Tariffs on other countries is exactly what my country did last century in order to foment national industry. It did produce results, including a national computer. I'm not exactly sure why it backfired when Trump did it.

If Trump's someone's asset, he's probably Israel's.

This is relevant to me because Brazil is going to have a presidential election soon and the right wing is taking over. Trump's brazilian ally is expected to win. I'm gonna start paying a lot more attention to US-Brazil relations.

Surely there are less embarrassing ways of doing that sort of thing...

I mean he invaded Venezuela, and everybody knows he wanted the oil, it makes sense. This super intelligence stuff is not making any sense.

Propaganda is simply spammed until it sticks. How could it be worth it to literally make an enemy out of anyone who doesn't take to the new terminology?

Pretty wild that the US has a law that literally says it must invade another country if they judge Americans for war crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...

Pretty insane to literally make enemies over terminology. I don't understand what he's thinking.

CHICKEN closures have a compiled C function and slots for the objects it closes over. How do you capture a continuation? Do you compile a partially evaluated C function and create a closure object for it?

In my lisp, I represented delimited continuations as a simple array of stack frames. Capture just copies to the heap all the stack frames up to the delimiter. Calling it just spills those frames onto the stack and replays the frames.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/delimited-continuati...

> What do those Lisp books lack?

> it doesn’t go very deeply into e.g. garbage collection and data representation.

> I like to blog about cool techniques that are undiscussed nowadays.

> For example implementing weak references and how to GC them efficiently.

I had the same complaints about the books! They're always so high level. Stuff like garbage collection is simply taken for granted. In a real lisp, it's a core part of the virtual machine.

The blog posts about the chicken garbage collector and data representation are excellent. I really want to read about how chicken's continuations are compiled, hope to see an article there about it someday.

I too have taken up blogging in order to fill those gaps.

> Other stuff I rarely see discussed is how to do FFI and cross-module optimizations

Yeah. Those subjects are deeply interesting but I've never been able to find much material about them.

Wingolog has a post about cross-module partial evaluation in guile.

https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2021/05/13/cross-module-in...

The partial evaluator cannot penetrate foreign functions, which prevents optimizations. It's an argument against FFIs!

> The biggest positive I see right now is the push for digital sovereignty.

> I sincerely hope this will change how people deploy tech, maybe in a more mindful manner.

> But vested interests and inertia will be hard to overcome and really bum me out.

Always nice to find more people who care! If you find a way to avoid feeling bummed out, please share. Things only seem to get more difficult for us...

What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.

I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

I'm just addressing the point about entropy that you made.

> Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?

I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.

Entropy is a measure of the disorder and disorganization within a system. Any form of structure reduces entropy by definition.

You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:

> We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease.

Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?

To me that sounds like a coping mechanism.

Hordes of robots constantly and meticulously maintaining entire cities sounds awesome, actually. That's the post scarcity society I dream of.

> Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second?

We only need to choose because we lack the technology. Maybe one day we'll have Deus Ex style nanobot pills we can swallow. They will invisibly and continuously maintain our bodies for us. Nails are just one of countless things they will maintain.

This is entirely orthogonal to economically efficient concentration. In fact, cities are an extension of it. We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease. This leads to economic efficiency.