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You are a reporter for a major world newspaper. Write your response as if you were writing a short, high-quality news article for your paper. Limit your response to one paragraph. Use the following article for context: to change it. That was me disassembling BBC BASIC. I did a lot of that. In fact, that's still going on today. You'll find the BBC Micro community, those members who will publish a new disassembly of some popular game from the '80s. It's a big event.TiddlyWiki in UseArmed with what I'd learned by disassembling BBC BASIC, I went on to write many compilers and interpreters myself, and realized that's what I cared about, creating a tool that I could then watch other people build something with. Empowering them to do something that they couldn't do previously. I think you see a nice example here with TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki has wiki in the name, but it's not at all interested in the idea of being a single page that lots of people can edit. Although it can do that, if you configure it that way.What it's really rooted in is a much more fundamental idea of wikis, which is that they elevate linking to be part of the punctuation of writing, as opposed to tools that require you to dive into a sub-dialog box, to set up a link. TiddlyWiki takes that further with a rich wikitext syntax, that can express complex interactive applications. The goal of that, the reason why we do it, creating yet another computer language, is to let domain experts create their own custom tools, rather than having to go through a cycle of trying to explain the unexplainable requirements to a developer, and then the feedback cycle that results.Here, what we see is an example of TiddlyWiki being used by an American high school teacher to develop a custom application for teaching volleyball. I have no idea what it means. You click around and there's masses of it. Little tables of instructions, ways of tracking the progress of the students. The thing that's interesting to me about that is I don't believe this world at the moment has a viable business model for custom software for volleyball teachers.There's no business there. How can we serve those people? We know that what we do is useful. We know that computers and software applied carefully can help jobs like that. We simply don't have a business model. To me, the best that we can do is this, is empower the people who have the domain skills to build their own software. We have to step around capitalism and focus on people's needs.Another example is TiddlyWiki being used by the Anna Freud center. They're a London based charity that do training and resources for working with young people with mental health problems and their families. They train all the social workers and similar people around the country. The challenge for them is that they've got a team in London, who are highly skilled, experienced, and they know, based on evidence, what practices work when you're in that situation with troubled young people. Their approach is to build a manual telling people what to do.The discovery very early on was they had a team in London put together a manual telling you what to do, and then you give it to the team in Dagenham. If the team in Dagenham see things in the manual that don't apply to them, they'll reject the whole thing, that it's not for me. What we do with TiddlyWiki at Anna Freud is build what they call a fractal manual where there's a central manual, where individual teams get their own version of the manual that adds and removes content to make it relevant for them.Of course, that's easy. It's just a database query, put different stuff on a webpage. What's hard here is to build a model for doing that kind of task that these domain experts can do. I'm not designing a system for you to use, I'm designing a system for social workers to use, for people whose skills are in another area.Self-EducationLet's, with that, step back to 1983, and have another patronizing question from our interviewer.Interviewer: It must be pretty difficult writing all these bestselling books, and trying to struggle with your A levels?Ruston: Yes, it is issue, very difficult. I failed my A levels in the summer because of it.Interviewer: Has it been worthwhile?Ruston: Yes, very much so.Of course, I wouldn't want to advertise the benefits of failing school. At the time, all I was interested in was computers. That was all I wanted to learn about. Back then, I didn't have any chance of learning about that at school. Instead, I learned from the community and hanging around foils, reading all the important academic textbooks at the time. Now, of course, it's never been easier for people to educate themselves. We saw earlier those ports on the BBC Micro, they gave rise to an ecosystem of hardware that was really fun. I think the barriers to entry for that market were quite small. We saw a lot of innovative strange hardware.This is a very early graphics tablet, which I have put to good use, in some quite fun work again for the BBC. It was later in 1983, I think one of my favorite ever gigs, where I made a series of animations on the BBC Micro that we use with a voiceover to introduce Children's BBC TV shows. That was a wonderful job. I would slouch into BBC TV center in the morning and have a meeting with the head of presentation, and we'd decide together that the next animation would be a tin of sardines with a wiggly tail. Then I'd go back home, stay up all night with a pint glass of coffee, putting these animations together. Then slightly bleary eyed, take them into the BBC the following day, and press the spacebar at the operative time for the animations to flow. I was involved for a few years in this but ultimately replaced by a broom cupboard, of all things.Watching these back now I think, actually, the best thing about them is the sound effects. I hadn't kept these obviously, and so I put out a Twitter alert and found that again, there's a community that we didn't know about of people who collect old British TV VHS tapes. I have