Unsophisticated ASM

Continuing the food chain rule in terms of programming.

I started programming in assembly language on the early PCs. There was very little “sophisticated food” available for the task I wanted to perform, so I had to write more of the action myself. There was also very little memory and disk space compared to modern computers, so my code had to START WHERE YOU ARE, WORK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE, MAKE SOMETHING OF IT. The task at hand was intentionally low on the food chain, encouraging the user to MAKE SOMETHING OF IT.

Minimal resources = maximal creativity. A subsistence farm has to WORK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE.

Local content rules = maximal creativity. Before the tyranny of Free Trade, Canada and Argentina and Turkey exercised local creativity to spice up Detroit’s premade packages. After Free Trade, local creativity was literally banned. The only choice was replaying what GM designed.

When you can’t easily access premade food packages or premade program modules or premade records or premade AI or premade capital, you have to use your own mind and hands and tools more intensely.

This is what God wants.

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Reheating previous thoughts on Sophisticated Food:

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Academic research on diet is reinventing a very old wheel.

Item in today’s “science” news coverage:

While obesity is a complex and multifaceted problem, much of the strategy behind combating it boils down to healthy eating habits. Taking into account the primary role of subjective appetite sensations in said habits, a group of researchers recently compared the satiety impact of two popular breakfast choices: oatmeal and ready-to-eat breakfast cereal (RTEC). … The oatmeal breakfast resulted in a greater increase in perceptions of fullness and a greater decrease in perceptions of hunger, desire to eat, and prospective intake in the 4-hour period postprandial when compared with the RTEC,”

This principle was well-known a hundred years ago but forgotten in the interim. Here’s a page from ‘Air, water and food from a sanitary standpoint’ by Ellen Richards, 1900.

Richards distinguishes between adulterated and sophisticated foods. Adulteration is dilution of real food by inert or bad stuff like water or sawdust. Adulteration faded after the Pure Food and Drug Act, but has recently returned as shrinkflation. Sophistication is pre-digestion that lulls the digestive system into fatal laziness. Sophistication is much more common now, and still unaffected by laws. (In fairness, I don’t see how you could practically regulate it.)

Unfortunately Richards’s advocacy failed. The commercial forces of sophistication (love that word!) remain in control, and the idea that the digestive system needs to work for its living is still “new” and “marginal”.

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