metagame

Creative canvas painting. It's actually an incredibly deep (skill-wise) field.

They've tried a lot of "reimagining." It never works. No one wants Intel on mobile, despite Intel's mobile chips being absolutely great when they were actually releasing them, and no one wants a genuinely high-performance chip if it means they have to make alterations to how their software is written.

I have a lot of criticisms of Intel, but held back from reimagining isn't quite a great one.

Painting is serious labor as much as anything else, and requires skills and effort comparable to and sometimes exceeding programming.

Do you have a blog, by chance? Your writing style's really engaging.

Bit of trivia: The Bob Morris mentioned in this and many other Multics-related articles was the father of one of the people who made the implementation of the Lisp dialect this website runs on (and, of course, one of the founders of YC).

He later went on to do more UNIX-y things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer)

Multics was an elegant system and design kneecapped by a few ill-advised decisions and poor choice in contractors. It's worth exploring, if only for a little while.

This assumes that we're "truly" sentient, and on top of that, that we have actual free will. Both seem unlikely if things are actually simulated.

This isn't about trying to "raise him."

There's a difference between instilling your own moral principles upon someone and actually helping them.

Their only idea for solving the problem, in retrospect, is to remove from his life the only thing he cared about!

You can help someone in more ways than just "raising" them, and in this case the way to have actually helped him would have been to display enough understanding to gain his respect, and then guide him gently into a safer course.

Even in an article that's published in a paper with fact-checkers and standards, his parents still refuse to acknowledge RollerCoaster Tycoon as anything other than a violent video game! It's a game about building a theme park! It is blatantly clear that even the mildest effort to understand him or his activities wasn't taken, and that they refuse to do so even with the benefit of hindsight.

You can stand on a hill and grandstand to your child as much as you want, but if you don't put in the slightest effort to understand them it's your fault when they end up doing something that hurts them.

They didn't help their son while he was alive, and blamed the bad outcomes of his life on the single object that seemed to bring him joy. They even turned him away when he came home for help, according to the article.

They allowed their child to degenerate in front of them and it wasn't because of the computer; it was because they didn't do anything for him.

Empathy should be encouraged but in this case the mindset of the parents contributed to their son's suicide, and empathy should be had for the child instead of the parents.

Rest in peace. Roger Hui deserves a black bar just about as much as anyone.

A (likely incomplete) list of his talks can be found here; if you have the time, you should watch at least some of them: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Roger_Hui

He dedicated a substantial portion of his life to the design and implementation of two of the last truly-unique languages in our field.

We all owe him a degree of debt. If you use numpy, for example, you're actually closer to the heritage of his work than you might imagine; about two steps removed. Start from the top of this thread and work your way down (I am sorry for the source of the link, but none of the frontends cover threads this long and with this many authors):

https://twitter.com/teoliphant/status/1115283666995941377

Probably skeptic, because they lived elsewhere, got an education for relatively inexpensive or free, and all they see is the difference in the value of currency.

Or probably skeptic, because they're planning on moving to a good state.

Or most probably, they don't care. They're moving countries, they probably don't have the most nationalistic bent to them.

I don't hate the United States, I'm just not being unrealistic about how beneficial it's been for me.

Why wouldn't a country mean little to someone, even if it is a democracy? I live in the United States, and any theoretical vote I give is completely worthless unless I would move to Maine, and even then it's still not worth much. I move out of the United States, my vote is still worthless. I get citizenship elsewhere, my vote might have a chance at value.

The United States doesn't actually do much for its citizens; it's the states that do things for citizens, and if you're not in a good state, you get no real value from the United States or any part of your country. It wasn't always this way, but it's been this way for as long as I've been alive.

Sentiment is overrated and irrational if the country's never given you anything, and the United States just doesn't give anything to a substantial volume of its citizens.

A common argument is that the United States gives the right to free speech, or to guns, or to varying abstract concepts, but it would also give this even if everyone stopped paying their taxes and the United States was unable to enforce anything.

I'm a big fan of taxation, and of most laws. The US, though, really doesn't do anything with it that has ever benefit me.

The poster really does seem like, if anything, she cares too much for the country.

If you want a Lispier robot programming game, check out GNU Robots. You use the dialect of Scheme that most GNU tools are extensible with, so you'll get something out of it!

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnurobots/

The human race isn't in danger, though. The population's actually going up year after year. There are some countries that aren't having enough kids to stay at their peak population without allowing immigration, which may be the actual cause of your concern, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing; encourage immigration, and the problem's solved.

«For the crime of breaking numerous state and city laws»

«Except, none of those are crimes.»

Breaking the law is the textbook definition of a crime, isn't it?

This is a very poorly written article. To save you some time:

Yes, they're getting rid of Electron. No, they aren't going native. Yes, they're doing what Qt and Gtk+ and Microsoft have already been doing for years and just using the toolkit's built-in ability to embed a web browser into a native frame. Yes, this is pretty much just what they were doing during XP but with a more bloated web browser.

