spindle

For people reading Russell: it's important to know in advance that he's funny! I've known an expert (specifically, on Plato) disparage Russell's history until I showed him which of his sentences were jokes, and then they came around to my view that his history is okay (although very condensed).

I totally agree, and that's how, for example, the rich Oxford and Cambridge colleges are funded. I think it might be a big ask these days, though, especially with returns on investments relatively low. Sadly.

Smalltalk's ideas about OOP are very different from more mainsteam languages. IMO they're much better, but YMMV

I love the film sims when I'm feeling arty, but most of them are so far away from realistic colours that I've ended up almost always using the plain one (Provia) unless I'm photographing someone who's monochrome. (A lot of my best friends happen to be monochrome, and then I can use film sims to change the colours of the background.)

For my purposes (recording memories plus just a tad of artiness), my phone camera is at least as good as my Fujifilm X series big camera (and actually probably better), except for zooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. That is a very big exception. There are so many great photos I could never have got with my phone because the subject was too far away.

Another positive is that you can get a big camera that's virtually indestructable, unlike any phone (but then you probably had the phone anyway).

Also, yes, I find getting the photos off the camera does add friction to the workflow.

> I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? ... Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? ...

> I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this

There are two very separate issues. Some people are upset and mad (so good question, and I bet you get some good answers). Other people, including me, are not at all upset or mad BUT we think it's extremely interesting. And important.

That's true of (commercial) news outlets. It doesn't apply to "everything you read". There are many ways to check facts that don't rely on news outlets, at least for people who have time and resources.

Yes! You're the first person I've heard say that and I'm sure you're right.

Then there will be some market for better-trained LLMs, which it will still be possible to make using curated data sets, but that will be expensive, and product differentiation will be messy. We're in for quite a ride. I can't predict the outcome. Maybe there is no stable outcome.

By far my favourite book on consciousness is "The View From Nowhere" by Thomas Nagel. It doesn't mention AI but you can make the connections yourself.

David Chalmers has a recent book and a bunch of papers on AI and consciousness. I haven't read the book or much of his other recent stuff, but he is super smart, and also (!) well respected by other philosophers. See https://consc.net/

I had a job in IT at the University of Cambridge. I moved to Sydney for personal reasons and worked in a government policy job for a few months, and then applied for an IT job at the University of Sydney that was similar to the one I'd had at Cambridge. I wasn't even shortlisted. At around the same time, I was offered me a job as what Americas call an adjunct professor in philosophy, despite having no relevant qualifications. I took that, and it was fun, so I became a philosopher. If there's a moral to this story (and there is!) it's that careers are unpredictable.

Interesting - thank you!

If you like tapping, let me introduce you to Michael Manring:

https://y.com.sb/watch?v=js93qxDlIzg

To answer your question directly, Haskell is too hard for me :-( I'm a pretty crap programmer - I was a professional back when you didn't have to be GOOD at it, you just had to be able to do it!

More interestingly, I wonder whether Haskell has, or lacks, the careful choice of orthogonal features that I love in a language.

I first came across lisp in the 80s, when I briefly worked in AI.

Lisp taught me (this is the motivational bit for you) the power of a few well thought out orthogonal abstractions. Almost all other languages seem to me to be a mixture of leaky, non-orthogonal abstractions.

I've always loved lisp, but since I discovered Smalltalk and Self and Io (a few years later) I've loved those languages even more than Lisp.

So I've found it hard to go back to Lisp.

But actually Lisp is much better than my favourite languages, because there are no implementations of my favourite languages that are really well tied into the unix ecosystem (and the ones that come closest are hobby projects that are full of compiler bugs). So if a paternalistic god would like to tie me down and force me to go back to Lisp, that would probably be a good thing. I would definitely choose Scheme - possibly guile for the minimalism and because Andy Wingo's blog makes my head spin, but probably Racket.

Great topic, but I'm disappointed by the Wikipedia article. It strikes me as a bit hagiographic. I could be wrong. Can anyone suggest anything more critical on this topic (in any sense of "critical")?

By the way, I'm not the person who submitted this link and I don't know why they submitted it.

WOW

(and I searched for more and found https://andythomas.com.au/pages/bird-sounds)

I have huge respect for those people and I hope you're right.

> I think it's 5-10 years out from widespread adoption

To quote Andy Warhol, "They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

I don't mean you personally! I mean that it's not clear how time is going to fix Nix's documentation.

My guess is that at some point a big company will either clone or copy NixOS and enforce some discipline on the documentation. At that point it'll take over the world.

I don't think it's inevitable, because governments notice what large financial companies do. It might be aaaaaalmost inevitable, depending on who's got the best lobbyists. Let's hope not.

I suppose "Why?" is a rhetorical question. If you think they should get fined again, I agree with you.

k2pdfopt is an alternative with a billion useful options:

https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Awesome.

I do a similar thing with kmonad, which works on Linux, Windows and MacOS.

https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

yes

Carrying all that weight helps keep me fit.

changelog:

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/main/changelog.md

Another great short movie by Steve Cutts is Man:

https://y.com.sb/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU

The clocks in my schools would take 80 minutes to complete each hour. No wait. Maybe it only seemed like that.