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jksmith

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Now that I'm out of the corporate tyranny and have my own company, I use lisp for everything. There's certain satisfaction in writing config files and persisting data directly in s-expressions. Any json requirements are triggered by exports to foreign systems.

I personally don't know anything about LispWorks except for the name. My pref for Franz is the commercial quality and the toolchain. If you have forgotten your graph fundamentals, Allegro Graph will make you want to get back into it. Very powerful tool for proofs and modeling the world.

Use python or whatever to build the llm, use lisp to explore and infer from the edges of what the llm has to offer. I don't do anything but lisp these days. Been waiting my whole career to be at this point. I'll never "write" a line of C# again. Just my taste and pref.

It was something like screen: array[1..80,1..25] of byte absolute $B800:0000; So, just use all the extended ascii to assign chars to cells to draw boxes for screens, buttons, tables, whatever. Instant update.

Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that.

But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.

1. Attack surface for agents is tantamount to a virus. 2. Any way for an agent to touch something is a potential compromised vector. 3. The mitigation is controlling the blast radius. 4. Sandboxing capability will have to be baked into architecture. 5. Mitigation includes measuring cost of blast radius. 6. All agent orchestration will likely require an andon cord.

Windows is a horse that is becoming less and less rideable. Be great to get this to build on ReactOS as just a hobby or side effort.

Sabotaging Bitcoin 7 months ago

You're not getting what I'm saying. Before this technology, the concept of property rights could not be defended, depending on the attacker. This tech allows that, even if it is just for one use case.

Sabotaging Bitcoin 7 months ago

Did you read the paper? There exists a technology that has purely enforceable property rights. What is that actually worth? I don't know.

Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean everything to humans. They literally determine whether not one is a slave (I am my own property). So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.

How many degrees of separation is this from adult regulation? Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit? That's a real thing in the US.

Government assumes zero expected trust reciprocation because they don't have to provide trust reciprocation and can do what they want, and government is comprised of co-opted humans.

Err on the side of sovereign freedom. Arguing about banning this or regulating that is all second principle stuff, and nanny states all strike me as the tail-end of civilization.

Exactly. So let's expand. A good reason to have AI everywhere is that it is capable of giving you a fair answer for just about anything. So ask it to do some data analytics stuff, like what Tableau or PowerBI can do. It can provide maybe 60% of the same functionality that most users require (provided data access, blah blah). Ask it do patient pre-triage. It will get you within 60% of a ballpark answer. Ask it to diagnose a car problem, or a crop rotation plan. Once again, it get's you in the ballpark. So what I'm suggesting is, the current state of the art has no Dunbar limitation and no bias toward any particular domain. It's like a 10k person team that doesn't care what it's solutioning (L1). Generalize the L1 to provide high assurance foundational functionality (workflows, custom workitems, some general way and tools to get from a strategic opinion to an executable fact).

People are still limited by Dunbar's number, so they need domain specific vocabularies to help them describe solutions to smaller groups. Maybe a direction exploitable by lisp at the L2 level.

But with an AI native L1, it doesn't care about the domain but would need to hold up the whole organization. Ada assurance. So it produces a 60% solution that has to be consumable by any particular L2. Multiple enterprise apps with a common base layer. No need to provide connectors or bridging apps for separate ERP, SCM, BI, HR vendors. Complete line of site, real time analytics and real time budget adjustments, eliminating need for budget cycles. It's kind of the Deus Ex God app. Deprecates need for separate Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, Tableau apps, separate vendor expenses, etc.

"An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age." Heavy opinion: Combined with AI, there is a story for unified app development. Something like Ada for the L1 and trust reciprocation, then something that creates app domain vocabularies for L2 development. That of course would be lisp.

I think the bias noose has tightened a lot over the years, so we don't avail ourselves to experiement like we used to - no chance for critical mass now that the profession has become so commoditized. It was wide open when I first started and devs were using all kinds of toolchains. The most money I've ever made selling applications (in today $) was from a TP (DOS) then later Delphi (Windows) codebase. Way back in 1991 I remember having a cigar with a client in SF and the dude wrote me a 70k check right there on the bar. What a huge thrill for me that was. Wild west of price and value discovery, which has totally disappeared.

