I'm sorry, how is that sad?
Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?
Looking at the front page of HN, I think it's pretty safe to say it's moved a fair distance from news of only VCs, startups and such to the realm of what we find interesting. This is interesting. It's not useful, particularly well built or even presentable at a sales meeting. But it is interesting.
What function is the Mona Lisa accomplishing behind layers of glass, with security guards posted 'round the clock, in a museum in France?
The point of contention here is that someone of that level of intellect has "wasted" their talent on art, rather than productivity, which "should" come first.
For varying definitions of "should" and "wasted", of course.
P.S. Knitting a sweater takes forever too. Especially if it has buttons.
I don't know what could cause somebody to adopt such a twisted notion, but I think the roots of it go deeper than I care to know.
And this program, my friends? This is art.
I hope you're just being sarcastic.
Nor will I, or much of anyone else, I imagine. I respect it because it stimulates my mind. My imagination is moved by it in much the same way that it's moved by holding an acorn in my hand while contemplating a fully grown oak tree. Or studying the math that causes z <- z^2 + C to describe a ridiculously intricate shape. Or implementing my own minimal Lisp interpreter from scratch. Or trying to understand the Banach-Tarski paradox. These things stimulate my sense of wonder because they're like a magic trick, but there's no trickery involved. And when I contemplate them, I learn more about the world. Art cannot aspire to much more than that.
Yet people gladly upvote stories about computers implemented insite Minecraft and life-size spaceships made out of Lego blocks. Are you saying it has nothing to do with the difficulty involved? I doubt this story would be equally well received if there was some easy way to achieve the same result. If you take difficulty of the task out of the equation, what will be left? How much of what's left is genuine creativity and skill, and how much is mere patience?
No, of course not. The "simply" was what I was disagreeing with.
Also, in what way is this exercise not exploratory?
(If you are looking for other people to explain to you how to appreciate art, you are going to have a bad time.)
Eli Siegel explains in his great essay "The Serious Aspect of Snobbery":
Snobbery is the unwillingness to like something, unless at the same time it
makes one feel more important;...
[It] is the inability or lack of desire to appreciate justly. >...art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people
who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make
it any less wasteful use of human time and attention.
That's not a personal attack. I don't know you personally and nor was it an attack. I felt it was merely an observation. But If you took an observation as an attack, then doesn't that speak to the validity of the quote?
I don't appreciate a whole swath of what is considered "modern art" either (though I do like Dada, if anything for it's quirkiness that I find interesting). But never have I called someone else's creation of time and effort "garbage" purely due to my lack of appreciation.
I think the notion that purpose and intent behind art is far more important than the amount of effort involved in its creation has considerable amount of intellectual merit. Even more so considering how unpopular it is. Whether people choose to read the whole comment, or prefer to see "bla, bla, bla, garbage!" is a different matter.
>Whether people choose to read the whole comment, or prefer to see "bla, bla, bla, garbage!" is a different matter.
Purpose is ancillary to art. Art without purpose and merely is as art has been a cornerstone of creative expression since art has existed. The fact that you prefer to inject purpose behind it now has no bearing whatsoever on what people will consider artistic. You're not the arbiter of worth or taste.
I would however claim that the vast majority of art does stimulate the mind, though it may not stimulate yours without some additional effort. Indeed just about anything in the world is capable of stimulating your mind if you look closely enough at it, to paraphrase John Cage.
[1] ... or, if we take a 'vibrant matter' / 'object oriented ontology' view of the world, stimulate something.
> Pour qu’une chose soit intéressante, il suffit de la regarder longtemps.
http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspondance/conard/outils/1...
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” ― John Cage
What is sad is that the author probably has no plan to explain how it was accomplished, which prevents anyone from learning from this.
In the "spoiler" section:
""" Normally quines are made like this:
s = (something that generates your own source code)
puts s
puts "print(\"...\");"
s = (something that generates your own source code)
puts "print(\"#{ s }\");"
- Need proper escaping
+ Lots of old languages do not support C style of escape sequences.
+ Depending on languages, you need to escape interpolations.
- Cobol and Fortran programs have troublesome constraints
+ Need 7 spaces on the left and less than 80 columns per line, etc.
- Naive escaping will cause intermediate files to get too large.
+ JVM Strings have 64K size limit.
+ Languages like Intercal and Whitespace will become unbearably slow.
In general, there isn't any standard method to making quines. You just keep on tweaking the code until the input and output matches, mostly by trial and error.
[edited to improve wording]
A truly worthwhile bitching would take at least an hour.
I don't think so.