DonaldFisk

People smoke a lot less. We have antibiotics. Life expectancy is up.

It's confusing because different people mean different things when using political terms. The political compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org) has two axes: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. On it, socialists are definitely left wing (and communists far left), regardless of what the left/right wing meant at the time of the French Revolution.

I was puzzled by this: (rplacd (quote tt) (quote ...)) and later (print (cdr (quote tt))).

But it appears to be valid in PDP-1 Lisp (though not in either Lisp 1.5 or modern Lisps). From https://s3data.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/DEC.pdp_1.1964.1026...

"Doing a CDR of an atom is permissible and will get the atom's property list. Doing a CAR of an atom may very easily wreck the system."

I'm interested in how they work, but building anything like them, given the hardware I have, would be impractical. I've seen others use them, including to answer some questions I had, but the answers they gave were obvious, unhelpful, or wrong.

Even if they become more reliable, I like to understand and work things out for myself, rather than just be given the answer.

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then. I've been doing symbolic AI, on and off, since the 1980s.

I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand, but I have fairly recently implemented a multi-layer artificial neural network in C, mostly as a learning exercise, but as I had previously built a speech spectrogram in Lisp, I thought I'd try to use it to recognize phonemes, with one hidden layer. The Lisp communicated with the ANN via a Unix pipe. It worked reasonably well for just vowels, but when I added other sounds (e.g. l, r, s, z), its performance deteriorated. I think the C is bug free, but I don't know an easy way to train the ANN. I've tried adding to the training set, adding an extra layer, changing the number of neurons in the hidden layer. The usual debugging skills don't seem to help there.

It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and sometimes what they develop has little to no practical value, and is done as a learning exercise. Using AI would defeat the purpose for them. If they're forced to use AI in their job, it decreases their job satisfaction.

There are others who just want a problem solved, and it doesn't matter to them how the program which solves it gets written, as long as the program (appears to) work and it's done as quickly as possible, so they outsource the development to AI. That is not hacking.

This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site

And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...

General Relativity. It explained the anomaly in the precession of Mercury's perihelion, and the bending of starlight by the Sun (double the value predicted by Newton's law).

The test here is for the inverse square law of gravity. The rival theory in this case isn't GR, but MOND: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

Anglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.

I wrote something similar here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/GroundBreakingLanguages.html

We agree on Algol, Lisp, Forth, APL, and Prolog. For ground-breaking functional language, I have SASL (St Andrews Static Language), which (just) predates ML, and for object oriented language, I have Smalltalk (which predates Self).

I also include Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL (string processing), and Prograph (visual dataflow), which were similarly ground-breaking in different ways.

Sadly, not part of this course, though Lisp and Prolog are very useful for other things. C's fine for building neural networks from scratch, and you can glue different subsystems together to make anything more complex than that using Python.

Why not? It was called AI at the time.

Written Chinese stayed the same while the spoken language evolved from the 5th century BC until the 1911 revolution, after which people began writing Chinese the way it's spoken in Beijing. So there's a sharp dividing line just over 100 years ago; Literary Chinese is still taught in school but without that you'd have trouble understanding it.

Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.

Here's Trump's claims debunked in detail: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/08/recapping-trumps-deceptive...

"But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. "

It's well worth a read for anyone who wants to implement their own Lisp. I'd say it's the precursor of Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec though. I have copies of both.

Newton wrote, "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."

Source: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE...

Yes, the principle of relativity was known to Newton, but the other idea, that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, was new, counterintuitive, and what makes special relativity the way it is.

It isn't an anteceent, it's part of special relativity, discovered by Lorentz. It's well known that special relativity is the work of several people as well as Einstein.

Agreed.

General relativity was a completely novel idea. Einstein took a purely mathematical object (now known as the Einstein tensor), and realized that since its coveriant derivative was zero, it could be equated (apart fron a constant factor) to a conserved physical object, the energy momentum tensor (except for a constant factor). It didn't just fall out of Riemannian geometry and what was known about physics at the time.

Special relativity was the work of several scientists as well as Einstein, but it was also a completely novel idea - just not the idea of one person working alone.

I don't know why anyone disputes that people can sometimes come up with completely novel ideas out of the blue. This is how science moves forward. It's very easy to look back on a breakthrough and think it looks obvious (because you know the trick that was used), but it's important to remember that the discoverer didn't have the benefit of hindsight that you have.

Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/

Here's the Wikipedia article, which provides more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom

Dennis McKenna, mentioned in the article, is the brother of the late Terence McKenna.

It depends whether you want your system to handle all of natural language and give answers which are correct most of the time (but it isn't easy to tell when it's wrong), or to handle a limited subset of natural language and either give answers which are demonstrably correct (once it's fully debugged or proven correct), or tells you when it doesn't know the answer.

These are two opposing approaches to AI. Rule induction is somewhere in between - you use training data and it outputs (usually probabilistic) human-readable rules.

again,

    capital(germany, berlin).
    capital(france, paris).

is clearer.

Someone once told me you need humongous vectors to encode nuance, but people are good at things computers are bad at, and vice-versa. I don't want nuance from computers any more than I want instant, precise floating point calculations from people.

Another cognate is Classical Greek γυνή, whence gynaecology.

It's telling that king – man + woman = queen is the only example I've ever seen used to explain word2vec.

I prefer the old school

    king(X) :- monarch(X), male(X).
    queen(X) :- monarch(X), female(X).
    queen(X) :- wife(Y, X), king(Y).

    monarch(elizabeth).
    female(elizabeth).
    wife(philip, elizabeth).
    monarch(charles).
    male(charles).
    wife(charles, camilla).

    ?- queen(camilla).
    true.

    ?- king(charles).
    true.

    ?- king(philip).
    false.

where definitions are human readable rules and words are symbols.

But if there are no Dilbert cartoons on the wall, it might be because the PHB has banned them.

The original proverb is "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." See https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pro1.htm

I had assumed that XWayland is a drop-in replacement fo X11, and will be available indefinitely.

I regularly write code which relies on a working X11. I have written a virtual machine which makes X11 calls to do 2D graphics and event handling, as well as applications which compile to the virtual machine code. If X11 and now XWayland cease to be available, not only would I have to rewrite large parts of my virtual machine, but also rewrite all the 2D graphics code in applications. All so that I can stand still when the rug is being pulled from under my feet. I'm sure there are others in a similar predicament.

I may be naive about this, but as X11 just works, and has done for decades, it should require little to no maintenance, so why the need to withdraw it? I don't expect, or require, any additional functionality.