Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40804069

Points: 75

# Comments: 24

> “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

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

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.

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.

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

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).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28529241

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24667817

Points: 1

# Comments: 0