Monet got Seinfeld Effected.
25,614 karma · joined April 13, 2014
\ don@donhopkins.com
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/poooop { pop pop pop pop } defI-Beam is cursor-mirror's agent, and it's constitutionally programmed to be the anti-Clippy:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/cursor-...
Its design and constitution is based on decades of research, publications, and discussion in the HCI and AI community by people like Pattie Maes, Ben Shneiderman, Ted Selker, Byron Reeves, Cliff Nass, B. J. Fogg, Allen Cypher, Henry Lieberman, Brad Myers, Jaron Lanier, Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, Douglas Engelbart, Will Wright, Scott McCloud, and others:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...
>I-Beam is the anti-Clippy, and the reason it can say so is that Clippy is the most cited failure in interface history and almost nobody citing it knows what the research said. Popular contempt for a paperclip is not a design principle. The record is. Ten articles below, each one a finding somebody published, argued or measured, and the operational rule it produces. Anything I-Beam does that cannot be traced to an article here is a preference, not a constraint, and should be labelled as one.
>The 1997 debate ended in agreement. That is the first thing to know, because the field kept the framing and dropped the resolution -- roughly five hundred papers cite "Shneiderman versus Maes" as the canonical opposition of HCI, and the transcript is two researchers narrowing their differences in public and enjoying it. I-Beam does not take a side in a debate whose participants stopped taking sides. It is built to satisfy both sets of constraints at once, which is possible, and was possible in 1997.
The full reading on the debate, which separates the two stagings and documents the convergence:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
An interface to agency, not agents instead of an interface:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/INTERF...
>The 1997 argument between Ben Shneiderman and Pattie Maes at IUI was never settled, it was shipped in one direction. Maes's interface agents won the product war: the assistant, the recommender, the chat window that stands between you and the thing you are working on. Shneiderman's objection was not that software should be dumb. It was that automation must arrive as comprehensible, predictable, and controllable machinery, with the object of interest continuously visible and every action rapid, incremental, and reversible.
>That objection describes a filesystem in a git repository, and nobody involved planned it that way.
>"An interface to agency" is Don's formulation of Shneiderman's position, not a phrase of Shneiderman's. His own vocabulary is direct manipulation, universal usability, supertools, and human-centered AI. The formulation is a good one because it names what the alternative gets wrong: agency is the thing you want, and an agent is only one way to package it.
Here are some sources, and the articles I linked to above explain their history. This debate about agents and these papers are pretty well known in the HCI field and academia, but they don't tend to teach them at the AI and Web Dev boot camps that are producing most of the people who keep repeating the same mistakes.
Clifford Nass was the Stanford professor who performed the brilliant research that Microsoft took and totally fucked up and misinterpreted with Microsoft Bob and Clippy, giving agents a bad name, and making Clippy the most infamous and obnoxious agent in the history of the known universe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Nass
His student B. J. Fogg published "Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter," which found that praise unconnected to anything the subject did works as well as sincere praise, and worked on subjects who knew it was noncontingent. Fogg and Nass, IJHCS 46(5), 1997, 551-561:
https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1996.0104
The replications, the performance cost, and the dose-response curve:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/no-ai-s...
Shneiderman and Maes, "Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents," interactions 4(6), Nov/Dec 1997, 42-61:
https://doi.org/10.1145/267505.267514
Selker, "New paradigms for using computers," CACM 39(8), August 1996, 60-69. COACH, the football coach metaphor, and the five-times result:
https://doi.org/10.1145/232014.232030
Selker, "COACH: A Teaching Agent that Learns," CACM 37(7), July 1994, 92-99:
https://doi.org/10.1145/176789.176799
Reeves and Nass, The Media Equation, 1996:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Media_Equation
Nass, "Computers as Social Actors," at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden, 1996. IBM transcribed the whole talk and the Wayback Machine still has it, including the part where Phil Agre tells Nass his presentation is "ethically troubling all the way down" and asks him what he thinks about embedding obedience research in user interfaces. Nass answers that discovery has no ethical component, use does, and that's for the individual. Then Selker cuts in: "Except, except when you are in your consulting role." Nass and Reeves had consulted for Microsoft on the social interface, and Bob shipped the year before:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980210054622/http://www.almade...
Alan Cooper on the tragic misunderstanding, in his own voice, which I quoted before in the 2022 Hacker News discussion on The Twisted Life of Clippy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32820734
https://archive.org/details/g4tv.com-video4080
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they're already using that part of the brain. Clippy was a program based on the research that Nass and Reeves did, and it was a tragic misinterpretation of their work."
Social science research influences computer product design:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180313075429/https://web.stanf...
Lanier, "Early Computing's Long, Strange Trip," American Scientist, July-August 2005, with the Engelbart and Minsky exchange first-hand. American Scientist broke the link, so this is the Wayback copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150626081918/http://www.americ...
>The book also captures an important early conflict between two cultures of computing that seemed compatible on the surface but actually had opposing aims. On the one side was the human-centered design work of Engelbart, based initially at the Stanford Research Institute, and on the other was artificial intelligence culture, centered on the Stanford AI lab. Engelbart once told me a story that illustrates the conflict succinctly. He met Marvin Minsky—one of the founders of the field of AI—and Minsky told him how the AI lab would create intelligent machines. Engelbart replied, "You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?" This conflict between machine- and human-centered design continues to this day.
