Hacker News: weeeee2

New comment by weeeee2 in "Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming""

weeeee2 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 16:01:15 +0000

Forth, PostScript and Assembly are the "natural" programming languages from the perspective of how what you express maps to the environment in which the code executes.

The question is "natural" to whom, the humans or the computers?

AI does not make human language natural to computers. Left to their own devices, AIs would invent languages that are natural with respect to their deep learning architectures, which is their environment.

There is always going to be an impedance mismatch across species (humans and AIs) and we can't hide it by forcing the AIs to default to human language.

New comment by weeeee2 in "RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015)"

weeeee2 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:15:47 +0000

I remember that my brother at Bell Labs had an address with bangs. He was working on System V stream drivers. For me, actual "email" started when we had DNS routing ad could email --or talk to-- user@shost.university.edu ... before I don't actually recall how I exchanged emails with my brother at Bell Labs. It's that period of time that I'm trying to reconstruct, around 1987 early 1988, when I immigrated to the U.S. (from UK... now back in UK as of last year)

New comment by weeeee2 in "RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015)"

weeeee2 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:51:50 +0000

Yes but I was referring to "email him ... [in 1986]" and wondering about what he meant by "email" exactly in 1986...

New comment by weeeee2 in "RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015)"

weeeee2 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 12:09:22 +0000

Are you sure it was '86? I was using IBM's BITNET in 88 from UMASS before Al Gore invented the Internet lol. Email took 2 days to go from Boston to London, passing thru a node in California before routing to the UK. I got on Usenet in 88 or 89, and had fun chats with professors at Caltech and elsewhere using the finger command and talk (with tee pipe to dev/tty and a file, so I can play back the whole session.) I am vague in my memory about how and when I went from being n BITNET to ARPANet/Internet, but I do remember Gore was busy promoting the Information Superhighway around that time, and it was the time the first iteration of excitement around neural networks was cooling off... Memories! Real Genius was a fun movie to watch and an inspiration for getting into lasers.

UPDATE according to ChatGPT:

ARPANET itself began in 1969 at a handful of research universities, so some US universities had access as early as the early 1970s. However, many institutions that didn’t have a direct ARPANET connection joined BITNET in 1981—a store‐and‐forward network that was easier and less expensive to join but often led to long email delays (sometimes on the order of a day or two, especially on international links). By the mid‑to‑late 1980s, with the emergence of NSFNET (which provided a TCP/IP backbone) and the broader adoption of Internet protocols, many universities transitioned from BITNET to the more immediate, real‑time connectivity of the Internet.

In other words, while ARPANET was available to some US universities from the early 1970s, widespread academic use via the modern Internet (with NSFNET and TCP/IP) really picked up in the mid‑1980s. The long delays you remember (such as a two‑day email from Boston to London) were more typical of BITNET’s store‑and‑forward mechanism rather than ARPANET’s near‑real‑time communications.