I hope you enjoy it! I got a lot from checking it out.

In throwawaylinux's defense, they've been using the account consistently for three months, and have a sizeable portion of karma (roughly (* 3 x) my own current 222, and (* 40 x) my own two days spent here). I believe, if I'm not mistaken, enough to use every point-based tool on the site (flagging, downvotes, colorbar). It's perhaps less than fair to wipe away a person who seems to be giving a good-faith effort like that, even if they're ultimately wrong about something.

I completely agree with everything else you said, though.

K&R is still an example of computer science education. Programming languages are a subset of computer science, it's a book that tries to teach you a language. There's a substantial body of evidence in linguistics research that input is just as important if not more than output when it comes to learning a natural language; programming languages are no different.

I edited my comment pretty significantly to clarify; you might want to give it another look. Putting this comment here to avoid the "Wow, what an irrelevant comment" problem. You might find your comment, while a decent literal reading of my initial comment, might not hold up to the new one.

I will point out, though, that I never said anything along the lines of "was not widely known [...] in computer science." What an absurd thing to accuse a comment of saying! I do insist that it wasn't widely used, though, and TAOCP, a series that's infamous for not actually being read often, isn't a great example of it being widely used, even if TAOCP did fit the criteria (which in my updated comment above, I contest).

Yes, I know. That's why I pointed out that zipped HTML was available, but that's not quite a native web copy! Especially given how the zipped HTML in the epub format is usually presented (a million tiny HTML files in a single directory).

TAOCP uses a significantly different methodology of teaching, and it's also very explicitly aimed at a significantly different market of programmer and in a significantly different area of endeavor within computer science.

It's a great work (I'd be lying if I'd said I'd poured into the entirety of it extensively, but I've spent weeks on certain portions, like the MMIX fascicle and Sorting and Searching), but PAIP has a significantly better claim at "kickstarting" the "read code instead of write it" trend, because in TAOCP the code doesn't take center stage, and it was never the point for it to (hence the creation of MIX & MMIX).

It is a civil issue rather than a criminal one, albeit still violation of law, which is why I used "crime" in the same way that the US government calls piracy and copyright infringement a crime despite it generally being a civil offense.

The Open Source Initiative coined the term to begin with. Using it incorrectly is harmful, and is how we've ended up with "literally" meaning "figuratively" in modern English. By insisting on the correct definition, I'm trying to prevent the same from happening to open source. It's pretty offensive to act like it's not a big deal to use something so essential to computing freedom in a cavalier way to intentionally lessen freedom.

Computer science, historically, has been a field filled with books that encourage you to write code while not particularly having you read much of it. K&R is a good example of this. PAIP went against this notion, and has you spend much of the book reading code.

Yes, this is taking the way learning is done in almost every case and field and applying it to programming. No, it still hasn't really caught on universally in computer science.

It by definition is not open source. The term has a definition. This breaks literally the first rule.

https://opensource.org/osd

The argument against it, presumably, is that "If you try and make us pay for committing crime, you won't get access to our toys anymore" is very strange and seems illegal, since the ability to play with toys should not stop anyone from reporting violations of the law.

But at the same time, it's definitely legal, for better or for worse, as is pretty much any stunt you pull with the joke that is US IP law.

It is legal, yes. That license is awful and proprietary (3.3), but it's most definitely legal.

I'm talking about the code. Models are distributed separately.

Computer-generated artifacts are non-copyrightable. This is not the problem. (That said, as the law is written, no binary should be, but we already threw that baby out with the bathwater.)

The problem is that the software is not free software, but encourages you to stop using its free predecessors and competition sneakily.

I'm aware of what he said on it, and I don't disagree with what he said, but you're misrepresenting him by leaving the preceding two lines out.

«As an advanced Lisp text, PAIP stands up very well. There are still very few other places to get a thorough treatment of efficiency issues, Lisp design issues, and uses of macros and compilers. (For macros, Paul Graham's books have done an especially excellent job.)

As an AI programming text, PAIP does well. The only real competing text to emerge recently is Forbus and de Kleer, and they have a more limited (and thus more focused and integrated) approach, concentrating on inference systems. (The Charniak, Riesbeck, and McDermott book is also still worth looking at.) One change over the last six years is that AI programming has begun to look more like "regular" programming, because (a) AI programs, like "regular" programs, are increasingly concerned with large data bases, and (b) "regular" programmers have begun to address things such as searching the internet and recognizing handwriting and speech. An AI programming text today would have to cover data base interfaces, http and other network protocols, threading, graphical interfaces, and other issues.»

While yes, it aged poorly as an AI text, and excellently as a Lisp & AI programming text, it's a better book than AI:AMA, even if ignoring that it's based around a better language.