d-us-vb

Stallman’s Principle:

The extension language should be a full featured programming language in its own right capable of creating substantial applications because that is something people will want to do!

I wish every application worth putting a plugin system in it followed this philosophy.

The "tradition of Smalltalk" is to experiment and exceed what came before. Alan Kay expressed disappointment about the ossification of Smalltalk upon the release of Smalltalk 80. Pharo and Squeak are trying to carry forward only the tradition of the original Smalltalk to produce new ideas, not "be a Smalltalk" (whatever that means).

If you say "Pharo is a Smalltalk" then you might get some of the religious elite come and claim "Thou must change this aspect of the system! For it is in violation of the law of Smalltalk as handed down to our forefathers in Smalltalk 80". Pharo is its own system, heavily inspired by Smalltalk to the extent that non-language lawyers look at it and say "it's Smalltalk".

People argue about whether Janet or Clojure are lisps. Some people say that only Common Lisp is Lisp. Some include Scheme as well. But the unqualified "Lisp" usually means Common Lisp when referring to an actual language with an actual specification that you can find an actual compiler to create binaries with. Pharo is a Smalltalk in a similar way to how Scheme is a Lisp. Different enough that saying "Scheme" means something different from "Lisp" to everyone who knows enough to know what you're talking about.

reductionists being reductionists. I'm with you.

The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.

It entirely depends what success means to you! Don't let society or even your perception of society define that.

In all fairness, I know that you meant "wealthy and/or influential people". But it bodes ill at every level that your tacit belief about success is widely known and widely accepted (though certainly not universally).

Postman's book is exactly against that definition of success, though he readily points it out. He describes it in the "Gods that Fail" section of the book.

That is, if they're licensed. Most hardware engineers, at least in the US, are not licensed PEs; you only need a PE license if you're signing off on engineering work under government contract or public safety is a concern or its some otherwise regulated industry where the regulations require it.

> doesn’t have to … persist any meaningful state

What is a game save file if not persisted state?

Yeah, Blow has a generally unfavorable opinion of scripting in game engines. Jai (the language) gets around that by being very fast to compile debug builds, about 150 kloc/s, which he says he intends to optimize up to 1 mloc/s. Order of the sinking star compiles in about 2 seconds for a clean build, so iteration can be basically as fast as what you'd expect from scripting.

Well, it becomes bad for you if you start needing to take so much of it that the other stimulant effects start causing problems, like poor sleep. Most addictive substances have this potential, since "the dose makes the poison". But the same dose forever rarely satisfies cravings forever.

> It turns out nicotine is addictive and bad for you

links to a substack post confirming the benefits Gwern wrote about, and acknowledging the risks Gwern acknowledged

> Not even Kelly foresaw the Bitter Lesson

Except that he most certainly did! The bitter lesson isn't about LLMs vs specialized neural networks! It's about manually programmed expert systems vs machine learning. Alpha Go Zero isn't very good at anything but playing Go. It's a highly specialized brain only for that singular task. LLMs remain a problematic technology (both in terms of reliability and privacy) for a lot of domains and my own prediction is that smaller models that are much more reliable for a specific domain will become common after the utility of AI is known by way of LLMs, but the reliability or cost of running them makes it unsustainable.

While biology has inspired many inventions, the electric motor is not one of them. Electric motors were invented in the mid 19th century, before cells were known to be anything more than simple blobs of protoplasm, barely distinguishable under a microscope. It wasn't until high powered microscopes were invented that biologists had any clue to the previously unthinkable complexity of cellular life.