YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Plummer

lines on the record: 165
first: 2025-08-29
most recent: 2025-08-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Making cool stuff Guess fundamentally, what I care about is being able to make complex things that are useful to other people, which leverages my abilities in a way that allows me to be creative and to create things that other people can use in a way that if I was limited to painting or sculpting or whatever in the classic arts, I would be hopeless. And so for me, that's really the meaning of life. And then maybe you raise a couple good kids to hand the baton off to.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I kind of came up at a really fortunate time, I think, because I had to come up with the technology over the course of 30 or 40 years. So I understand TTL logic and I can use AI to write code. And I kind of know all the pieces in between. There certainly are holes in my knowledge. But I think the only way to have got that level of knowledge or the completeness of that picture is to have lived it for that long. And it's going to be hard to duplicate that for people starting now.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think, I don't want to say prompt engineer, but I think it's going to be something like that in the sense that if you're an architect building a bridge, at some point guys were down there welding beams together, but now you're dragging things around in AutoCAD and assembling from big freeform sections. And I assume that's what programming will be like. You won't be in there throwing individual lines of code around. You'll be moving components and interfaces and describing to the AI what those interactions should be and letting it build the components. But I think we're still quite a ways from it being able to whole cloth generate. You can't say give me a Linux kernel is compatible with Linux. One day we'll be able to and it'll crank it out. We're not there yet.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, and to read it, and to know what to tell it to do next and all that. Yeah. I don't think you can vibe code yourself if you just knew and haven't coded. But if you're a good programmer, AI can make you incredibly powerful.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's all pretty self explanatory once you see it, but you know, creating it from whole cloth is a little different.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've done a ton of it for the Python side because I'm not great with Python and I'm kind of new to it. So I found it very helpful because I've learned a lot from watching the code that it generates. If I don't know how to do something, because if I write Python from scratch, it's going to be about four times as long as what the AI can crank out because Python can be pretty terse if you're good at it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most fun for me is when I build something complex and I thought through how it should work and then I run it and it does work that way, that creates intense satisfaction. Seeing the results come out the way that I planned them and have it work It rarely does the first time, but”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two guys over in Europe, Rucker and Tudor, basically own this now. I started as just three languages. I did Python, C sharp, and C++. And I checked them in and I published the episode and then people started throwing more solutions in there. And it just got out of hand. So I had to get somebody to manage that one. And they've been great doing that for me.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so you can do anything you want, but it has to be a prime sieve. You're allowed to use one bit per integer at most, so you can't use a byte, which is cheaper and easier. There are a number of rules like that that you have to allocate the memory within your time loop. And so we have a set of rules, and we have some solutions that don't follow the rules, like the 6502, because you've only got 64K, you can't do 100 million sie. So there's a lot of solutions like that that we run as exhibition projects. But among the main languages, they all follow the same rules. And so it really should just be how the algorithm is expressed in that language. And many of them use the same back-end compiler. So it really is how you're expressing any limitations or the benefits of that language.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what they're doing is they're solving the primes up to 100 million as many times per second as they can in a five second loop.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zig, I think right now It does, it varies. People will make an improvement to the C and it'll pass for a while, and then the zig guys will get angry and come back and make it faster.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have a project called GitHub Primes. If you just search for GitHub Primes, you'll find it. A single set of prime number algorithms implemented in about 100 different languages. So it's the exact same algorithm, and we require that you follow certain rules to make it fair. Then you express that algorithm in whatever language you choose to the best of your ability, and we run a benchmark every night and we compile the results and find out which languages are fastest”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The PDP-11 stuff, I'm trying to get at what's called an RA82 drive. It's the big 14 inch monster that spins at 3600 RPM and sounds like a washing machine. And then I'll find the controller card and write the code and integrate it into the driver and try to get that all working.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very close to working. I think now it's tweaking the model size and layers and stuff like that to get it to learn past the one threshold. But it's a couple thousand lines of Lewin, it's a couple thousand lines of Python, and they all interact and they all work. So it's like 95% of the work is done now. It's tuning hyperparameters and hoping for the best.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's that single minded focus and the ability to reduce a problem and to be ultimately curious about what's inside stuff. That's been an obsession for me my whole life. What's inside? I got to take my mom's oven apart because I got to know how the flip clock works. And I think that's a good habit to have if you're going to be a programmer.