One thing I do believe: the quality of software from MSFT has gone down, in part because their business model has gone from providing products to monetizing the users. Their products are just stagnant honeypots to collect data. This is opening a door for the small time dev to try new things, maybe with unpopular toolchains. I've got something that would be great for highlighting Ada's mission critical rep. Price and value discovery aren't dead (yet).

Forgive, but that smells of youth and recency bias. How do you judge lisp and k/qdb? Is C# the best language? Is Nim anachronistic? How would you write a desktop app using your exact same codebase on Win, Linux, Mac? That would be Free Pascal. Or maybe the desktop is now anachronistic, even though it still produces a richer UX.

Many languages have their great qualities. Whether or not they're outdated is a determination full of biases. Measure the language choice against resources and potential revenue. I'd be happy to write an app in Ada to proclaim its advantages as a sales pitch.

It failed because the C family is far superior - in mindshare and commodity dev experience. Ada may end up with a win to some degree if it plays to a narrative that all software needs to be mission-critical, no matter what the domain. Maybe in degrees, but that's actually true these days.

I did some consulting at a major US car manufacturer, and helped with a coding seminar, mostly in java. A fair chunk of those developers struggled with a fizzbuzz exercise. All I can say is this: don't leave your baby in the back seat of an autonomous car just to get out and recharge unless you have consequential trust reciprocation with the manufacturer tantamount to shutting them down if anything tragic happened. Of course, even that price is too low.

Comment generator: "Concerns about privacy invasions, adware, and forced updates in Windows are pushing users away. Many users are fed up with Microsoft "urging users to train their AI for free"."

1) Windows chatting behind your back causes distrust. And for good reason. 2) Yes, forced updates, but the consumers don't understand that they're just crofters in MSFT's world with all MSFT's products. MSFT will update as much as fits their needs to protect their property, not yours. 3) Re: adware. Part of your relationship with MSFT is that you are the commodity. It's a general internet business revenue model.

Microsoft Edit 1 year ago

Well, I don't have the rights to bundle anything with windows, nor would I want to. All you'd need is a thin player to reproduce a TUI screen if done in FPC, and it wouldn't be limited to Windows. All I'm suggesting is we tend to have some recency prejudice in our development, even when it costs more time/money than it should. I'm sure I've done the same over the years.

Microsoft Edit 1 year ago

That was the toolchain that my company used. Turbo vision was a Borland product, back when Philippe Khan was running the company. We were that ahead of the curve for "shrinkwrapped software development" at the time. That legacy, Delphi and FPC still maintain the standard for desktop, native dev, really for the last 30 years.

Microsoft Edit 1 year ago

My first company out of uni was a company that sold a tv advertising application written in dos. It did all the reports, put together spot advert packages, measuring reach and frequency, cost per point, etc. Used Neilsen ratings for data. The company at the time paid commissions along with salary to programmers. The app still lives on in windows, but I've been out of that game for decades. Written in TP for dos, then Delphi for windows.

Microsoft Edit 1 year ago

This is just a "because I wanted to" project. And I get that; done a lot of those myself just to understand what the hell was going on. But the rewrite of turbo vision into FPC and compiling to half a dozen targets has been around for 20 years. Turbo vision is probably the best text mode windowing library in existence. The cool fun kicks in when you can map a whole text screen to an array like so: var Screen: Array[1..80,1..25] Of Byte Absolute $B800; // or something like that as i recall

What turbo vision brought to the game was movable, (non) modal windows. Basically a lot of rewriting that array in a loop. Pretty snappy. I made a shitload of money with that library.

Awesome. Thanks for posting. I miss my modula-2 so much I wrote a bunch of editor macros for Lazarus that allows me to write slightly modula-2 like code in the editor.

One reason for this is when the big players move their business models over to taking your data and renting it back to you, there's no profit motive in pushing state-of-the-art ux when they just give their apps away to act like honeypots. MSFT gives their stuff away if you get on Azure. Atlassian charges 14 bucks a seat if you use their cloud. Lots of people who use this stuff have a laptop plus a bigger monitor their company bought to get their work done and it's like staring into an empty desert every day.

Yep, I'll have a major rich gui workstation client/server package with basic D365 functionality coming out in I hope about 8 months. Win, Linux, hopefully Mac, and browser. The browser version is definitely legacy gui compared to the native versions, just because it's browser.