lrc

> If you use ATMs...

Guilty as charged. Before my bank had an ATM, I organized my time differently, but I survived.

As for dignity, it's not versus "a job that can be more efficiently done by automation", it's versus "being unable to find a job."

Forget the sandwich clerk; schoolteachers are found somewhere along this trajectory.

I would answer almost all of the questions in your first paragraph "yes." I agree with all of your ideas in paragraph 2, so I think there is much we agree on, despite that.

I think it is in society's interest to arrange for there to be a number of job-vacancies of the Panera-kid-type available, even if that is not the sandwich-delivery mechanism of minimum cost. In principle, we could do better, but I am skeptical that it will happen.

There is a difference between digging a ditch and working on a rockpile. One has dignity--it is useful work one is paid for; the other is a punishment.

I don't, in fact, think it's wise to automate the people behind sandwich counters out of a job; it doesn't follow from that that I would prefer a pneumatic tube to my computer monitor.

I acknowledged that the benefits you cited were real, by using the word "real." I assure you I'm not some kind of paperclip-AI-zealot when it comes to employing people for tasks that could be automated.

I wonder if there is any level of peristent unemployment--25%, say? at which you would prefer to halt the growth of the kind of automation which is drying up the job pool? Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind sandwich counters? Enjoy the bread selection.

The teenager has a job, which is a small but positive increment in the health of your community. For that, I would be willing to endure the (real) risks you mention.

In a weird coincidence, I watched the movie "Network" (1976) with my wife & kids last night, none of whom had ever seen it. They liked it. It didn't even feel very dated, despite the fact that the televisions all looked like the one in this picture. The complexity of the dialogue in the movie astonished us. More was expected of the audience back then.

+1. Writing this on a trashcan 'pro. I love it; I'm happy with it, 32G and a little La Cie RAID, but I know I paid too much for it.

Last year's MS rollout opened my eyes. I ordered a Surface Pro 4 the next day. Was skeptical about the keyboard, but it's good enough to code with. Install Git, Atom or VS Code, IntelliJ and I'm off. It's now my go to device when I want to do a little light coding on vacation. The kids love to draw with the pen. It's a lot of fun.

Reminds me of the Andromeda Strain (except that didn't have any amino acids)

http://mymeaningfulmovies.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-andromeda...

I like it. There's definitely an opportunity here. `iostreams` is stateful and using it for formatted I/O has a faint masochistic flavor. `printf()` is fine, but recall that the compiler writers had to learn to critique the comparison between formatting characters and remaining arguments for a reason. What you want is to smack things together into an output pattern that's good enough. The leverage of callability is clearly a point in favor.

This made a big impression on me when I read it. I think it helped me. When I find myself yielding to a certain kind of programmer's temptation, I will mutter, "four-bit microcontroller..."

Only for a moment. An extensible claw would fly out, grab the untoasted bread from your hand and fling it into the garbage can, after a brief but unpredicatable interval.

True (oddly, the article uses the word "regurgitate" twice and left me wondering "whose nipples?")

This is the whole point of the movie the Great Escape. The allied prisoners know they won't be tortured since they're in a Luftwaffe camp and not a Gestapo one. After the escape, the ones who are recaptured are handed over to the Gestapo and are executed. Even in a 1963 film set in a Nazi POW camp, it was understood that there were rules. Sic transit.

And now it hits me, for the first time, shamefully: the sense that Urbit is Pynchonesque... it's often said of Pynchon that nostalgia for the 60s is the animating theme of most of his later work, and here it is made explicit: the chain Usenet -> Reddit -> YouTube. (Clearly, I think this is a good thing.)

Do I miss usenet? I have to say I only ever liked it from within emacs, with glowing characters on a black background. Seeing it on a web page, dark on light, is just not the same. Les neiges d'antan

Once upon a time, it was fun to see what you could learn about an IP address that you found in a weblog. Who bothers anymore?

Perhaps it is snowing, in a way that we are too sinful to perceive!

There are plenty of numbers. We could all have one, forever; or until we die, and then we can, like Charlemagne, will them to our children, who will factor them at leisure

I've spent a lot of time with SICP and with Clojure. The book changed my life, and I too considered working on "porting" the book, but there would be a considerable amount of friction. Clojure can do everything necesssary, but it's very unidiomatic to build data structures out of pairs in Clojure, and SICP spends a _lot_ of time implementing data structures with pairs. A reconsideration of SICP for the modern age would, I think, take vectors and maps and sets as given, and see what _additional_ magic could be built from there!

Just start with sequences. Lazy sequences, which are so helpful in the expert system database that's built in SICP, are already right there in Clojure without the complications of force and delay. My thought is you could do a lot more with the higher level examples, but a lot of the first half of the book would have to be rethought. (The functional implementation of Conway's Life in O'Reilly's "Clojure Programming" is as good as anything in the first third of SICP, for example; the example of accelerating series convergence from SICP seems less exciting today than it used to, at least to me.)

+1 for reminding me of Carlos: I love spy fiction

It is absolutely unimaginable that Chomsky might be uninvited from any conference for anything he has ever said (one piquant example: defense of the Khmer Rouge).

Let's face it: the window of conference political acceptability covers the point -infinity. We know the upper bound is finite, and shrinking.

I would say that if being part of a bombing campaign isn't an impediment to becoming a Distinguished Professor at UIC, then being part of a bombing campaign isn't enough to get him disinvited from StrangeLoop either, however many astonished tweets might have greeted his appearance on the program: becuase, in that case, it would have been easy for the organizers to separate his political thought from his educational thought. Of course that's speculation on my part.

I thought of eco-terrorism too. But then I thought of William Ayers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers

Thought experiment: is there any extremity of leftist (or progressive if you prefer) thinking (say, on a personal blog) that could conceivably get one disinvited to speak on a technical topic at a conference of this sort?

"Emerging languages, alternative databases...code-heavy." That's from StrangeLoop's 'About' page. The fact is, the talk would have worked, not the least because it's consistent with the conference's overall mission.

Folks looking for a polite argument with Curtis could have had one.

Clojure is underway: http://github.com/littlredcomputer/math

Thanks! I grew up with Scheme, but set lisp aside for years until Clojure came along to reboot my interest.

I love FP, but in order to learn to love it you have to get used to the idea that the language is going to be doing a few things that you might not like (collecting garbage, silently boxing things, not knowing how to convince the system to use the vector operations provided in hardware). With Fortran/C, it's easy to see how assembly language gets produced. I like Haskell a lot, but while I know how C(++) gets to the iron I'm pretty vague on how Haskell does it. FP can still win, or approach parity, but it costs some trust

I'm working on a port to Clojure: https://github.com/littleredcomputer/math .

(The name is a little vague, I haven't decided what to call it; "scmutils" doesn't convey much).

Having it in Clojure means it could be integrated with lots of other things; I'm considering graphics, at some point, or some kind of integration with javascript.

I'm a daily reader of HN, but not much of a contributor (sadly): do you think this might be worth a Show HN when it was more mature?