mtraven
Joined 18 years ago
Karma
866
Submissions
180
Member since
Feb 18
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 months ago
Same here, for at least 13 years. So have many others https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/AI-risk-%E2%89%A1-capitalism
Comment · 1 year ago
"You know about death...that it's just a change, not an end." – The Log Lady
Comment · 2 years ago
I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist
Comment · 2 years ago
I don't like working on killing machines either. But we shouldn't forget that the internet and basically all of computation originated out of defense research. That might be good or bad, but arguably the field was more innovative when that was the funding source than it is today.
> “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
Comment · 2 years ago
Seriously, WTF?
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.
Comment · 2 years ago
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: [email protected]
Everything about me: http://hyperphor.com
Comment · 2 years ago
I founded the original unix-haters list that the book is based off of.
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.
Comment · 3 years ago
Nice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature.
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.
Comment · 3 years ago
No advertisements, just reviews of things they thought were good.
Comment · 3 years ago
That's a much better name actually.
Comment · 3 years ago
Sad news. I had the honor of participating in a workshop he organized on Inconsistency Robustness in 2011, that was an interesting gathering.
https://www.amazon.com/Inconsistency-Robustness-Studies-Logi...
Comment · 3 years ago
Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894
(from 1991, and a response to the revival of connectionism that happened in the late 80s).
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).
Comment · 5 years ago
Don't think that's quite right, TOPS-20 was actually a fork of the Tenex code and so was pretty similar. Not sure what the relationship with TOPS-10 was.