. And then have a day of quiet. I don't think more talk gets us anywhere. Just imagine how the end of the Roman Empire looked for people during the time of the birth of what we know as Christianity. It was an awful time. People walked around and asked each other: "Who has any clue what to do?" Not about the Romans, but about life.

So number one, shut up the trivia; number two, look at your resources. Ask, maybe, what's life all about? Is it not more important to bring up children than to see that the big machines fly faster and faster? Give it a bit of quiet. Look at history. Who has said that all people matter equally and nobody matters more than others? Most traditions. Most religions. Don't drown it out. And then begin step by small step, to increase justice, and to say: "We will not resort to violence privately, personally, collectively, provincially, nationally, globally." There's no other way. You can see how costly violence is. When people say, "Oh, it's so difficult," I reply "Look at the cost of violence." There are also costs for peace, but the result is more than additional costs.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

literally wearing this today

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

the best part about early computers is they hadn't settled on the term "instruction" yet and many systems called them "orders"

Each pernissible operation can be specified in a concise
coded form called an order. The correspondence between the set of permissible operations and the set of orders which specify them is called the order code of the Illlac. It is given in detail In Chapter
3. A coded problem is called a program or routine.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

ok sure severance has some cool retro-styled computers but they are pale shadows of actual historical machines for example here is a nixdorf 8811 I am not even making it up at all

a nixdorf 8811 workstation which consists of a comedically small amber terminal with chunky keys, a phone, and a printer. the phone also appears to have a card reader and key that unlocks the unit? the 3 units all seem to dock together into a continuous desk-wide unit of beige and brown plastic.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

oh geez

a screenshot of a bad situation in a computer: I have 49,999 unread messages

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

I like the bits where Douthat -- a delusional right wing bozo himself -- gets flustered by how far into fantasy Andreesen has got and has to stop to clarify which version of reality he was living in.

So you’re in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you’ve got the press coming at you. You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the [federal] government coming at you.

Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right?

Andreessen: Not really.

Douthat: I mean, this is the peculiar thing about the narrative, right? You’re saying everyone is possessed by all these fears, and I grant you, they’re powerful fears, but they are in an era when, officially, the Republican Party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington, D.C.

Andreessen: Well, did they? Like sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

a photograph of a man with a large rectangular cone-shaped contraption attached to the monitor of an early home computer. he is holding a film camera up to to the cone in order to get a nice screenshot.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

(from: “Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism”: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions)

as I have attempted to demonstrate, the practices of “bumming,”
pranking, and other forms of technical display that originated in the university computer labs of the 1970s form the basis for a rich culture of masculinity within computing communities. Some of the most conspicuous features of this masculinity, and
in particular the association of computer programming with the “computer nerd”
personality type, are not so much a reflection of the essentially gendered nature of the
activity (or, as Turkle suggests, the uniquely “intimate” nature of the technology) but
are instead the by-product of attempts by early programmers to elevate the status of
their discipline. In a wide variety of periods and contexts, from the corporation to the
academy to the computer center, male programmers have mobilized masculinity as a
means of pursuing professional status and autonomy. Many male programmers saw
the role of the eccentric and exceptional computer genius as a desirable alternative to
that of a lowly, routinized, and feminized “coder.” although there were some downsides to being categorized as a “whiz kid” or a “computer boy,” most particularly the
stigma of being narrowly focused, antisocial, and corporate unfriendly, this identity
nevertheless provided programmers with many of the perceived benefits of professionalization: the establishment of barriers to entry to the discipline, the possession
of a “monopoly of competence,” and mastery over an esoteric body of knowledge.115
In fact, one might argue, contra Turkle, that computer programmers, rather than being
insufficiently masculine, have elevated the performance of masculinity to an extreme.

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