I strongly believe in Hulu's right as a private business to decide this.
The key here is that Democrats are outraged at Hulu, but they're not trying to change laws to force Hulu to carry these ads.
That is in contrast to the other side of this debate about deplatforming, which has repeatedly proposed laws that violate the First Amendment because the marketplace of ideas rejects their regressive propaganda.
Yep. The answer here is that Hulu should probably run the ads. Free speech is more than an amendment, it's a social value that should be respected by everyone, not just the government. I'm sure I'd disagree with every one of these ads but I would still like to see them run, because allowing people I don't like to speak is what protects MY right to speak.
I disagree. I don't think ads are the same as individual people being able to express themselves, and having one conpany reject political ads isn't preventing the politicians from expressing themselves altogether. Hulu also has discretion to choose which ads to air. Undoubtedly there are a great number of submissions, I'm sure not all of them make the cut for various reasons. What criteria should they use? Highest paying ads? Extending ad time to ensure all ads submitted can air? What if someone submitted an ad supporting ISIS or other extremist speech?
Should a business be forced to air content they don't want to be associated with or perceived as endorsing? It has already been established companies are not obligated to do business they find violate their 1A rights, so this would seem to fit into that precedent.
Moreover politicians aren't being silenced, there are a vast number of different avenues they can (and do) use to spread their campaign information.
If it's campaign ads being more equitably presented, there are a number of ways to approach this that don't involve forcing a private business to accept any and all ad content.
> Should we allow cigarette ads again? Where's the limit?
Cigarette ads are totally irrelevant to this controversy.
Cigarettes are a non-ideological, commercial product without any therapeutic uses. We can suppress all mention of them from the media, and we would be in no danger of death, tyranny, etc. In fact, there would be far fewer deaths, as we've seen in the last few decades.
Suppressing political ads does carry the risk of death and tyranny. The whole reason people are worried about the erosion of free speech is that suppression of potentially valid ideologies is extremely dangerous.
I actually think we should allow cigarette ads again, I don't think anyone is harmed by being able to see a sign telling them something.
But also, think about it this way: isn't this the other side of the slippery slope argument? I'm sure when cigarette ads were first banned, people made the argument that it would be used to justify banning other ads later, and were told that was a slippery slope fallacy... Now, you're essentially saying "we've already banned cigarette ads, if we're not going to ban gun ads too then we might as well re-allow cigarette ads!"
That's not what I am saying. I'm saying that society has deemed the cigarette ads (in the US) to be something we don't want. The ad types in this thread seem to be going the same way, and hopefully pharma ads will follow later.
The first amendment does not compel speech or publication thereof.
Ads in general are probably something society doesn't want, because you have to pay people (in the form of ad-supported content) to look at them. You might say that most people in society think cigarette or gun ads (or DNC political spots) are particularly objectionable. But, I don't believe that that's a reason to ban them.
I'm completely in agreement that the law doesn't compel speech, or publication, especially of ads. Hulu is completely legally in the right to not carry DNC ads, Google and Facebook are completely legally in the right not to carry Colt or Remington ads. They'd also be in the right not to carry Altria ads. But the question is what speech do we want to ban by law... and I think the only answer to that for a healthy, free society is "none."
I even go further and say that respecting free speech exists outside the first amendment as a societal value that we should all hold, like "politeness" and "honesty," and that it should be kept even when not legally required... So Hulu _should_ run the ads, even though they are not _required_ to.
You can believe what you want, we tolerate flat earthers too
> I think the only answer to that for a healthy, free society is "none."
This is not true or healthy in the internet age where speech can reach all of humanity in seconds and we are plagued by bad actors without the ability to easily rein them in. Telling people to do their own research or be safe does not scale and the negative externalities end up costing society more.
A company or platform that wants to allow unfettered speech is free to compete with those who filter & curate. We can then see without doubt which society prefers
Hmm. So the way I interpret this is: true free speech lets people say things that are wrong, and leads to people believing things that are wrong. A company that allows it will perform worse in a market because of people believing those wrong things. An analogous thing would happen to a society allowing it, so, to have our society be stronger economically, we should have limits on speech. Is that close to right?
If so, my argument is this: a company and a country have different goals. Many things that a country might provide (welfare programs, democracy, public services) are expenses that don't make us economically stronger. But, we do anyway because that's not the point of a country: the point is to provide the best quality of life for citizens. I'm happy to accept the drawbacks of free speech (people believing in Q, or that the Apollo landings were faked) in exchange for being able to say whatever I want. If you aren't, then there are other countries that make the other tradeoff.
