rus20376

This place sounds like an adult daycare.

Has there been a business started based on work done there? Publishable research results? (that second one is actually a pretty low bar, and yet if there is something it is not easily discoverable)

PG has had a license to print visas. Fund a company whose founders are from outside the US and they basically get an automatic “genius” visa. This has not gone unnoticed by wealthy parents who, via the usual quid pro quo agreements have had stunning success in getting their kid’s/nephew’s/cousin’s roommate accepted into YC. No qualifications other than cutting a check required.

The copying and pasting of AI output into a chat has previously been referred to as a “slop grenade”. That’s a good phrase for it!

I came looking for this comment, as it was difficult for me to tell from the article what was actually wrong with this person. I am not sure why it’s being downvoted, then again I find claims of helplessness frustrating without a lengthy precise list of what has actually been attempted to resolve the issue. If a colleague claimed helplessness with a code bug I would ask what attempts had been made to fix the issue. Why would serious life issues be treated differently? If the colleague with a bug just started crying and vaguely claiming to have tried as much as they could I have to say I would not be impressed.

Forget about that, I just learned there’s a salt mine under Detroit!

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with EHR systems will know that nobody wants to build their own. I once worked for a large hospital system that abandoned a decades old institutionally built and maintained system for Epic. The choice was celebrated by almost everyone who worked there.

The value is in the “system” itself. The tooling, plugins, knowledge that your staff has the familiarity and skills so as to not require retraining, the interoperability of data with other systems and vendors.

The idea that AI is going to enable a variety of bespoke competitors is truly laughable!

The message overall doesn’t seem especially controversial. I am personally disappointed on what seems to be a de-emphasizing of healthful plant based sources of protein such as beans and legumes, although nuts do seem to be noted more prominently.

If the message is “eat plenty of protein and fiber” beans and legumes are a great food that has both.

The article, which you may not have read, specifically calls out the use of JBang[1]for this purpose.

[1] https://www.jbang.dev/

This is fun to read, but from my personal perspective it all seems quite depressing. About half way through this list of stuff I start to think existentially: would I be happy if my life was constructed like the author’s? I like much of the same sort of stuff after all. But at some point I got bored with reading yet another cool random book or fiddling with an interpreter for a little toy language.

I wonder, does the author really find deep life satisfaction in all this? Presumably the answer is yes, but that doesn’t match my intuition which intrigues me somewhat. Is the satisfaction gained, at least in part, from the performance of making this sort of list and getting external approval from HN, conference audiences, etc? Is the production of this list and the stated desire to speak at conferences a statement that all the journaled activity is not enough, that it cannot be done privately? That if done privately, anonymously, it really is just not that great a way to live your life?

I am happy that I don’t live alone diving so deep into various hobbies that I ultimately start hitting the firmament underneath. What my life would look like had I not gotten married and had children is not so hard to imagine when I read these sorts of blogs, and I smugly think I am better off.

> AI on the other hand has the potential to put literally millions of individuals out of work. At a minimum, it is already augmenting the value of highly-skilled intellectual

This has been true since, say, 1955.

> This is the final capitalism cheat code. A worker who does not sleep or take time off.

That’s the hope that is driving the current AI Bubble. It has neither ever been true nor will be true with the current state of the art in AI. This realization is what is deflating the bubble.

Ada is sometimes taught as part of a survey course in Programming Languages. That’s how I learned a bit about it.

I wish the article had more details on the ISP side of the connection!

The answer seems to be given indirectly: they offered him interview prep, fast tracked his early career stages, and paid him a ton of money. No deep philosophical torment, they offered the kid a really good job.

Living in a permanent structure where you can afford isn't as good as living in a gross RV on a street someplace and fruitlessly demanding the government build you a house?

apparently the other option, as seen in the comments, is that the government bulldoze the houses on that same street to build a highly dense row of flophouses

like I said elsewhere, just move where you can afford. wherever that is, it's probably a few decades away from being some future generation's dream home

> pay a developer to build them a house

I seriously doubt anyone living in an RV has a plot of land in Palo Alto that they are forbidden to develop.

Is it just boiled down to the sentiment that you want to "stick to the rich!" by forcing the government to bulldoze their communities?

I know I risk getting down voted to oblivion, but I truly do not understand this sentiment. There are plenty of places I cannot afford to live, so I live somewhere I can afford. Every time I hear about a "housing crisis" all I see are people demanding government mandated development in some fancy place (Manhattan! San Francisco!) that is out of touch price wise for almost every human being on Earth.

This idea that people are demanding Palo Alto or some other high end desirable community to build them a place to live makes no sense. I understand some community they can afford like Fresno or somewhere may be less desirable, i.e. fewer millionaires as your neighbors, but if that's what you can afford then that's where you go, right?