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a lot of people, maybe 10 to 20 percent of the population, is somewhere on the autism spectrum, but isn't impacted by enough that it rises to the level of a disorder. But they still have many of the characteristics that arise from autism. And I think if they can understand and identify and manage some of those behaviors in an optimal way, they can both leverage them and take advantage of some of the skills and mediate some of the deficits and problems that come with it. Wrote it mostly for my kids because none of them, as far as I know, have ASD, but they've all got certain aspects of my behavior that are particularly related to it. Thought I'd write a little manual for them, basically.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, now we do a lot of affirmation and checking. Like in the last couple years, we do a thing where she'll just be like, you good? I'm like, yeah. And there's two steps to that. There's are you good? And then there's my response. Because if I'm like, yeah. She knows something's And so he's always just pinging back and forth because there's not the ability to read people just from looking at them to know what's going on. So we have this explicit check mechanism, I think, where we. Develop that.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, her family was way more open with that kind of thing than mine was. And so it was a growing period for me. But yeah, it's not a problem I have.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was never good with people I don't get it when people like me, I guess. And so, and my son is the same way because they don't fall very far from three. And I got him a t-shirt that says, if you're hitting on me, please let me know and be specific because I'm clueless. It's very similar for me. I mean, I had to be around a long time and kind of grow on people because I had no game, because I had no ability to do the social dances that that whole thing requires. So my only option is to just be myself, and that works for some people.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been married 31 years, and together for 37, so a long history there. And I think our first indication that we knew we were very different was we were sitting in the car one night in front of the house at dark. And across the street, there's kind of a nice house. It has these big brick pillars that are linked by like anchor chains, and it forms a fence around the yard. And I'm looking at these things because they're about two feet square and I got a capstone. And I'm like, no wonder if they're hollow or are they backfilled? They film a concrete or what? Now wife looks at me and she's like, what's wrong with you? Why do you have a Place in your head that cares. That's great in the moment that I was passionately involved in caring, and she was passionately involved in why would you even?”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Switch Philipsy go kind of a primitive brain, your frontal cortex shuts down to an extent, I think, so you don't have the benefit of decision making and filtering your very reptilian brain in that state. And it's really a panic state. And so it's a panic and a fight or flight response to not being able to tolerate the current reality. And perhaps it's been so frustrating or you've been so randomized or you had a bad travel day or an argument at work or whatever, it's added up to the point that something has now triggered you. And your brain loses its ability to adequately moderate your behavior.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, it is when you're emotionally overwhelmed to the point that you can't manage your behavior anymore. And so you see it in the movie Rain Man when he's trying to get on the airplane and he's kind of forced and he starts losing it, that's a meltdown. Or I've seen it on, they did kind of a, well, actually probably the best portrayal I've seen in media is, what's the TV show where the doctor is autistic? Anyway, there's a TV show where a doctor is autistic and he's a surgeon, and he is eventually banned from surgery because of his autism, and he's always wanted to be a surgeon, and he has a complete meltdown. And it's a pretty good portrayal on television.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A song by Rush, you know the band And it's written by Neil Perth. And I only speculate about people who have passed on. So I've got a sense he was probably on the spectrum. But the line is something like all the world's indeed a stage, and we are merely players, performers and portrayers, each another's audience. And he talks at length in the song about not being able to treat strangers as friends and being able to fake an affect and all that. So it seems like he's struggling with masking a lot in the song, and I have no idea, but that was what I took from it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, masking is, and it's probably not the right way to describe it, but it's the act of acting normal. That is, how do I conduct myself? A social situation in a way that other neurophygical people are going to, or that other people who are neurotypical. Are going to receive and accept it the right way. And everything you do in a social interaction from waving my hands to taking facial expressions to tone of voice to posture It's a huge contrivance and it's work. Comes natural to most people, it's just what they do. And cool people do it really well. But for somebody on the spectrum, you've got to fake it all.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, be really specific and don't assume I'm going to pick up on clues on nuance and subtlety So, if you're trying to nudge me into a particular behavior, you're much better off to say, Dave, this is what you need to do.