I think this is the core of what's going to be a big debate over the next decade or two, though: is it better to be less productive and free (America), or more efficient but authoritarian (China)?
> A company that allows it will perform worse in a market because of people believing those wrong things.
This is not why. Look at 4Chan, Parlor, Truth, or any other "free speech" platform. It ends up being toxic and noisy to the point that the vast majority of people will not use it. Thus the company fails, because it cannot reach critical mass for a 2 sided marketplace.
> I'm happy to accept the drawbacks of free speech (people believing in Q, or that the Apollo landings were faked) in exchange for being able to say whatever I want. If you aren't, then there are other countries that make the other tradeoff.
We live in a democracy and you might be the one looking to other countries, if any exist who want to support such an unfettered society. I don't know of any... and even if they did exist, if your company wants to operate in a given country, it has to follow the local laws.
We do not live in a pure democracy, we live in a constitutional republic. Our lawmakers aren't able to create certain laws because of limits on their power in the constitution; one of those limits is that no law can be passed abridging the freedom of speech. No matter how many people vote for it, without amending the constitution to remove that protection first, it will not happen. And the process for passing that amendment is intentionally cumbersome, for that reason.
> 4Chan, Parlor, Truth, or any other "free speech" platform. It ends up being toxic and noisy to the point that the vast majority of people will not use it.
4Chan and Parler seem to exist just fine. 8Chan doesn't, or was killed and then revived, or something, I'm not sure, but it wasn't due to lack of users; their host canceled them. Never heard of Truth before now, it seems to be Trump's Twitter clone that contains just Trump?
Anyway, my point is not that these free-speech-platforms are more successful than curated ones. My point is that that's the wrong metric to judge whether free speech is a good value to have in a society. I don't care if there are costs to it any more than I care whether the post office is profitable: I don't want to live in a society without freedom of speech, no matter how efficient it is, any more than I'd want to live in one without a post office or a fire department. I am willing to pay for the externalities because the alternative is much, much worse.
From your other reply: if I'm letting my bias in, then how am I misinterpreting what you say? I genuinely want to understand your position.
Letting your biases shine through affects more than your interpretation of what I say, it permeates from all of your speech. Most people do not want what you want, but you characterize that as being at the other extreme, and therefore must be disastrous, while your solution is the savior of all. Step back to see that your "solution" is unworkable, that it does not reflect what the vast majority want.
Again, you have a problem in that you only appear to think at the extremes. What concessions to your vision would you be willing to make?
Looking back at what I've said in this thread, it's "free speech is a societal value like honestly and politeness, not just a constitutional right," "I would be in favor of lifting bans on cigarette ads," "people don't like watching ads but we shouldn't ban them anyway," "I don't think we should be banning any speech," and "the point of a free country is to have a good standard of living for its citizens more than to make money."
There's only one thing in there that I think any reasonable person could think is extreme, and that's having no bans on speech. I'm overall happy making the concessions to this that America already makes.
As for the rest of it: if that sounds extreme to you then I really don't think I'm the one with biases, and I really don't think there's going to be much common ground between us. It's cliche at this point but do you talk about this stuff to a lot of people who aren't on the internet? Because outside the bubble of social media and this website, nothing I've said here would be controversial at all.
I also notice that you think I'm misinterpreting what you said, but still won't say how... Which makes me think that I'm not misinterpreting it at all, you just don't like having a corollary of your beliefs pointed out to you.
Anyway this has been fun but I'm finished now, the anti-flame-war filter is making it take forever to post replies.
dude, you really need to step back and read the words you are writing...
Have a look at the patterns and trends in your comment history, or better yet, have a trusted friend do this if they will give you an honest opinion. Thing is, the internet is more likely to tell you what you need to hear
I don't have any reason to explain myself to you more than I have, not worth the time with your attitude
When "your guys" are pushing women into desperate, life-threatening situations due to a condition which occurs in 2% of pregnancies... yeah, "my guys" are clearly better than "your guys".
Absolutely. Gavin Newsom has signed into law a bill to ban ads for firearms. Google and Facebook already ban that as well. If you have no problem with that then why should you have a problem banning ads against guns?
