stew-j

Does nothing well except generate heat.

Like the current GPUs running my application?

I wish you would directed that to my comment above. I would reassert that something like this, perhaps with the qualification of it being well engineered and efficient, is what I would like to run my graphics application on--a highly parallelizable algorithm but with need for a general ISA, recursion, and 64 bit floats--and the ability to get rid of CUDA and OpenCL. Given this, do you have any suggestions for something better? And why?

Look, you’re not wrong about anything

Nor you! I was just returning to thank you for posting your original idea to listen to this--I was only clarifying my thoughts before--Leary was human like any of us and I think a progressive, truth-seeking one. It is good to make up our own minds about history with direct sources like this. So, thanks for that and these new comments, which do make sense too.

I agree that hallucinogens have therapeutic promise. Leary (and John Lilly, and others) was forward thinking in this respect. But they can be dangerous if misused, with the potential to cause chronic psychotic disorders, for example. I am hesitant to mention Charles Manson, but what if the wrong influence is there when your mind is so wide open?

Leary didn't say, "Due to regressive laws in the U.S., which I respect but we need to change, I cannot pursue my double-blind clinical trials of LSD-25 for treatment of depression in America. I have therefore moved my research to Mexico." Leary was infamous for popularizing LSD, and was part of the problem for authority's long road to accept it. I know sometimes civil disobedience is in order, but we are not talking about sarsaparilla root here.

He said (paraphrased), "People over 40 want to put me behind bars for helping people discover the cosmic candles of the night sky on the Mexican beaches...the fair-haired elven princess in the tree house...the verdant fields... Why are the mean rational adults picking on me?" which are outside of the generally accepted principles for the treatment of mental illness, I would think. It's way beyond therapeutic use and into snake oil territory when advertised as an aphrodisiac and spiritual guide. Yoga and Buddhist meditation also have therapeutic benefits and very safe--why not use those until (and after) the clinical trials of LSD are completed?

Designs like this are what I like to see in my field of implicit modeling of geometry. We need processors with more general purpose ISA, recursion, and 64 bit floats due to the functional techniques we use. There's a fair amount of impedence mismatch for that using current triangle pushing GPUs, as sophisticated as they are getting. Thanks for posting!

Respectfully, it's about what I expected.

A mostly earnest man addressing the real problems of the military/industrial dystopia, the world's break from reality, with a bit of wisdom and a lot of snake oil. Cannabinoid snake oil ("It's an aphrodesiac, but not like in Reefer Madness, it's more cosmic than that."), lysergic acid diethylamide snake oil. Back to the Garden of Eden lures, generational politics (one's age determines one's potential for spiritual advancement?), dulcet, lyrical, hypnotic sales pitches. It was "don't trust anyone over 30" until they turned thirty, then their mind expanding experiments led to "don't trust anyone under thirty and grab a big pile of money, depriving the subsequent generations of their livelihood". What did they learn during their acid trips?

By Leary's measure, at the time of this recording, Jack Kerouac (a pioneer himself in examining the modern world) would have been 44, past Leary's 40 year old age limit. In Leary's Cyberpunk I learned yesterday that he appealed to "silicon snake oil", the world's current obsession. Dropping out isn't a ticket to Eden, I know through personal experience. No Harvard endowment paid my or Kerouac's bills, nor did free software. "Tune in, turn on, and drop out" if you have to, but "pay attention to what you are doing and who you listen to, and what you are dropping in to" would be a corollary.

In other words, like hallucinogens, computers and "cyber-enhanced" reality aren't necessarily bad medicine, but they are strong medicine. Playing them off as "cool" and enhancements worth trying without considering the drawbacks as well as benefits at hand is irresponsible.

The Greeks also gave us the example of Pandora's Box.

Thank you for your comments and consideration of our time. I think it was Stanislaw Lem that said there is so much poor quality writing out there, reviewers should present the materials they find good in, rather than the bad--I know that's a bit different than what you are saying, but still relevant.

think for themselves

That always interests me.

