Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.

Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.

I'm afraid that this is very common.

Hard AI has long had a well-deserved jet black reputation as a flakey field filled with armchair philosophers, hucksters, impressarios, and Loebner followers who don't understand the Turing Test. It eventually got so bad that the entire field decided to rebrand itself as "Artificial General Intelligence". But it's the same duck.

Though I strongly disagree with their choice of conferences, probably the best regarded ranking of computer science schools is CSRankings.org (https://csrankings.org/)

Absolutely. More to the point, it's an example of just how impressively detail-oriented Francis Ford Coppola was.

Additionally, capisce ("does he understand?") in Italian, is pronounced "ca-pee-sheh".

The "capeesh" is derived from Sicilian.

How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.

Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737516

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

- Two oscillators undergoing detune, sync, ring or amplitude modulation, or fm prior to getting fed into the filter?

- An LFO combined with an oscillator?

- An envelope (controlling the filter or amplifier) combined with an oscillator?

Perhaps these things might be considered combinations? I agree this is weak. You can blame the RCA Mark I and II for calling subtractive synthesizers "synthesizers".

Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors.

But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was free. This made MacWrite revolutionary.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)