More right-wing personalities than I can even remember have been banned from various media, not least being a sitting President of the United States. The same platforms also have policies against certain "disinformation" that target anyone discussing some issues or events like the Hunter Biden laptop which were later determined not to be disinformation at all. As for it being Democratic policy, there was (briefly) a White House office under a Democratic president to coordinate these policies.
That bill allows ads that say things like "Vote for X, because he will pass a law that all Californians be given a free pistol". It just doesn't allow ads that say "Glock is the best pistol".
Similarly, you cannot advertise cigarettes with cartoon characters, but can advertise a political candidate wanting to make that legal.
Meanwhile, right-wing people aren't being deplatformed because they are right-wing. It's because of other things they say and do.
> It just doesn't allow ads that say "Glock is the best pistol".
Until, well, yesterday (edit: not yesterday, that says "June." My mistake), it was illegal in Germany to advertise where you can get an abortion. Abortion was and is legal there, but the doctors providing them weren't allowed to tell anyone that that's where they could go to get one.
This is a pretty analogous situation to what Newsom / his party want in California: guns legal (after a fashion) but for anyone part of the gun industry to be excluded from the public square.
Do you think that Germany changing their law is a step backwards, since you support an equivalent law in California? Or do you have a double standard between free speech applied to one kind of ad versus the other?
>> More right-wing personalities than I can even remember have been banned from various media, not least being a sitting President of the United States. The same platforms also have policies against certain "disinformation" that target anyone discussing some issues or events like the Hunter Biden laptop which were later determined not to be disinformation at all. As for it being Democratic policy, there was (briefly) a White House office under a Democratic president to coordinate these policies.
> Meanwhile, right-wing people aren't being deplatformed because they are right-wing. It's because of other things they say and do.
I'm no fan of that right-wing nonsense (e.g. Hunter Biden, etc.), but your apologia isn't really compelling. The impermissible "other things they say and do" can be defined in slanted ways to deliver an ideological result that can be described in faux "neutral" terms. To flip things around, for instance, how would you feel if (hypothetically) some social media company de-platformed pro-choice advocates under a rule that bans advocacy of violence (because they're interpreted as advocating violence against "the unborn")? You probably wouldn't be satisfied with a "nothing to see here, they're just enforcing their policies against advocating violence."
> You probably wouldn't be satisfied with a "nothing to see here, they're just enforcing their policies against advocating violence."
I kinda would, though, but I'd phrase it more along the lines of "Nothing to see here, just a garbage website doing its trashy thing."
Cancel culture types don't seem to understand that refusing a platform to other people based on their beliefs is a right, which comes along with the right to free speech. I'd prefer if pro-choice positions weren't banned, but if a website wants to ban pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-gay, or non-QAnon positions, then they have the right to become a cesspit by doing so. Likewise and in exchange, other websites retain the right to ban anti-choice, pro-gun, anti-gay, and QAnon/neo-nazi views.
>> You probably wouldn't be satisfied with a "nothing to see here, they're just enforcing their policies against advocating violence."
> I kinda would, though, but I'd phrase it more along the lines of "Nothing to see here, just a garbage website doing its trashy thing."
Even if it was major one with influence; like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook/Instagram?
I should have been more clear, but I was specifically thinking of major social media sites like those when I wrote that sentence, not some marginal social media site like thedonald.win that's easy to ignore.
Also the main thing I was commenting on was defining things in such a way that describes a slanted result with faux-neutral language (e.g. "when it happens to us it's censorship, when it happens to you it's just enforcing the rules").
Those are examples, but not sources. Can you provide actual sources to these examples?
And is the action of large corporations that regularly donate to Republican candidates (as well as Democrats) really “part of [Democrats’] playbook for years”? Or are they just (perhaps selectively) enforcing their TOS in a way that they believe provides them the most value?
I always wonder about these sorts of comments. Do you think sources for these easily-googleable facts don't exist, or that the pretty uncontroversial events I'm talking about didn't happen? Am I supposed to somehow be argued down by having to post a couple links? Or is this just a way to shift the conversation to discrediting the particular links I reply with, instead of engaging with the actual issues I'm bringing up?
As for it being just the unrelated actions of large corporations and not Democrats per se... Well, the White House part kind of disproves that, as does the California law. Yes, large corporations do act independently of the Democratic party, but the question here is does the Democratic party want this sort of censorship against other people, and they self-evidently do. And the WH Disinformation board shows that they're happy to use the large corporations as their tools to get it.