[edit]

I just read this paper in detail. Adding to coincidence here, I kept thinking back to Lem's Pirx the Pilot series and The Cyberiad. It makes me want to read more about the Lindbergh family. Also, it touches on another topic I was thinking about tonight, the thread on HN about Finnish as a universal language when Leary writes:

French philosophy, for example, has recently stressed the importance of language and semiotics in determining human behavior and social structures.

this also extends to computer languages, IMO. Pointy haired bosses and their languages of choice is the modern equivalent of the mutation of the "pilot" to the "steerer" in his Greek to Roman example. I found this paper thought provoking, but like his LSD campaign, misguided in its exuberance of the benefits of the "Cyborg" experience. There are drawbacks. Who's to say the computer as rudder won't become the steerer, among other "bad things"?

Is it too late to nominate Nadsat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat

or Newspeak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

both expressive languages developed by forward thinkers for our modern era.

Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme

I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).

Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.

I got to thinking about silent movies, like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I don't think I ever saw another treatment of home ownership quite so apropos as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film)

It expertly treated its subject matter with great humor--sans verbal language (interstitials aside).

OK in Firefox desktop Linux.

Anything interesting in it? Would you recommend it and why?

It's interesting to draw a parallel between the popularization of acid by Leary and the popularization of the Internet by many. John Lilly experimented with hallucinogens, but knew that a lot of preparation was in order.

    sed 's/acid/Internet/'

Alternate reality is alternate reality, man.

Nice writeup, thanks.

It depends.

I hardly ever give up a computer, we still have a '98 Windows laptop doing recipe duty in the kitchen. (It's getting harder to find a small 32 bit Linux distro these days, though.) Energy efficiency is another concern, one machine I took to be "recycled" (I know--maybe or maybe not) was a Mac G4 which was good as a space heater in the winter, but that's about it--and I didn't feel like moving it 1500 miles with our latest relocation.

I started with electronics many years ago, and would balk at replacing a surface mount chip, but people could learn basic electronic repair literacy for things that commonly break like cords which would help a lot. I also don't tend to buy products like smart phones which are glued together and difficult to repair.

As for RISC-V, it is hard to find even a dev board with the chip shortages (I bought a HiFive Inventor kit to experiment with as a first project):

https://www.hifiveinventor.com/

It might have been more interesting to watch Aki Kaurismäki's movies, including the Proletariat Trilogy if I understood Finnish. I'd like to know a very different language from my native English like Japanese, too. (Akira Kurosawa?) You just never know what you miss in translation.

I like Couturat et al.'s Ido even better. I can't "think" in it yet, but it is very regular and easy to learn. The main (irrational, personal) issue I have with it is the monotony of endings, -o is always a singular noun, etc. Plus it is Eurocentric. It does have pan-gender words like lu, saving having to say he/she/it. Tradeoffs.

We need you here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32430592

As I finished the code for straight-line coil geometry tonight, I thought of an abbreviation for the above story. Take the year it happened, 2014 and subtract 30--(re)read this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

then add a little of this for good measure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm (being a free software developer)

I think a section of the redacted text on the police report was "Neighbor heard him telling her 'I love you, Julia.'"

It was like living a hyper-realistic version of 1984. "My name is Winston Smith." Except, although I'm sure I can be broken, they didn't accomplish it that time. Our English class read the book 1984 in the year 1984. I read Slave New World, er Brave New World when I was 12--I guess I should have seen this all coming with my advance study of it. Hmm...

    ; __*\*____________
    ; ___/\/\achinate__
    ; -----------------
    ; "The Machiavellian Scheme"

    mash> (= (+ 2 2) 5)
    #f

A Kubrick-directed LHOTP would have been a different series, too, I imagine. I don't think NBC had a Kubrick level budget either.

On a side note, there was a rumor that the Capricorn One movie was filmed on location too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One

My father taught me how to chop wood in the early seventies at the age of 8 in the remote territory of suburban Connecticut. More dangerous was the wasps whose nest I disturbed near the wood-pile, and my face swelled up like a balloon. We didn't call an apiary to humanely remove them back then, my dad used kerosene to burn the nest.

