jprival

I think Scheme works well for the kind of conceptual overview the course is trying to provide. I think there is something to the argument that Scheme syntax is not ideal for readability of larger programs, but I would wager that the bigger reason some students find SICP confusing is the same reason it blows others’ minds - the whole approach is at a higher level of abstraction than most “intro to programming” classes.

It’s not a particularly fair accounting of the framing of the article, which also profiles people who are working precisely on making the technology more practical and portable and ends on a hopeful note. For the time being it’s a high maintenance way to keep people alive, though, so the ethical dilemmas of resource allocation are real.

To look is to train one’s eyes on, or to scan for, something. To see is to perceive it.

So one can look without seeing, and one can also see something without intentionally looking.

OECD definition

> any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS

I don’t think that includes any of those, and Xanax is not fluorinated at all. You might have been thinking of Prozac, which I believe does meet those criteria.

It is a broad category with competing definitions, some of which are even broader, though, yes.

Also sometimes they do make really painful and arbitrary UI/UX changes - don’t get me started on the iOS podcast app. Personally I’m all for preserving keyboard shortcuts because that’s something I really internalize but it would be hard to argue that they are consistent taking any kind of broader view.

> enter doesn't open the folder

That’s a little like complaining that Alt-F4 is unintuitive, isn’t it? It’s historical continuity. On the other hand, they changed Command-N…

> there is only a back button and not a go up directory button

Can’t argue with that one, though.

> This is despite the arrival of a boom in funding due to the generative model bubble.

Does the boom in funding for AI companies make up for the overall drop in funding from late 10s-early 20s heights? That would not be my guess offhand, which makes playing up the contrast between “plenty of funding” (for one specific thing) and “job cuts” feel a little overstated.

It does complicate predictions, though.

The appeal of prompting a whole song into existence kind of baffles me for the same reasons you are suggesting but there’s room for fun and creativity in working with samples and given the substantial cottage industry that royalty-free samples already are this was pretty much the first application I was expecting to see in the audio GenAI realm.

>Five years ago people were in agreement that the turing test was a really good test

The limitations of the Turing test have been discussed for much longer than that. Ironically its dependence on human judgement is arguably a weak point.

“Functional style” doesn’t offer the same guarantees, sure, but I wouldn’t underestimate the structural and readability benefits it can offer for certain kinds of tasks.