You claim deplatforming has been in a Democratic playbook "for years", then cite the introduction of a WH DGB which opened and closed this year, after being open for less than a month
>Do you think sources for these easily-googleable facts don't exist
>does the Democratic party want this sort of censorship against other people, and they self-evidently do
People ask for these "easily-googeable facts", and your response is 1 link to something not really relevant, and an assertion that it is "self-evident". Apologies if not everyone finds this to be a convincing argument
Source? That sounds like a law to regulate advertisements, not a deplatforming
>Google and Facebook already ban that as well
This is irrelevant - these are not Democratic organizations, and they do not have Democratic policies. Are you somehow implying Google and Facebook are run by Democrats, and so supposedly Hulu is run by Republicans?
> Are you somehow implying Google and Facebook are run by Democrats
Again, there was a White House office made specifically to coordinate these platforms banning "disinformation" content. It was later shut down, but its creation in the first place shows that the Democratic party wants to censor discussion it doesn't like. Or are you somehow implying the White House is not run by Democrats?
> That sounds like a law to regulate advertisements, not a deplatforming
Which is exactly what we're talking about here: these are advertisements, Hulu doesn't want them on their platform. You're fine with Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, banning advertisements from gun manufacturers and retailers, presumably pro-gun, but you have a problem with Hulu not wanting advertisements that are anti-gun.
>Or are you somehow implying the White House is not run by Democrats?
Of course not, this is obvious?
>You're fine with Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, banning advertisements from gun manufacturers and retailers, presumably pro-gun, but you have a problem with Hulu not wanting advertisements that are anti-gun.
I may or may not be fine with either of those things, why do you assert something you don't know?
So far you've demonstrated an inability to source the information in your original claim, "this sort of deplatforming hadn't been part of [Democrat's] playbook for years."
I really don't think you're arguing in good faith here. This is a very common tactic for people of your political alignment, at least on HN: to nitpickily demand sources for completely obvious facts, and then if provided, shift the argument to discrediting those sources instead of engaging with the actual philosophical points being made.
I could probably write everything else you're going to say in this thread myself, so, I'm not going to bother continuing to argue with you. If you'd like to respond to the core point, which is why are Democrats justified in complaining about their own ads being refused while they celebrate Republican content being deplatformed, then we can continue.
> If you have no problem with that then why should you have a problem banning ads against guns?
Are you really asking "if you want to ban advertising murder weapons, why should you have a problem banning adverts telling people not to murder"?
In this case, of course, Hulu have the right to carry any adverts they like. It turns out, they don't want adverts for either side of the argument, as is their right.
If Hulu decided that they wanted to ban adverts for guns, and promote the hell out of adverts for psychiatric services for people who want to own guns so they can get the mental health treatment they clearly need, then that is also something they have a right to do.
In 2015 I joined a local club for electronics hobbyists. It was great, we met every other week, had show-and-tell presentations of the things we were learning and building, I made a lot of friends and learned a whole lot. But, in 2020, it started getting taken over by crypto bros: where before we'd have presentations about a new IoT platform or how to generate some signal, now we'd have presentations about yet another bitcoin-trading thing, usually not even run by people who were regulars in the group.
At each one of these, I and a couple others did try to explain, politely, that crypto wasn't what was being claimed (overnight guaranteed millions!) and that these people didn't seem to understand basic things about economics (bitcoin is not a "store of value"). And we got laughed out of the room for it.
After a few times of that I just stopped going to the club, and I wasn't the only one because the whole thing disbanded a couple weeks after that.
So, when you say that the crypto people lied about this and people got suckered in, well, no sympathy. Because you're ignoring all of us who tried to point out the lies and caught shit for it.
Maybe you all shouldn't have invested more than you could afford to lose.
You can feel smug and vindicated for being treated unfairly in the past, I won't take that away from you, it sucks that it happens.
But the amount of airtime paid for by people saying "be careful" or even a nuanced "I like bitcoin long-term but be careful with some of these risky new schemes" was basically zero compared to the amount of resources relatively rich people spent trying to convince suckers to make them even richer by buying into their bullshit.
I say, don't blame the victim without trying to fix that as well. Why do we shrug when millions are spent to try to outright lie?
I'm not shrugging. I think you shouldn't be allowed to do fraudulent ads for investments, and that the loophole of "it's not USD so it's not a real, regulated investment" is wrong. I would like to see most of that industry thrown in prison.
