infinite8s

Smalltalk didn't start until 1971/2 (Alan Kay started at Xerox in early 1971 as a consultant and then joined as a full time member). It's covered in the HOPL article above

That's the difference between first-hand evidence and vibe-based feelings/arguments.

The collapse of Syria was partly due to an extended drought causing famine. A lot of the current xenophobia in Europe is due to the small amount of refugees escaping the effects of this famine and subsequent civil war.

And at a meta level, every medium of communication shapes its receiver as well (think about the dumbing down effect of TV vs a book).

This is like "Picture Cook: See, Make, Eat": https://www.amazon.com/Picture-Cook-Katie-Shelly/dp/16460416...

QRT?

>The UK system takes the national insurance contributions of workers but doesn’t invest them in anything on behalf of the individual. So despite decades of payments you technically have nothing at the end and survive on the goodwill of the government and current taxpayers. That works right now because of the population pyramid.

That's how Social Security works in the United States as well.

That's because they know their kids will be set no matter what they do in life.

But they might be pushing in the wrong direction.

The opposite - the incumbent party is destroying America.

Is this like some scale-independent version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

There are definite costs to this in terms of continued US taxation as an expat, especially if there isn't a tax treaty in place.

Who's legally responsible once someone's agent decides to SWAT someone else because they got into an argument with that person's agent?

Those poor people voted for something for which they were explicitly mislead. The results of Brexit have in no ways made their lives better.

Binding people to a shared worldview due to a fear of an unsuccessful afterlife?

As someone coming back to C++ after more than a decade away, do you have any recommended resources on C++20 or open source projects you've seen that utilize the language this way?

Would you have gone to the streets for it?

He's been talking about doing it since he was inaugurated.

Don't be so sure of that. Network effects are still subject to tipping points.

The economic benefits are clear - what social costs are you taking about?

In what other country does a jail sentence mean you get sent to another country to serve the sentence? (Except maybe the US now with detained immigrants)

Did you study chemical engineering knowing it's applicability to software engineering?

Your observation is interesting because early ideas in object oriented design were likewise inspired by biological robustness in the face of a non-zero background error rate (see any of Alan Kay's early writings, and his Turing lecture). I wonder if half of a CS degree shouldn't also involve basic chemeng and bioeng.

Folk.computer (https://folk.computer) is an open source version of DL-like system, and even though the code uses TCL it's pretty easy to reimplement any bits you see in the DynamicLand archives (I've done this). For example, the code in the video here https://dynamicland.org/archive/2022/Knobs can be 1-1 translated into TCL and it works the same.

If you really wanted to play around with similar ideas it doesn't take a needing to do a full reimplemention of the reactive engine.

I think you and the GP are probably talking about different scale orders of magnitude.

Hi Don, do you know if this ever happened (I think it's from the 2007 email - but tough to say for sure given above formatting)?

> (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to do Robot Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of funding problems but we now have funding and are really going to do it this year. Want to help design and build it?)

From a purely humanity-improving perspective this lack of dissemination is quite sad.

> No one writes it down because it sort of feels wrong to claim second-hand knowledge of unknown origin as your own, or to even lead people to assume as much.

Wouldn't it be possible to publish informally (say in a blog post) while fully disclaiming first-authorship or invention?

I love histogram sliders! I think they were originally developed by Chris Ahlberg in Ben Shneiderman's group, and were later commercialized in Spotfire (I have yet to see them in any other infoviz system except Panopticon - https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=965). Jeff Heer did some work a few decades to generalize into 'scented widget' (http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/scented-widgets). With systems like DuckDB it's now even easier to implement them into various visual analytic systems.

Pushing atoms around by mechanical means only seems plausible if you've never really studied molecular chemistry - see the Drexler/Smalley debate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate...

What's the current state of the art in terms of being able to regrow teeth/regenerate alveolar bone?

This quote is great! Where is it from?