My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures.

Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.

Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!

I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.

Huh... I did that, too :)

And before that I duct-taped the insanely large 16KB RAM extension (from 1KB), so it doesn't reset with the slightest movement, on my Sinclair ZX81, which I've also assembled and soldered from a kit :)

A fellow survivor of RAM-pack wobble!

There are dozens of us!

Their children are far more likely to survive childhood than at any time in history.

Those are estimates. Notice they didn’t assume 0% or a million %. They chose numbers that are a plausible approximation of the true unknown values, also known as an estimate.

Your hard mode is exactly the situation that RL is used, because it requires neither a corpus of correct examples, nor insight into the structure of a good policy.

> How can we confidently extract any signal from a failure to solve a problem if we don't even know if the problem is solvable?)

You rule out all the stuff that doesn’t work.

Yes this is difficult and usually very costly. Credit assignment is a deep problem. But if you didn’t find yourself in a hard mode situation, you wouldn’t be using RL.

We are made of meat.

Ye I was alluding to carbon and silicon.

I paid about GBP 20K for the 192MB RAM in a Sun SPARC 5 workstation in 1995. That’s maybe $27K USD in 1995 dollars. Gulp.

There is or was a website that would let you plug in an Apple computer, and then tell you what you'd be worth if instead you'd bought Apple stock.

I put my G4 PowerBook into it once, and then vowed never to look at it again.

If the sticker price stayed the same since 2016, it got about 35% cheaper due to inflation.

How much should I charge my kids for the second lesson?

> It has really reduced the friction to write GUIs in an enterprise environment.

Thereby adapted to devs' needs, rather than users'.

Spatial frequency, ie. small detailed things, not temporal frequency (in this example).