But I have zero sympathy for the people who dumped their life savings into something that sounded too good to be true, and were jerks toward anyone telling them about the risks / misunderstandings. I know someone in his 60s who put his life savings into it, and (until I explained it) didn't know that bitcoins were mined. Did not know where they came from, just understood that the line was going up. (I do have some sympathy for him because he wasn't a jerk about the whole thing, but, the others... nah).
Right, but now imagine you weren't one of the people who had someone knowledgeable and sceptical pointing out the flaws. Imagine all you ever came across was crypto bros and people who believed, repeated and amplified their bullshit. Imagine the received wisdom all around you, from your family, peers, role models, was: this is the thing to do.
Yeah, a bunch of people ignored you and ostracised you. But not everyone. Not most people. Most people never even got the chance to ignore you.
I have a hard time believing that anyone actually falls in that category. No living grandparents who remember the great depression? No memories of 2008? And even if they were in a total vacuum, why wouldn't it occur to them, as it did me, to ask "what makes the line go up?"
If people put X USD into buying Bitcoin, and then can sell that Bitcoin for Y USD, and Y is greater than X, then the extra money has to come from somewhere. Where? Without knowing that answer, even before I knew the first thing about blockchain or crypto, I was unwilling to buy any.
I don't care who in your life was lying to you or pressuring you to invest, anyone who got suckered in without asking that basic question should have done more due diligence.
Agreed on much of what you wrote, but this isn't accurate. Anything is a store of value if people say it is. Baseball cards, art, books etc. all fall under the same definition.
A store of value allows you to get the value back out: if I spend a bunch of money and effort mining iron ore, or growing wheat, or building a house, I have the ore or wheat or house which has intrinsic value. Maybe now I don't need to grow as much wheat next year.
Bitcoins take value to create, and creating it consumes that energy / compute, but all you get out of it is a receipt that proves you spent the resources. You can't use the bitcoin for anything; you can only sell it to someone else who thinks it's a store of value.
I think you may be conflating commodities (and real estate) with the concept of "store of value". Those can be stores of value as well, of course. But using your explanation, doesn't it also take resources to create baseball cards, art, books etc., yet we accept they can be a store of value.
And with most stores of value, there is no guarantee you will get out more or equal to what you put in.
> doesn't it also take resources to create baseball cards, art, books etc.
Baseball cards are generally valued more than an equivalent-size rectangle of cardstock. Books are priced higher than a ream of paper; saying the value of a piece of art comes from its frame is usually an insult.
I would argue that those things are also not in any way a store of value: the only thing you can do with them is sell them to someone else. If no one else wants them, they're worthless. By your logic a big pile of beanie babies is a store of value, since someone spent a lot of money in the 90s to get them, and they took cloth and plastic pellets to make.
The way I've usually heard it explained is that doing some sort of productive work (growing wheat, clearing land, mining things, whatever) can store the value of that work because you create something useful with it. The resources it took to grow the wheat are stored in the wheat, and can be retrieved by not having to grow wheat next year.
My point, whether we agree on the terminology or not, is that Bitcoins are not anything useful: they take massive amounts of resources to create, just like farming or mining, but all you get out is a proof-of-work receipt that says "yes, he lit that pile of money on fire to create this."
>Baseball cards are generally valued more than an equivalent-size rectangle of cardstock. Books are priced higher than a ream of paper; saying the value of a piece of art comes from its frame is usually an insult.
Not necessarily. There is more use for blank card stock than card stock damaged by some obscure overprinted card from the 1990's. You can't use it for anything, it's been "consumed" with the design. Same goes for shitty overprinted books or "art". An artist will pay for blank canvas, but not a painting my niece did of dogs playing poker.
So it goes back to the idea that a store of value is anything people agree stores value.
I think we're arguing over terminology. But "it takes resources to create" is not the same thing as "it stores those resources." That's the whole misconception with Bitcoin. It takes a lot of resources to make one and that value is lost forever, instead of being used on something productive.
So you're saying, in the scenario where someone asks directly "will this company lay anyone off," you'd rather the company deflect the question and not answer it than just say "no?"
I really can't imagine why anyone would think that's a better look. If someone dodges a question, it's safe to assume that the truthful answer would look bad for them. That's WHY people dodge questions.