If someone wants to explain why a high end and highly sought after community needs to use the power of the government to force development for anybody at all please do let me know. Explain it like I am five. Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option, seeing as that is what seemingly everyone else so far in human history has done. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Palo Alto itself was just some undesirable hayfields. Every place you don't want to live is just a few decades away from being someone else's coveted dream home.

100% correct!

Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl once said of Lisp syntax "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."[1]

I would argue that Python is about the same, but without the nail clippings. Just plain oatmeal.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.clos/c/edcyFOBLMeo/m/M...

Yes, absolutely!

At one point it made sense for everyone to learn Perl because it was the de facto scripting language for server side components of the, then brand new, World Wide Web. Nowadays backend software development and other Perl niches like shell scripting are crowded with competitors. But that does not invalidate Perl in the least! Indeed, Perl is still the best "power tool" available to a systems programmer, system administrator, or anyone working in the realm of "shell scripts".

Learn Perl because it is the most powerful way to write scripts on Linux (or any other Unix like operating system).

You misunderstand. The body does not naturally hallucinate. To get it to do so requires overriding (forcing) the normal functions against their usual behavior with chemicals.

More recent than this article have been failed clinical trials of psychedelics. Turns out forcing people chemically into a hallucinatory state isn’t that effective. To the point of this older article it seems that existing therapies are probably not the effective either.

So the search should be for therapies that surpass existing ones.

> Phish doesn’t make money by selling music. They make money by selling live music

Let’s be intellectually honest here, probably the majority of tickets are sold to people who are at best casual fans of the music but are seeking a temporary autonomous zone in which to consume drugs. That’s the real product. I make no moral judgment here about that, but any discussion of this band without any serious mention of the drug culture is inherently dishonest.

Personally, I started with a few subjects that I knew would sustain my interest, that I would not get bored with, and that I felt I could honestly make a real contribution to. I then tried to connect them all together!

At first the connections looked very forced and unlikely to yield anything more than a handful of curiosities. I gave myself a time limit to try out explorations to test some ideas, full aware that I may need to backtrack and start again in a new direction.

After some searching around indeed the connections were there in a way that was unexpected and gave way to research that led to my dissertation, another students dissertation which continued work in that area, and a good number of papers.

Maybe the short summary is: give yourself a “writing prompt” of given these things I like and want to research how might they be connected and what do those connections mean?

I am always disappointed in these articles that fail to mention that other forms of AI such as logic programming/intelligent search easily solve problems like the “Einstein” one. Similarly, it is not difficult for genetic programming methods to discover code which reliably multiplies numbers.

I am uncertain if this is a lack of understanding by the authors of these articles or just a bias to keep the audience’s attention on the shiny hyped up LLM business.

It has been a very long time since I interacted with a webring. But my memory is that the webring link on a page in the webring should take you automatically to another page, not to some main index page which is what seems to happen here. Is this the correct behavior and I am just misremembering?

After a period of extreme burnout I started to explore different meditative techniques and, as part of that exploration, read the Bhagavad-gita.

Greatly paraphrashing for the sake of brevity, but the idea that has guided me since then is that we cannot help but take some action or perform some work. At the very least we need to eat, but to eat we need to get some food and cook it. We need to get shelter from the elements. You know all the basic stuff. Ok, so let's say we have a job in order to satisfy just the basic requirements to stay alive. Do we work just for that reason alone? No! Doing so traps us into this vicious materialistic cycle. A dreary life of working and paying bills and buying things that please our senses but are ultimately unsatisfying.

So, we need to work, but working for even the barest of material benefit is a trap so what to do? The answer is work with detachment. Work because you know you have to and you like what you do, but that's it. Break the connection to the material outcomes of work. Your work needs to transcend materialistic concerns.

If you are so inclined religiously you work for the satisfaction of God, work is itself an offering. Your work transcends, then, the materialistic trap.

If you are more atheistic then perhaps take the attitude that human society as a greater good needs as many of us to Do The Right Thing. Scientific studies show we are social creatures and the good positive contributions we make invariably help others, even if we don't see it. Even if we're just installing POS software at a chain restaurant along a busy freeway. Even such a mundane endeavor is a glorious celebration of simply Being!

CWEB spawned several other Literate Programming systems, the main differences being in programming languages supported as well as how the documentation was formatted.

My favorite is nuweb https://nuweb.sourceforge.net/ which allows for LP in virtually any language and provides documentation in LaTeX. The main trade off being that with wide language support the code sections are as-is, without special formatting. Since mostly people write the code sections to their own tastes already this is not a significant problem.