kjander79

I just wish many of the software projects the code in the book depends on had been maintained. Portable Aserve and the Shoutcast server are two examples that come to mind off the top of my head, and of course the Lisp in a Box environment is long gone, and the replacements, like Portacle, are also getting left behind.

It's just an event loop, watching for status changes in a memory location. Talking to the hardware just occurs when the keyboard changes the values in memory.

The iMuse system really is remarkable. Games like X-Wing took great advantage of the features, when a Star Destroyer jumps into the game the music would seamlessly transition to the imperial March and it felt just like being in the movies. I don't think any modern system even tries to do those seamless transitions from one music piece to another.

One thing I wonder about .. he mentions CD-audio (Redbook?) as being one capability of the system. But the CD-Audio games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter were much more limited in that sense. You'd literally just hear the music switch to the new track. And the Force Unleashed, the last game that used iMuse, wasn't particularly remarkable if memory serves. I wonder if that was a limitation they just couldn't quite make as seamless?

I figure today you could do it, with a "virtual MIDI" system using MP3 audio of individual instrument sounds ..

Edited to add: that last sentence is essential what a DAW provides.

I really enjoyed having the kids introduce it

This is the Logic Theorist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist

I love Simon's anecdote of using his wife and children as the stack as he developed IPS.

This eventually was replaced by GPS, which has a good description in Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Programming, here: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

This really is a beautiful book, applicable to breaking down problems into manageable parts, whatever language you are using. Highly recommend.

Actually that's an interesting point, since the images are already in use in the article this one is responding to. It seems likely.

but how much actual understanding does it have?

That's always the question, isn't it? The article does a pretty convincing job of showing that at least in the given examples, it has pretty good "understanding" of what's taking place in the scenes and what makes them remarkable to people, and 7 years for comparison is going back a long ways, just the last 2 or 3 years has been where much of the most interesting progress has revealed itself.

Image segmentation, object detection and tracking, are all on display already here.

I'm editing this because I'm wrong but leaving original comment below.

On second thought, this research wouldn't be looking at genes that would be highly variable among human populations, that DNA tests would profile to identify individuals, but on genes highly conserved among the human genome, where 4303 changed genes would be a significant amount. I was ranting about the wrong thing.

Original comment: Point taken. Speciation is certainly messy.

4303 statistically significant coding genes is just essentially "a good start" when it comes to identify what, if any, Neanderthal inheritance modern humans might have, compared to a potential "4% of genes DNA tests bother profiling, which now could have still come from some undetermined modern human population, that just so happened to have the same alleles as Neanderthals, including non-coding genes that we couldn't pinpoint effects anyways".

I think that would explain the ambiguity in the articles about actual effects of these identified genes, that's for the follow-up research.

Sounds to me they are saying this is a significant reduction in the Neanderthal genes that survive today, down to 4303 that can't be attributed to other human variants. This would make more sense to me, as the usual statement of up to 4% of a person's genes would be enough to create a unique species, wouldn't it?

In theory I agree, but in practice...

The exploit given here works on any device with the given driver, regardless of OS. Android is just the primary example since it is the 800lb gorilla.

And as the article mentions, just 2 hardware stacks make up nearly the whole ecosystem.

This write up highlights a depressing fact we all know: the mobile security situation is bleak, to the point of being untenable.

I checked my own device, and despite owning it just about a year, security updates have likely already stopped (although the manufacturer website hasn't exactly confirmed that, just yet) and even if the security updates were still coming, the gap between when they are released and then reach the devices are measured in months, not days, making these exploits worse than zero-days. I have seen no movement in correcting these issues from any of the manufacturers.

You too can check for yourself at source.android.com/security/bulletin

Chaotic systems, at least, were not known to Einstein. They weren't described until after his death, from Lorenz' computer simulations. Earlier hints of the theory were there, but no one took them seriously. Ian Malcolm, though, is a solid authority.

Lisp is the Planet Express Ship...

"Tubes!? You're older than you said!"

One thing to note: The reason why SICP uses Scheme is not that the resulting programs are simpler. But instead, the mental model of what is happening under the hood is simpler, and easy to refine as you go along. This makes it possible to come to the end of the class, ready to create your own Scheme interpreter. I don't think that's possible with any of the alternatives, like Python.

I am sure this result was rare, of course, even when it was the introductory at MIT. And as you point out, Racket has changed a lot also. I think it has been some years that Racket stopped calling itself Scheme, feeling the changes they have made have deviated too far.

The chapters describing the simplification performed by Maxima requires some basic calculus understanding, such as differentiation and integration. But the focus is on the programming techniques, not on math, so it doesn't get too deep. It's more important to think logically, rather than having a deep or broad mathematical background.

Awesome resources, thank you!

I have to ask, how far along is this project? Is it good enough to run all of the examples in the books? I have run into the issue where the provided compiled version of scmutils from GJS' website doesn't run on recent versions of MIT Scheme (version 11 and up) and there's not much info on compiling it yourself.

At the risk of this comment being equivalent to many other "this doesn't belong on HN" comments:

This is almost to the level of doxxing. Please consider removing, or at least changing the headline (nothing intrinsically wrong with highlighting comments from an interesting account).

I'm reminded of MenuetOS http://menuetos.net/

Can someone explain to me why the brickwork in the picture in this example is just separated columns, using the cap to hold them together, rather than interlocking the bricks? I'm sure that's not the reason the structure collapsed, but once there's movement in the wall, it seems like that would contribute to loss of cohesion.

Thank you for pointing me to these.

On gog.com, remakes and updates come out pretty regularly. The quality varies wildly. But there's definitely an enthusiastic market for them.

This does use the Alliance ships, which are slightly more tuned towards multiplayer than the original Tie Fighter models. Specifically, shielded fighters suffer a bit.

Editing to add, I just saw your user name, and at first assumed you created it just to reply here.

Reproduction is likely to always be an issue with psychedelics research, since people's responses are so variable. Any research would need to have unethically large numbers of subjects. Perhaps legalisation would change that, but the legalisation will always be dicey without reliable research. An ouroboros of an issue.

Shamelessly replying to my own comment, there's MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. I don't see VR support mentioned.

My first response is, I don't know. But I guess it depends on what you consider the current MechWarrior game. I know of MechWarrior online, which I don't believe does, but I suspect there's a newer MechWarrior game out, or coming soon. There's also a newer strategy BattleTech game which I doubt would benefit from VR.

If anyone on here has built a flight simulator rig, I'd love to hear about it.

I would think a cockpit VR experience would be much superior to a FP one.

This conversion has VR support as well, so you should get that same immersion, with the stronger gameplay provided by the Alliance game engine. I haven't played Squadrons myself.