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good point to jump in there too on empathy because there is some perception in the community that people with autism lack empathy. And I don't think that's the case at all. I can only speak for myself. I feel fairly empathetic. But I think the problem is that a communication one, and it works in both directions. Whereas I don't know how you're feeling. So it's hard for me to be empathetic with it until you communicate to me what it is you're experiencing. And then once I know, once I have an understanding of what's going on in your head, I can feel incredibly sorry for you. But until then, I'm going to assume you're going to handle it just like I would in your position in my case with what I know now.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably 10 years later, that I had a whole bunch of craftsmen that had worked on my car for three years, and I probably should have blown some smoke up their butts, but what a great job they did, but I never did that because it's not what I wanted or needed in that moment. And I was completely oblivious to that. So I sent an email to the manager or to the owner of the place, and I said, I don't know if you remember this, but 10 years ago I picked up my car and I've probably looked unimpressed, but I want you to know that I was very impressed with everything and the quality and everything else. And he wrote back, he's like, I've thought of that moment often. So I'm like, now I'm going to”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if I meet somebody, particularly somebody new, and it's my first couple interactions with them, they start even meeting you today, then I will go home later and replay all of the moments where I had choices to make. And probably the most uncomfortable ones first to find out what did I do wrong in that moment, what did I miss, what was the other person thinking, how can I improve that kind of situation next time? And do I need to go fix it or make a phone call, that kind of thing in a bad, you know, in an extreme case? And that's happened a couple times in my life. Like I had a car restored that my dad had bought new at 69. I still have it. So we've had it 50 years. And about 20 years ago, I had it restored. And it was like a three-year process of craftsmen working on this car for thousands of hours. And I could go out to pick it up and I'm inspecting the car and I'm very impressed with the work and I'm saying, oh, this is nice and this is great and everything else. And then I fly home and write the check and the car gets delivered. And then I realized.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everything is very literal for me. I remember as a kid, my grandfather was building a planter holder in the kitchen for my mom. And he was using these big angle brackets that I thought were a little overkill. And I said, do you think that'll be big enough to hold the plant? He says, it'll be big enough to hold the horse. And I was only five, but I was very confused about A, why you would bring a horse into your kitchen, why you would put a horse up on a plant there and all of these things. It didn't make any sense to me. Well, obviously it was a figure of speech. For a lot of my life, I took figures of speech as literal”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you want to double your precision, you can use the second test, which is you ask there's a room with 10 chairs, and six people come in and sit down in those chairs. How many chairs are left? Some people are going to say four, but I'm going to say ten because that's how many chairs are still there. Literally true. And I'm not being a dick. I'm not trying to be complicated, but that is how my mind works. So, when I see that question, it's like how you answer it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, now, of course, anything that has two answers has a high error rate. So, what's more important to society as a whole from the people? Is it cooperation or creativity? And if you had to pick one, which is the most important? And most neurotypical people will generally lean towards cooperation. Whereas people on the spectrum tend to lean towards creativity as individual problem solvers.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's something I started doing is overtly asking because it's hard for me to nudge somebody there. I'm not good with that kind of social dance.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest deficit for me was when I started to manage people because now you're Concerned about their hopes, dreams, aspirations, what motivates them. They have entire lives that are kind of a mystery to me because I assume they want to be motivated and led and encouraged and compensated exactly as I would. And that's not always the case. Some people need a lot more affirmation. Some people just want money. Some people want to be in the important meetings and make decisions. But I was largely oblivious to that. And so eventually I had to learn that everybody that you're managing has their own set of incentives and priorities, and they're completely different from what I think they probably are.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of prosperity and finances, the biggest thing I can say is sell what you can do and not yourself. Because if you go into a job interview and you try to wow them with your personality and how amazing you are, it may or may not go well. But if you can go in with your portfolio of work and say, look, here's my GitHub history and here are the awesome projects I contributed to and here's the actual algorithm I wrote and this is what I do. I think you get a lot further with that. So whether you're playing the piano or writing code.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm much better than I used to be before I didn't know and I didn't know how injecting a correction meaninglessly into a conversation could impact and make the other person feel. Now I got a better sense of it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my very first summer at Microsoft when I got the internship, Bill had all the interns over, I guess it was 20 or maybe 25 of us that got hired that year over to his house for burgers and beers and just chat in the backyard. And of course, it's still Bill Gates, and he's a big enough deal even then that you're a little nervous. And so my manager, Ben, who was sort of my mentor at the time, took me over to introduce me to Bill because he knew him. And he's explaining this to Dave. He's our intern from Canada. And in the space of four months, he's done this feature in just copying smart driving. He listed off all the stuff I was doing. But I stopped because I'm like, well, actually, it was three months. I had to interrupt them and they both kind of, what? And they looked at each other and I realized that was the wrong time.