Right, but LHOTP showed the importance of community--and the power of cooperation. [1] This was a strong theme in the first season. I grew up in Kansas in the late '70s to mid '80s, and the "theme" back then was the accretion of family farms by bank repossession into large agribusinesses--but there were still small to medium sized farmers at the co-ops. Having your means of support repo-ed is another way to starve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#Unite...

As a follow on to a my previous submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32142757

Disappointingly, while the sequel "The Flying Girl and Her Chum" had a similar charm to the original, and even though it did mostly show women in a positive light, it didn't give a similar fair treatment towards equality of race and culture. As for the original "The Flying Girl", it was mostly about white Americans in California--and in retrospect, omission is a type of unfair treatment too.

Without excusing Baum, we do have to realize that equality for all has been an historical struggle and he wrote this book in 1912 (under a pen name Edith van Dyne). I'm mentally ill--I still use terms like "crazy" and "off the rails" myself--and have had other people chase me off calling me the same names to protect their turf IRL and on the net. I am a loss for answers--my expertise is in computers not social equality, but if anyone has comments, I'm open to listening to them.

I would have posted this as a comment on my other submission, but it is apparently closed to comment.

I forgot to add, at the time in 2014 I was working on this project

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32491982

which lead to this one:

https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero

As I was taking a break from writing that "wall of text" last night, I finished my "Homer's Donut" shape, a 3D torus with a 0 - 360 degree arc to connect pipe-like shapes. My pipe-routing code is almost finished as of this morning.

My parents also taught me to "pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again." Peter Tosh too. So I guess another trite quote, "It's hard to innovate when you keep receiving 'being hit over the head' lessons."

“Hippocratic Oath” equivalent

Excellent idea! This would definitely apply for investors, entrepreneurs and software devs, like myself, if you consider those "respected" :). I took an "Ethics in Computing" course in college, and our reading contained a lot of Sherry Turkle. I don't even think doctors are required to take the Hippocratic oath, they have a lot of power over our lives as does law enforcement. And as technology becomes more-and-more of the fabric of reality (a disturbing trend, IMO), we as technical people have more responsibility for what happens.

Thanks for your insight.

I'm sorry you had to have any involvement in that morass of a mess too. I've had more friendly interactions with the police in the new state I live in, 1500 miles away--although before that incident I never had any run-ins with the law in Wichita after living there 25 years off and on. Here, my wife and I wave back at them when they drive by.

This isn't the America I grew up in, the one where my parents taught me to trust, but verify authority. It seems like everything in our society is "upside down" these days--I really do want to trust our institutions, we have them for a reason--but the cracks are now canyons and it's easy to slip through. I guess it's trite to say it, but "When they came for the oddball, nebbish computer nerds, I did nothing because I wasn't a..."

Thank you for your sympathetic comments, they did make me feel better for sure, and best wishes.

It sounded preposterous

That's what everyone I told about my February 2014 incident in Wichita Kansas said, including now ex-friends I knew since elementary school.

At about 1 AM in the morning, I was soaking in the bathtub after a long day working on my startup, and I heard pounding at the door. My wife who was asleep got up and asked if she should get it. I said no, I would get dressed and handle it. Before I could the police were already inside, weapons drawn, IIRC about 8 of them. I didn't see my wife--but she told me later they immediately took her outside in the cold, handcuffed, in her socks and no jacket and grilled her about how I treated her. They ridiculed her for being a university instructor, for some reason. She denied that anything was going on, which was true.

I have had issues with mental illness, I know I seem weird to some people, but no history of violence--mostly I was withdrawn. A few years before, I was attacked by dogs in a remote area in Colorado, my doctor said it was one of the worst incidents he had heard of, so I still had some residual issues from that. The experience with these police was strongly similar to that attack--which didn't help my condition. They said I had threatened my wife which was a complete fabrication (she is in reality my better half, best friend, and I can't imagine life without her).

One of them said, "What's going on tonight partner?" I told him I wasn't his partner, and I had no idea why they broke in.