I think you might be putting a bit too much stock in what a recruiter thinks. Recruiters generally do not know the first thing about the industry they're recruiting for, and in my experience, having a history of solving problems across a breadth of domains is received well by hiring managers.
You just need to find the right hiring managers. But the trick is, the ones who don't value that? Aren't the ones you want to work for anyway.
If you are not well connected or well established, I don't know how you could possibly find those correct hiring managers. I don't have anything other than legacy companies or midsized no name enterprise shops on my resume. How does that translate into anything other than the riff raff looking at my resume?
I'm not well-connected, and if you have a bunch of experience on your resume, you're probably established enough. Send your resume out to a bunch of companies. Expect that most of them will reject you, some subset of those will waste some of your time first. From the outside, you can't easily tell which are the good companies to work for. But eventually, if you have good technical skills, you'll find a place that cares about that more than resume buzzwords and FAANG employment history. I have, over and over, and have made a career out of working for those places.
As much as I want to agree with you, and as much as I usually go by that rule myself... The place I work at now said, in March 2020, that they weren't going to do any layoffs. And, they haven't. And are now making more money than they were in 2019, and actively looking for more people, so, I doubt any are coming.
There have been times in my life when that advice was 100% true, but, not every time.
I'm tempted to email the author answering that question, because it's actually a really good and profound question.
Edit: except I can't, there's no way to contact him from the blog. Oh well, in case OP is the author:
In addition to programs that read code and do what it says (interpreters, like Python), there's another class of programs called "compilers" that translate code from one language to another. One kind of compiler (an assembler) translates assembly language into the specific numbers (representing instructions) that the computer hardware can understand and run. Some of these are able to do this for a computer other than the one they're running on.
So, the bottom of the stack is generally... another computer. When you make a new computer, you write a compiler (or assembler) on your old computer that will generate programs the new computer will run... And those programs include compilers and assemblers for the new computer so it can host its own development after that.
The obvious next question is, how did the first computer get programmed? And the answer is, by hand: what an assembler does can be done by hand, by a patient person, so someone did that and then keyed in the numbers manually (old computers had front panels with switches to manually read / write memory, for just this purpose).
Hi, this is the author. Thank you both for reading the article and for responding with this information. I have been a long time lurker at HN and when I saw the traffic numbers on my blog I wondered if someone linked to the post here. It has been admittedly gratifying that at least a few people have taken an interest in my weird little musings.
Anyway. If I understand you correctly: at the bottom of it all, there is a thing called an assembler, which is a kind of compiler, that makes the code existing "above" the assembler understandable to the actual hardware.
And I'm guessing there's a reason we don't just have people coding in assembly all the time? Probably it is a huge pain to code at the assembly level? If so -- could you redesign the hardware so it is easier just to code directly, I guess, "on" the hardware? Then you wouldn't have to worry about all these languages talking to each other. Plus, I bet the computer would run faster since you don't have to have it doing as much stuff, right?
Potentially dumb question: for computers that are not electric, like mechanical computers or quantum computers, do you essentially have to make a whole new assembly language?
It's hard to express some of this in layman's terms, but it's good practice for me because I plan to write a book about exactly this:
Generally what a CPU does is, fetch an instruction (represented by a number) from memory, run it, then repeat with the next instruction (a little hand-waving here because modern CPUs also have the ability to rewrite the instructions they're given into equivalent-but-faster instructions, in pursuit of speed, but generally that's the idea). So, if you wanted, you could write the exact numbers representing the instructions you want to run into memory, and let the CPU run it. But this would be very hard to do, so, there are tools:
- Instead of writing stuff into memory, you write it into a file, and the computer has an operating system that knows how to read files and put them into memory.
- Instead of writing the numbers, you can write little text descriptions of the instructions, like "add" instead of the number "4," and the assembler handles the translation (as well as some other bookkeeping) for you.
So, why not write in assembly all the time? Because it's a lot of work: the instructions available on a CPU are very low level: mostly moving numbers around in memory and doing basic arithmetic. It's much easier to be able to work at a higher level of abstraction, like "take this list of people and sort it by last name" than "add 3 to this number and store the result at memory location 47." That higher level of abstraction is what a compiler does: you write in a higher-level language and it generates code in another language (like assembly) that does the same thing. In practice only things that need to run very fast, or things where no other tools are available, are written in assembly.
