Hopefully Interesting

Back in 2010 some researchers at the University of Berkley started work on an instruction set architecture (ISA) that was going to be both open for anybody to use and incorporating modern ideas.  All computers run by performing a series of operations, like loading a 16 bit value from memory, adding two 32 bit numbers together and returning the highest possible 32 bit value if the result can't be represented in 32 bits, or taking the cosine of a 32 bit number.  An ISA defines which operations are basic to the computer and which have to be assembled out of other instructions.  It also tells you how you represent your instructions as sequences of 1s and 0s in memory.  And it specifies various other things such as how memory accesses from different cores interact. You might have heard of the great RISC versus CISC wars of the 1980s.  For a long time it was very expensive to move data from memory to the computer core (it was only every one back then) and back.  Transferring instructio

Since writing a post way back about the way complexity is a problem for Congress I've been happy to discover that the ideas in those aren't at all original and that these are the sort of things people write papers on.  Here's a good article on one recent paper.  I suppose I should have seen that coming.  Possibly I got the idea from somewhere initially then forgot about reading it. But anyways, figuring out what you need to know to write legislation is hard.  It would be cool if Congress had a big budget to hire outside experts but they have to make do listening to what lobbyists tell them and trying to decide which to believe.  Of course there is on part of government that has a huge budget to hire people with specialist knowledge and which has tons of them on staff.  That is, the executive branch. That's an angle on this whole situation I'd completely overlooked.  A president proposing legislation can use the Department of Education to draft school reform bi