Personally, I didn’t come to any particular harm by the quarantines.
I had good fortune, they weren’t traumatic times for me. What were
those times like? They were "like nothing else," but also they were
remarkably like "nothing." They felt somewhat like a general strike
or a hurricane evacuation, but they also had this novel sci-fi
vacuity to the textture of the days. Huge, surreal absences. The
lack of transport nose and any sky-contrails was a big aspect. The
people were in hiding from one another, but also the big machines
were absent and silent.

In Österreich würde ich so eine Studie ja gerne mal für Accenture sehen …

Smart cities

This was a hopeful slogan to unite a scattered series of approaches
to urbanism. There’s no unifying "smartness" there. Google being
ignominously chased out of Toronto with pitchforks was probably the
Waterloo for this.

Web3, NFTs

It seems pretty clear now that this impressive craze was not so much
"blockchain art" as "lockdown art." It’s what art people do
culturally when they’re not allowed out of the house. One of the
most entertaining cultural freakouts I ever personally witnessed,
but it was convulsive and in many ways quite sad.

In 02023, people are becoming poorer, their lifespans are shorter;
food costs more, and housing is worse. You’d think there would be
more focussed, radical indignation about such an obvious bad scene
– a culture in visible decline – but the temper of the times seems
to welcome it, somehow.

…

I don’t like begin a year with gloomy, elaborate whining; that like
a privileged luxury that people have when Mom’s not chased in exile
and Dad’s not under arms in a trench. And yet, I do realize that
my customary futurist speculative habits have become old-fashioned.
I’m from a tech-obsessed subculture, so it’s my habit to look for
scientific and industrial innovations and assume they’re gonna alter
the world’s situation.

That’s not what happens in this decade. I’m aware that I need
better methods.

There’s something very Twenty-Twenties about attempting and failing
to "turn the page" on inconvenient truths that can’t and don’t go
away. That’s why each year tends to repeat the last. I wouldn’t
call that "moral cowardice," because people do not, and cannot,
really ignore the pervasive problems – they do see them, and tend
to complain quite consistently about the same issues, year after
year. But, without ever getting much done about them. It’s rare to
see any public problem that’s analyzed, agreed-upon, confronted,
dealt with and dismissed. All the "crises" tend to thrive, and to
mutate into long-term shambolic debacles. It’s a decade that feels
the need to marinate in its own distresses – doomscrolling as a
way-of-life.

"When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, things
change in ways that are unimaginable."

In other words, web0 is web3 without all the corporate right-libertarian Silicon Valley bullshit.

This is why many people in IT drink heavily.

Caching and prefetching were used in mainframe computers dating back to the 1960s. For instance, the IBM System/360 Model 91 (1966) had a cache with prefetching. Minicomputers such as the VAX 11/780 (1977) later used caching and prefetching. However, these features took a while to trickle down to microprocessors. The Motorola 68000 (1980) had a 4-byte prefetch queue. As far as I can tell, the 8086 was the first microprocessor with a prefetch queue.

We can view the 8086 as a stepping-stone towards the large caches first used externally in the 80386 and internally in the 486. The 80186 and 80286 kept the 6-byte prefetch buffer size of the 8086. The 80386 has a 16-byte prefetch buffer, although apparently due to a bug it was shrunk to 12 bytes in later revisions. As well as the prefetch queue, the 80386 supported an external cache.