Why not make assembly higher level then? Complicated question: one, some chips do, to a degree: there are chips designed to make it easier to hand-code for them. But most don't because it ends up being both faster and easier not to: you can use less hardware if you support fewer and simpler instructions, and if you tailor those instructions to make it easier to write a compiler targeting them, it ends up being faster and simpler for that too. As for it being faster because the computer is doing less: it's actually doing more!
Remember that the compiler step usually happens before you run the program: someone writes source code, feeds it to a compiler or assembler, and gets out the numbers the computer can run. The source is no longer needed; you can hand that output to someone else instead and they can run it directly. That means we care a lot more about the time it takes to run something than the time to compile something. A chip with higher-level instructions makes the opposite tradeoff: a more complex instruction would take longer for the hardware to run, and you'd pay that cost more often.
But wait, you ask, you'd also need fewer instructions, your program would be shorter! Well, maybe you'd win that tradeoff, maybe not. It depends on what you're doing. This is part of why there are lots of different chips; different applications want different instructions in hardware. There are lots of benchmarks for chips for how quickly they can solve a particular math problem, and sometimes chip A is better at benchmark X than chip B, but B beats A at benchmark Y: differences in instruction set mean that the assembly for one is faster than for another one, at some things.
Non-electric computers: in general, every machine has a specific assembly language for that machine. The AMD Ryzen I'm typing this on runs different instructions than my Apple M1 laptop which also runs different instructions than the Espressif ESP32-based game system on my desk. This follows for non-electric computers too: any stored-program computer, the format of how you store the program is arbitrary and up to the designer of that computer, and presumably a quantum computer or a mechanical one would have different instructions. I can't really speak for quantum computers (are there any yet?) but I've been designing a toy CPU for fun, and here's how I did it:
- Figure out which instructions I wanted, and how I wanted to represent them as numbers
- Write a program that runs on my normal computer that will translate mnemonics ("add", "store") to those numbers (the assembler)
- Write another program that runs on my computer that will pretend to be the new one, and run the new one's instructions (a virtual machine)
- Write some programs in the new machine's assembly
If you add a step after that for "make a piece of hardware that will be the new CPU," then that's pretty much how a new computer is built. I wouldn't need to physically use switches, but that's just because instead I'd write things to a ROM chip using my normal computer. If I really had to, I could do that using switches though, and that was common for homebuilt hobbyist computers of the 70s-80s.
Edit, probably worth noting: "in general, every machine has a specific assembly language for that machine," in practice this is becoming less and less true. It's now common for several different chips to have either entirely identical instructions or commonalities in instruction set. ARM computers (which is everything from an Apple M1 / M2 to smartphones to Raspberry Pis to small microcontrollers) share an instruction set; there are tiers of ARM chips, like an M1 will do things an STM32 microcontroller won't, but it's mostly the same assembly language, and that's part of the value of that architecture. Same with x86 chips: the 80386 supported all the 80286 instructions and some extra; the 80486 supported 80386 plus some extra, and so on, right up to the current generation i7 / i9 / whatever. And AMD ones, Ryzen / Threadripper / etc, support the same instructions as the Intel ones. The reason why is obvious: Intel wants to sell you a new chip and it's easier to do so if you can still run all the programs you ran on your old chip; AMD wants to sell you their chips and it's easier to do so if they can run all the programs you currently use on your Intel chip.
Ah shoot and P.S.: so if at one point some guy was flipping switches to get the first computer programmed, how do you do that with things like quantum computers?
My experience exactly. I wrote an emulator in Rust for a thing implemented on an FPGA that generates a video signal. For the first pass, I just ported the Verilog code to Rust, essentially: big loop over all the pixels every frame, figure out which color it should be, return that. There are a ton of ways to factor things out of that so you're not doing repeated reads of stuff, and I was going to gradually put them in until it was fast enough...
Thank you! When I read the headline I wasn't even thinking of propulsion: gliders have no moving parts for propulsion, neither do solid rocket engines, so what? What I wanted to know was how on earth they made something to do the job of an aileron without moving to affect the airflow... And I was disappointed to find out that they didn't.
"No moving parts" is a dumb way to advertise this. It's a cool thing, an self-propelled ionic propulsion system, but the fact it has no moving parts isn't an especially interesting feature of it.
Also perhaps I'd be more sympathetic to the Democrats here if exactly this sort of deplatforming hadn't been part of their own playbook for years.