Maybe Linus saw the race condition but just fixed it badly, again. https://dirtycow.ninja/ "This is an ancient bug that was actually attempted to be fixed once (badly) by me 11 years ago in commit 4ceb5db9757a... but that was then undone due to problems on s390 by [another] commit."

call me an utopianist 🤷

If we live in groups of 200 or less, rarely interacting with the wider world, that could work.

With millions - billions all interacting, plus the written word, some clear expression of what is and is not acceptable, what constitutes "damage" to another and what does not, would make those interactions much less problematic, less time consuming to establish what is accepted and expected behavior on the parts of all parties.

I also want roads and medical care in my utopia, and that's hard to establish without some consistent established behaviors that most people just won't usually do on their own. Look at the condition of most small group privately maintained shared roads / easements... that tends to be how "voluntary cooperation" goes in most aspects of life / society without things like taxes and services.

In my worldview there are two kinds of people, those who don't do a thing - ever - because they would be ashamed to be known to do such a thing, and those who do the thing but generally try not to let people who would shame them for it see them do it. Both shames still depend on the opinions of others being the prime motivator.

Then, as you say, there are the shameless who just don't care what people think - like Donkey says to Shrek. I think in the case of 47 shameless appeals to his base, so they are playing the shameless card at every opportunity.

I don't think our society should be based on the (momentary) opinions/shames of the masses, we have plenty of laws, too many laws really, but as long as we're going to have laws - those laws should make sense, be predictably enforced, and consequences for violation should not depend on shame - but whether or not the law was actually violated.

It's a little scary on the repeater, you never know who's listening...

True, and this:

by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.

smells very religiously based - shame driven behavioral control.

Live, let live - if you're not doing that, shame isn't a real solution - it's more of a way to push the undesired behaviors out of the public eye.

Standards of living (in "the West") have improved such that even the poor of today would be considered to be enjoying "upper middle class" comforts from 100 years ago, and the old saw about kings of 400 years ago being unable to buy the luxuries and comforts of the poor today is very true. But that doesn't change the skew of the distribution. We're headed back to kings and peasants, and ultimately that will bring down the kings' absolute standards of living - even as they continue to dominate the peasants ever more decisively in wealth and power.

The part that bothers me the most comes from my experience living in the City of Miami, where the wealthy lived along Biscayne Bay and the working poor staffed the shopping along Biscayne Boulevard. I could afford a house between the two, so that's what I bought. With the poor and disenfranchised in such close proximity, the rich had to be hypervigilant about security. You would worry about being mugged, burgled in the night, vandalized while not present, etc. etc. etc. worried because you saw examples of it. We had a car stolen, apparently as part of a gang initiation. When the poor have more opportunity for advancement, they do actually spend less time making trouble, have less of a pissed off attitude when working in the shops, etc. For an extreme extension, Key Biscayne was a popular community for rich Colombians to buy into, they literally were relieved that their children could play in the streets without worry of kidnapping and ransom - back home where they were so rich relative to their fellow citizens, those kidnapping and ransom situations were common.

So, sure, we should "work hard to get ahead" - not game the system so that a select few who get ahead have multiples of thousands of times the wealth of the median and leave no realistic avenues for the rest to follow them.

Tolstoy is worth reading, I'm not saying he's not, but remember when you're reading him what his background was: extremely privileged. That perspective does color his writing from time to time.

The middle class has been shrinking my entire adult life. The gap between people who start with nothing and work their way up and the people who start with a massive boost and accelerate in wealth accumulation faster than the bootstrappers ever could has grown by an astounding multiple in the past 50 years.

having trouble keeping up with who we’re supposed to hate

Everyone. The bots are going for maximal conflict and strife - spend more time online, find more outrageous reasons to hate more people.

Claude has the remote control as well (now). While I was on the $200/month Claude plan and not going to use my whole week's credit, we were waiting for some kind of theater show and the topic of Pinnochio came up, I asked Claude to make me an app that would add a Pinnochio nose to a photo on my phone - like 15 minutes later here's an app that automatically puts the wooden nose overlay on a photo snapped by the phone camera, with ability to zoom and fine tune the nose placement, angle and length, share the modified photo via SMS or e-mail or whatever, etc. on my phone, entirely built from my phone interface, while waiting in the lobby - I think this was back around February or March of 2026.

RISC was so successful

I would say popular rather than successful, but yeah, I was "actively" in the assembly code around then.

Around 2010 I was working with NIOS cores on FPGAs, which were ultra-flexible (sort of the ultimate microcode embodiment), but not really efficient or performant the way a fixed ARM core is. At the time Xilinx was promising ARM cores on-chip beside the FPGAs "real soon" - it took a while, but they finally delivered and that is a nice arrangement when you need specialized processing, which most projects I have seen implemented with those ARM+FPGA uZed and similar boards don't really need and they can better be implemented on a simple ARM core system, maybe with a few built-in timer-latches, instead.

In the 2007 timeframe we were looking to squeeze performance out of an algorithm to bring an analysis time down from hours to 5 minutes or less, massive parallelism was on the table but expensive - not unaffordable in the application - but unwieldy in the space / bandwidth taken by the hardware. SIMD, MIMD - the compiler optimizers seemed to be doing well enough with those to get what was possible, but we were still over 2 hours. Finally, a code review of the profiler identified bottleneck turned up a queer looking nested loop structure that was causing cache misses on the inner loop. We restructured that and sped things up 100x, 5 minute execution on a laptop, more like 2 minutes on the quad-core workstation target. I think the "chief scientist" was disappointed that we wouldn't be building an array of 100 workstations to crunch the numbers in parallel. RAM is fast, cache is faster.

I'm sure they've run the numbers and strings are better in code than hardware overall - I just constantly instantiate and manipulate string objects and wonder how much that adds up throughout the app execution. I'm going to guess that most string operations are small enough to fit in cache these days, and that's all the help they need.

I've always wondered about string handling - it's so common, and seemed to be an afterthought in every processor I ever learned about their instructions. Of course, I last touched assembly language 30 years ago, so... I would hope there's been some progress since then.