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's lots of times with my wife, too, where there's a certain literalism that comes with autism. And we spent years where she would say something, and I'd say, but that doesn't make sense. You know what I mean? I'm like, no, I know what you said, and I'm not being just combative here. I literally only know what you said, and I don't have that. And I remember we've been in meetings with people, and there's three or four people in the meeting, and I'm the only autistic person, I'll tell that they've got this communication loop going on, and I have to like, you got to tell me what's going on because I really don't know what's being. Set here”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be, yeah. Telephone is especially hard because I rely on a lot of other cues, and when somebody is just on the phone and I just have their voice, there's so much that's implied between people that I miss. And so I'm much better on FaceTime, where if somebody makes a joke, they might smile after on the phone, I don't know if you're being sarcastic or serious and that kind of thing.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what anybody else is thinking. So I know what I would think about this interaction if I was in your position and I was you. And that's the best I can do. But I think most neurotypical people have a sense of Alex probably feels this way or that way because he's acting this way and his reactions are this and his facial expressions say this. And that's all kind of lost on me. So I run a little proxy NPC game for everybody I deal with.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or actually acquiring the focus is the issue. So I'm very easily distracted. I fall asleep with noise canceling headphones or I can't fall asleep, that kind of thing. But once I get locked in, I'm very hard to distract. So it's kind of a paradox.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can bring to bear an incredible amount of focus and dedication on a particular task. If it's, and it has to be something I love, it has to be something that's rewarding. It has to be something I can make progress on. And there has to be all these things that are true about it. And there can be like a kid playing with trains, I get that same feeling.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fundamental theory of thought. One thing. It does it very intensely. And then when it's done, I can move on and do something else. But I'm not a multi tasker. I'm a serial single tasker by any stretch. Autism usually brings with it sensory sensitivities and repetitive behaviors, behavioral issues that compound it. And if they rise to the level where an individual can't moderate or accommodate them in their life, it becomes a disorder. And that's probably 1 to 2% of the population.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to rebuild the kernel and all that, so I had to learn the BSD kernel. I'm pretty familiar with it now. Because you can't just add to the device driver, right? You've got to rebuild the kernel to add support for whatever device. So you add a new disk controller. It's time to build the kernel, so you got to go find the source and find the code.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a weird floppy drive. It's a dual floppy drive with one stepper motor. So both heads seek together like Siamese twins.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The knobs in control what view you get of the LEDs. So normally you see the data bus and you can see the address bus, and you can pause the machine and you can edit the address on the bus and you can deposit stuff into memory with the switches.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, what it is is I had built a number of PDP 11s. And so over the years, I had acquired all these parts and I decided, well, let me build the best PDP-11 that I can. And so it was kind of a quest to, just like you'd try to max out a PC, I tried to max out a PDP-11. So it's got four megabytes of memory, which would be massive in the day. And yeah, that's it there. It's got lots of blinking lights, and I had to rewrite the BSD kernel to make the lights work.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like a lot of old hardware. I restore cars, so I do a lot of 1960s muscle cars, cars, and trucks. And old computers, so I restore PDP 11s has been my fascination and my special interest for the last six months or so, and I've built a number of those.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in the 70s or 80s, there was a tech in Vegas went around and he was burning his own ROMs for the slot machines and with a back door in them. And so when he serviced the machine, he would just put his ROM in and he'd come back six months later.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really know. I tried to get down and get inside access to one, and it was very hard. They don't want to tell you a lot about them. I'm sure it's not that deep of a secret, but. They're all basic Windows PCs, but they're basic Windows PCs on top of a very secure enclave of some kind that I don't know a lot about.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm happy to ruin them for you. Ironic to me that I placed law machines because I know it's a losing bid overall, but there's a whole dopamine feast there of bright lights and high contrast colors that I enjoy. So I do play them. But what happens is internally, there's basically a black box mechanism that does nothing more than generate the next random number and what the outcome is in terms of probability and payout. And then the game says, I got to make up a movie to go along with that, and maybe it's three bars or whatever it is. But there's no correlation. It's not spinning the reels, seeing where they land and looking that up to see what you won. It's completely the other direction. It determines whether or not or if you won, and then make something up to fit that scenario.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source