mtraven

"You know about death...that it's just a change, not an end." – The Log Lady

I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist

I don't like working on killing machines either. But we shouldn't forget that the internet and basically all of computation originated out of defense research. That might be good or bad, but arguably the field was more innovative when that was the funding source than it is today.

“All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT

Seriously, WTF?

The whole point of Emacs is that it is a radically customizable platform, and if you don't like the behavior of some feature you can modify it yourself with a few lines of Lisp. Forking the whole project over a change to one obscure feature makes zero sense.

Status: Emacs user since it was implemented as TECO macros (1981 or so), but I don't use registers.

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: possible
  Technologies: Clojure, Java, SQL, Python, R, Dataviz, Typescript, Spark...
  Résumé/CV: https://hyperphor.com/mike-travers-resume.html
  Email: mt@hyperphor.com

Everything about me: http://hyperphor.com

I founded the original unix-haters list that the book is based off of.

What I say these days: Unix went from the worst operating system around, to the best, without getting appreciably better.

Not entirely true. But the Unix model of computation has obviously won. The Lisp Machine model, well, nobody even understands what that means any more.

Nice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature.

I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.

No advertisements, just reviews of things they thought were good.

That's a much better name actually.

Sad news. I had the honor of participating in a workshop he organized on Inconsistency Robustness in 2011, that was an interesting gathering.

https://www.amazon.com/Inconsistency-Robustness-Studies-Logi...

Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 (from 1991, and a response to the revival of connectionism that happened in the late 80s).

I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now.

Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be.

For more of Minsky's thoughts on human intelligence, here's a recent book that collected some of his writings on education: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin... (disclaimer: I wrote the introduction).

Don't think that's quite right, TOPS-20 was actually a fork of the Tenex code and so was pretty similar. Not sure what the relationship with TOPS-10 was.

Not really, I was more interested in hacking than coursework, so that's what I did. But I dropped back in some years later when the Media Lab started up, finished up my BS and got a couple of grad degrees.

I may be the only one here old enough to have worked on Tenex... around 1978 or so, I dropped out of MIT and went to work at BBN and did some extensions to Tenex / TOPS-20, including as I remember some device drivers for the IBM-style tape drives that were still in use.

Really nice work, especially for someone pretty new to development!

http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/

Carl Sagan: Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? ... I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent.

Spurious comparisons to Nazis are a favorite tactic of his -- he famously compared Obama to Hitler because they both had enthusiastic crowds for their speeches. It's a mystery to me why anybody takes this man seriously.

One difference in philosophy of Lisp and Haskell is that the latter makes liberal use of many tiny functions that do one single task. This is known as composability, or the UNIX philosophy.

Have you ever looked at a Unix man page?

And while Common Lisp has some functions that might be swiss army knives of functionality, that is not "the philosophy of Lisp", it's a particular style. Clojure and Scheme are just as much Lisp as CL, and as other people have noted, their style is very similar to Haskell.

And to nuke the Van Allen belts -- that one actually went forward: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/07/01/128170775/a...

I still have one of those, a hand-me-down from my father...was my first real camera.

Should include some mention of Richard Gabriel's "Habitability and Piecemeal Growth", a really good essay on this topic from almost 30 years ago... https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf

http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/

Mostly quiescent at this point, and mostly about politics and religion and other non-technical matters.

But since its been going for 17! years, there's enough thoughts on Lisp to interest hacker types http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/search?q=lisp

The page seems to have vanished in the last few hours. (Whups, now it's back).

I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days. I was attracted not by Negroponte but by the people he managed to attract: at the time, that included Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand, as well as some less famous but truly brilliant people from the arts (Ricky Leacock, Muriel Cooper) and sciences (Steve Benton, inventor of white-light holography). It was an exciting place, but there was a hollowness at the core and not just architecturally (the shiny new IM Pei building was mostly empty space, since filled in).

Negroponte himself has always been a politician, a hypester, and a sleaze. His one true innovation was in fundraising – he was able to get industries that weren՚t used to funding research (eg the newspapers) to pony up for industry consortia. This was, maybe, better than the usual DoD funding that kept the AI lab alive, but it came with constraints of its own, including trying to impose IP agreements on the graduate students that made it difficult to open-source software. And of course in later days (I was mercifully gone by then) the creative approach to fundraising ran into even more serious issues with Jeffrey Epstein.

I՚d say evaluations of the Media Lab as an institution should be done separately from evaluations of any particular program or researcher who may have passed through there, because while the institution has some fundamentally broken aspects, there has been a lot of good work done there.

Old news and not very insightful. For a deeper look, Fred Turner is the one to read: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo37...

This seems organized around the work of the radical psychiatrist RD Laing. I've admired some of writing in the past, but his theories of psychosis are considered nonsense these days. From the website:

“Legacy of R.D. Laing,” Michael Guy Thompson, on Madness Radio. Is psychosis a journey and a breakthrough to somewhere more authentic? Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing was a fierce critic of the mental health system, and saw madness as a rational adaptation to irrational family and social constraints. How are Laing’s provocative insights about politics and culture still relevant today?

Archive.org to the rescue https://web.archive.org/web/20190306154203/http://www.gnosis...

This hits the nail on the head. Alexander has a horror of power struggles and wants to believe they can all be rplaced with debate, but that simply doesn't work.

He addresses this somewhat meta-level issue in his posts on Conflict vs. Mistake: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

(and I try and tear it apart here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.h... )

I'm in general an admirer of Bateson (and Stewart Brand), but the Double Bind theory is crap and not taken seriously any more. Schizophrenia is an organic brain disease with genetic and probably other material causes; it's not caused by bad family interactions or confusions around type theory.

There hasn't been much written on the Lisp Machines that I know of. Alan Kay's History of Smalltalk might be a good place to start, the LispM owed a lot to earlier work done at PARC: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/