this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
271 points (97.5% liked)
Asklemmy
44148 readers
1539 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Imagine an abacus. Now imagine that abacus to be very large, as large as the side of a building, with hundreds of rows, each row with 256 possible arrangements.
Now imagine making different arrangements of the rows in that abacus, such that they are directions on how to change the arrangements of other rows in that same abacus. Further, suppose that this abacus can follow a series of these directions itself, without a person needing to do it.
What I do is to write a series of these instructions in order to accomplish specific tasks on the rest of the abacus. Adding numbers together, search through rows to find specific numbers, copying them. Numbers might represent points on a map, accounts in a business, words in a book, even colors in a picture, like you might find in a tapestry.
But then imagine this abacus is the size of a whole city - that's the number of rows it has. But its elements are so small that the whole of it can fit in your pocket. And it uses the same energy to accomplish its tasks that is found in a bolt of lightning, but in very small amounts.
I uh, am currently debugging part of an abacus? Where one row is acting on another row while the first row changes?
Hardware race conditions suck.
I feel like they'd lose you in the second paragraph, unless maybe you were talking to an especially bright academic. Not because they don't get the concept, but because they don't get how that would help anything, living in a world where you make most of your own stuff manually.
Also, energy wouldn't be spoken about for another century after this, so you'll need to try again with electricity. The OG physics guys like Newton were still alive, and knew it as vis viva, but nobody else would really know what that meant.