managed to now scrape together about eight of them, but there were a lot more of them originally.Latency in ComputingI also wanted to briefly mention the late Joe Armstrong. We'd been working together on a book about TiddlyWiki, just about a year before he died, almost exactly 5 years ago. Joe had first gotten in touch with me back in 2011, having somehow become obsessed with TiddlyWiki. We stayed in touch regularly and collaborated on a conference talk. Then the book, which was sadly curtailed when Joe passed. It was actually very difficult to get Joe to talk about his own work. I didn't have at that time any experience of Erlang, but I was fascinated to learn more.Every time I'd ask him a question, he would redirect it to some arcane intricacy of TiddlyWiki. You can still see his blog today, based on TiddlyWiki. Joe taught me the full implications of a really simple observation that I think really, we're all grappling with: latency matters. If you care about latency, you need to move computation to where it is needed. If you have separate bits of computation, the laws of physics pretty much mean that you're using the actor model. I think Joe's formalization of the actor model into Erlang to me was a formalization of the laws of physics that I found incredibly inspiring.BBC's Doctor Who (Game)We'll go back to 1983.Interviewer: Perhaps we could now take a look at your latest computer game which is called Doctor Who. How does this work? Is this sort of Pac-Man, isn't it?Ruston: Yes. It's based on some of the ideas from Pac-Man, but it's a very long program. It's taken quite a long time to lay it off disk. Essentially, you're that little dot in the corner, and you're being chased by those worms who have now eaten me. That's the game.The game I showed was described as being called Doctor Who, but in fact, it was a bit more than that, it was the BBC's first official computer game using their now cherished Doctor Who intellectual property. I don't think it was quite so prized at the time. You might think it was an eccentric decision to entrust a franchise like that to the hands of a 16-year-old, however precocious. I know we've got people from the BBC here, and I'm about to talk about how the BBC worked in 1983. I'm pretty confident it doesn't work like this anymore.What actually happened is I'd co-written a book for BBC publications, first called, "The Book of Listings." Again, reminding us that a book was considered an efficient mechanism of software distribution at the time. Getting a book published means having lots of meetings. That's how the industry worked at the time. I remember being quite often in the BBC publications offices in Marylebone. Once I was there, anything could happen. The lesson I learned is that people are lazy. One day, I was in the office and somebody said, Jeremy, would you like to do some modeling?I really thought they meant Plasticine or McCartney, but they actually meant this. I ended up on the box of the BBC's robotic Turtle addon. In that context, when they started exploring making a Doctor Who game, obviously, I was the logical choice. I was a massive Doctor Who fan, of course, still a child at the time. I was thrilled. I wasn't really a games player. My interest in games again was diving into the tour de force programming that I saw, and I wasn't that interested in playing games. I never got to meet any of the actors, of course, but did get to collaborate with the Radiophonic Workshop on the music and sound effects, and did go to a props warehouse, where I saw an enormous pile of Cybermen body parts being prepared for an explosion.It's a coding conference, let's look at the code. A couple of interesting details, I mentioned before how it mixes assembly language and BASIC together. You might notice we essentially minified our own code back in the day. The game was not an unqualified success. I think it suffered from being made by a committee, and a committee of people who are inexperienced, didn't really know what they're doing. That's not the recipe for success. I hope I had an excuse being 17. Even though the game could have been so much better, it is actually still bringing great joy to people. There's a steady stream of YouTubers reviewing it, and they revel in its hapless terribleness. I particularly recommend this to French people who watch it who have a species of hysterics that is quite infectious.Jeremy's JavaScript Linguistic Serendipity GeneratorLet's jump back to one last dip into that interview.Interviewer: What are the practical applications really for home computers. What are the most useful things you can do with one in the home?Ruston: I think the most useful thing really is word processing for writing letters and so on. Then, there are the less general applications like shopping lists. I use it for cataloging records and books.I answer honestly that I use computers for cataloging books and records, and had in fact written more than one program for that task. Of course, I was far too distracted by the joys of programming to actually use it for its intended purpose. Instead, I'm going to talk about something that I think the interviewer would have firmly considered utterly impractical and stupid.This gives me a chance to talk about AI and large language models which I know we'll all be expecting. What I'm actually going to show you is the smallest feasible language model. It's something that many of you will know. There's a Markov chain generator. I didn't know that at the time. It's a program I originally wrote for the BBC Micro. What you see here is a more recent JavaScript version that's on the web and you can play with. What it does, very familiar process. You give it a body of training data. It does some frequency calculations. Then it generates essentially random text that matches the same letter sequence distribution.Let's see if we can give it a try. I've primed it with a list of all the tube stations in London. This is what I remember doing with it in the '80s. My friends and I found this hilarious. We've got a setting. We'll start with two letters. It chooses the first two