The officer who had apparently lead the charge said, "You threatened your wife." I said "What the hell are you talking about? What evidence of that do you have?" He just pointed at his head. I am not kidding. All these people seemed more psychotic than they accused me of being. I was my normal rational self. Anyway, they ordered me on my knees, still only in my boxer shorts. Then, two of them yanked me up by my biceps, pincer like, which gave me deep muscular bruises the next day. I wasn't resisting or putting up a fight at all. They cuffed me behind my back. I really couldn't figure out who I pissed off so bad to treat me this way.

My wife later told me they rummaged through our house, looking for weapons, which we have never had. They kept saying "Where's the gun?" She said, "There is no gun."

As they put me in the back of a marked car (apparently against Kansas statute for treating the mentall ill), I said (stupidly, I guess, but you have to understand I was a little mad), "This is how they got Stephen Biko--in the middle of the night." "Who is that?", one asked. I said "Haven't you ever heard of Apartheid?" "What is that?" "Like Nelson Mandela?" A note in my medical record subsequently read "Raving that he is Nelson Mandela." :)

I guess the details of the tortuous night in hell I went through should be elided somewhat to lessen the trauma to my readers here, but they injected me with antipsychotic drugs at the hospital against my will, faked my wife's signature, refused to give me water or let me go to the bathroom (Geodon makes you thirsty and have to go to the bathroom), put me in 5-point restraints with a spitmask, and kept gaslighting, insulting, and mistreating me and my wife all night. In the morning, I was rubbing my eyes to lessen the headache, and the intern on call asked me "Why are you rubbing your eyes?" Shit, why do you think? She advised me to stay a couple days there, that it would be like a vacation. I politely declined, and they released me with my wallet and other effects the police had removed from my house after rummaging through our belongings. Into a blizzard, which I had to drive home in because my wife was a wreck. When I got home I had to shovel 10 inches of snow from the drive. I went in, we took pictures, and started looking up lawyers and realtors. When the police came back knocking again, we were prepared and able to get them to leav.

We couldn't find a lawyer or mental health agency in Kansas who would believe us and take our case, and even a national search failed. After a few years, I tore up the photograph of the bruises on my bicep as it was too painful to remember. The police report was almost incomprehensible, as most people I showed it to, including lawyers agreed. My medical record said my injuries were due to fighting the police, and my wife's own doctor put a note in hers that said, "This is clearly odd storytelling behavior." The hardware store where we bought replacement locks and hinges remarked, "Them old boys had a good ol' time that night, breaking down your doors, didn't they?" :) The root cause of all this was a next-door neighbor, who I had never met, who kept swatting 911 until LEO came out and decided to have fun. After that, I kept an eye on him, and he was extremely crazy--he let his father who had Alzheimers ride around on a tractor waving his cowboy hat around and driving around in a circle around the bare feet of his grandson's children. The police never did remove him from his home, to my knowledge. I never have really recovered, nor my wife.

Since our tastes are so far apart, I guess we have nothing else to talk about.

QED

1. Values (objects) in Scheme are tagged, carrying the type with them. And no, a variable, the identifier that names a location which stores a value isn't statically typed. From R6RS:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/r6rs/r6rs-std/r6rs-Z-H-4.html#n...

Scheme has latent as opposed to manifest types. Types are associated with objects (also called values) rather than with variables. (Some authors refer to languages with latent types as untyped, weakly typed or dynamically typed languages.) Other languages with latent types are Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and other dialects of Lisp. Languages with manifest types (sometimes referred to as strongly typed or statically typed languages) include Algol 60, C, C#, Java, Haskell, and ML.

The Scheme standards are very concise and readable.

2. Sometimes we Schemers will leave an orphan paren, like if we want to leave a place temporarily for new code. The primary benefit of all on the same line, IMO, is it is more compact vertically and most Lisp programmers rely on paren matching anyway. If you program in Scheme long enough, you can just "see" the level of nesting by the apparent contour of parenthesis. (If you don't understand this, that's probably a good thing.)

Both are R6RS, by the way.

It looks like this Scheme might eventually have good interop with Common Lisp:

https://github.com/lisp-mirror/airship-scheme

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13868549

As for using it:

This section is currently incomplete because the programming language is not functional at the moment.