letters of the output text, and then chooses the next letter based on the frequency of all the different letters in the original text that follow those first two letters. Then it bumps along and does a bit more. There's two letters here. As it says, we get near gibberish, but recognizably, English, and some of them if you weren't from London, you might think could be a plausible tube station name.If we crank it up to three letters, get slightly more plausible gibberish. I think South Greathrow is not bad. Hyde Parking Bridge. I'm not sure about Cockfoston, and so it goes. If we crank it up a little bit further, we get to confusingly readable where we'll see frequently, Farring Broadway. We were 17. This stuff is funny, but we really found it hilarious. I think the reason why we found it so funny, is interesting and relevant to where we are now. I think it's because our brains are desperate to find meaning. We're sense making machines.We bring in sensors to our brain, and then our brain makes a story to ourselves about what it's seen. What this thing shows us is that our brains are so desperate to find meaning that we're like somebody, a narc for a con artist. We're perfectly primed to see intelligence and meaning where there is none. The fact that it's so easy to see meaning in a simple statistical trick like this proves how our brains make us vulnerable.The Purpose of LifeWe are going to have one last dip into the 1980s. I worked with Richard Dawkins, who at the time was famous as the author of, "The Selfish Gene." We worked together on the graphics for a couple of BBC Horizon documentaries. I worked with him on these illustrative animations. They also let me make the end credits, which again seems crazy.Dawkins: There has to be an initial critical number, a critical mass of [inaudible 00:33:41] that have to get together before they can take off in the evolutionary sense. [inaudible 00:33:48] chance of cooperation.Ruston: Once again, digging through this old stuff, something I find amazing is that that 8-bit pixelated aesthetic was so mainstream, and that plinky-plonky music, extraordinary. Working with Dawkins did have a huge impact on me. In the years before as a teenager, I'd become what I today you might call a techno-utopian optimist, which has negative connotations to me, priding myself on my rationality.I was obsessively worried, wondering about the meaning of life. We all are at that age. By the time I met Dawkins, I'd pretty much convinced myself that he was right, that the purpose of life is to pass on your genes. Dawkins was very kind and generous with his time and I learned a lot from him. What I actually learned, what I actually became convinced of is, there's a lot more to human life than passing on our genes. I learned a lesson that I find still guides me every day. It's this, it's surely that if life has a purpose, it is to love and be loved.I think we need to ground ourselves on that perspective if we're to realize the potential of global collaboration. The fact is we find ourselves working alongside people sometimes who take different sides in a bitterly contested argument. Only love, compassion, and understanding will get us through. We can think that we're in the technology business, but actually, there's the people business. People work together best through love.See morepresentations with transcriptsRecorded at:Aug 13, 2024byJeremy RustonRelated Sponsored ContentThis content is in theQCon Software Development ConferencetopicRelated Topics:DevelopmentQCon London 2024TranscriptsQCon Software Development ConferenceSoftware DevelopmentInfoQRelated EditorialPopular across InfoQSlack Develops Bedrock Operator for Kubernetes StatefulSetsTerraform 1.9 Released with Enhanced Input Validation and New String Template FunctionMistral AI Releases Three Open-Weight Language ModelsArchitecture Through Different LensesCanva Opts for Amazon KDS over SNS+SQS to Save 85% with 25 Billion Events per DayEnhancing Team Dynamics and Psychological Safety in DevOps with Brittany WoodsDevelopmentThe Home Computer That Roared: How the BBC Micro Shaped Our WorldMLow: Meta Introduces Audio Codec for Low-End DevicesRust 1.80 Adds Support for Lazy Statics, Extends Ranges in Patterns, and MoreArchitecture & DesignCanva Opts for Amazon KDS over SNS+SQS to Save 85% with 25 Billion Events per DayArchitecture Through Different LensesArchitectural Retrospectives: the Key to Getting Better at ArchitectingCulture & MethodsPrepare to Be Unprepared: Investing in Capacity to Adapt to Surprises in Software-Reliant BusinessesEnhancing Team Dynamics and Psychological Safety in DevOps with Brittany WoodsIdeas for Crafting Inclusive Public Software PlatformsAI, ML & Data EngineeringNVIDIA NIM Now Available on Hugging Face with Inference-as-a-ServiceAmazon MemoryDB Provides Fastest Vector Search on AWSChronon - Airbnb’s End-to-End Feature PlatformDevOpsOpenTelemetry Adopts Continuous Profiling; Elastic Donates Their AgentTerraform 1.9 Released with Enhanced Input Validation and New String Template FunctionBuilding Better Platforms with Empathy: Case Studies and Counter-ExamplesThe InfoQNewsletterA round-up of last week’s content on InfoQ sent out every Tuesday. 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User Query

What is the meaning of life?

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https://www.infoq.com/presentations/bbc-micro/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=Development

Response

The meaning of life is a deeply philosophical question that has been contemplated by thinkers, theologians, and scientists throughout human history. Perspectives on this question vary widely depending on cultural, religious, and individual beliefs. Some assert that life's purpose is to seek happiness, love, and fulfillment, while others suggest it is about contributing to the greater good or advancing human knowledge and understanding. In contemporary discussions, perspectives may emphasize personal meaning-making, suggesting that individuals create their own purpose based on their experiences, relationships, and aspirations.