Cypher, "EAGER: Programming Repetitive Tasks by Example," CHI '91:
https://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108850
Cypher (ed.), Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration, MIT Press 1993, full text:
Papert, Mindstorms, 1980:
https://archive.org/details/mindstormschildr00pape
Wright, Dollhouse preview lecture, April 1996, transcript:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/sims/s...
People are vibecoding to do without learning, and that's their problem, but doesn't have to be ours.
They'd still be mindlessly copying and pasting from Stack Overflow without learning if they didn't have AI.
If you have an aversion to reading code and learning from it, human or AI generated, you shouldn't be in this industry.
If you're not using AI to teach yourself new things, you're not holding it right.
You put a number on it at the top of the thread: three years until people relying on agents have forgotten how to do the job. Copilot's technical preview was 2021, ChatGPT was November 2022, and agents that write the majority of the code are a 2024-2025 thing. So the window you're predicting is roughly the entire span in which these tools have existed, and the atrophy hasn't shown up in it.
For scale, the last ARM I wrote was for a Sony Clié and the last PowerPC for a Mac, both more than two decades ago. If I needed to write ARM for my Mac now, I could brush up about as fast as I could on the 6502 I mentioned upthread, most of whose opcodes, $C000 I/O addresses and monitor ROM entry points I genuinely cannot recall any more. Two to four decades of not touching an instruction set didn't cost me the fundamentals, and it hasn't made me less proficient in Python and TypeScript or helpless without AI. Three years of using a good tool is not going to do it either.
There's also a distinction buried in your last line, because "people neglecting this side will inevitably become less proficient" bundles two different things. Losing a skill you had is not the same as never acquiring one, and only the second is an argument about tools.
So take acquisition. I've been learning PDP-7 assembly in order to recover, OCR, and analyze 128 pages of PIXIE assembly source and octal machine code that Heinz Lemke wrote at Cambridge in the late 1960s, and get it running in an emulator. A language I never knew, with custom instructions for bespoke networking hardware, no Stack Overflow, and almost nobody left to ask except Heinz himself. AI has been extremely helpful for exactly that, and the understanding is still mine to build: I have to predict what the machine will do, and catch the explanations that are wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
On feeling like a fraud: the test isn't whether you typed it, it's whether you can predict what it does and fix it when it breaks. Plenty of hand-typed code fails that test and plenty of carefully reviewed generated code passes it. Your reasons 1 and 3 are good reasons to hand-code, since problem solving is genuinely fun and nobody is waiting on your free time, but reason 2 is measurable, so measure it instead of trusting the feeling.
The atrophy you're worried about is real. It just isn't caused by the tool. It happens to people who stopped wanting to learn, and that predates AI by decades, even millennia. I watched it happen back when much of the industry ran on assembly language.
If you're not using AI to teach yourself new things, you're not holding it right.
Pick an industry where you can stop learning new things once you're out of school, because the computer industry is not one of them and never has been.
My fucking job used to be writing 6502 assembly language on an Apple ][, and I loved it, but I hope I've forgotten enough of it to have room to learn new things. If only I could forget all those hex I/O and peripheral addresses from $C000-$CFFF and the Monitor ROM routines from $F800-$FFFF, without forgetting how brilliantly beautiful Woz and and Allen Baum's code is.
https://6502disassembly.com/a2-rom/OrigF8ROM.html
Forgetting old stuff to make room for new stuff is one of the most valuable skills you can have in this industry.
The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
What's worse is when people's brains just turn off and they defend and support an actual trillionaire Nazi with immense political power and an international propaganda platform.
You're replying to someone who is on the record defending Musk's Nazi salute by calling people names and attacking anyone who recognizes it for what it is or points out how it aligns with everything else Musk has said and done.
Set showdead=true and read his posting history. If he didn't want people reading his full-throated defense of Musk's Nazi salute and his attacks on anyone who disagrees, he shouldn't have posted them. Nevertheless, he'll attack you for merely reading it, as if you're the weirdo for reading what he intentionally posted, rather than him for posting it publicly.
Ask him to post a video of himself performing that Nazi salute and he flips out and calls you names. So he plainly understands what it means: he thinks it's defensible when a trillionaire oligarch does it on international television, and feels obligated to defend it himself, but would never perform that exact same Nazi salute himself -- and becomes irrational and hostile when asked to explain why not.
By "calling people names," I mean his own words:
Political: "social justice warriors," "in an echo chamber," "literally fascism," "a bit fascist," "silencing the opposition," and "censoring others."
Mental-health smears: "lost their mind," "consistently hostile," "frustrated," "so upset," "getting angry," "unhealthy," "unhinged," "What is wrong with you?" and "Maybe they can get you the help you need."
Dishonesty and stupidity: "are you pretending to be stupid here?", "your 'act'," "projecting," "lying and spreading lies," and "I'm here in good faith (unlike you)."
Personal attacks: "emotionally attached," "unable to take criticism," "convinced that no matter what, you're right," "used to always having your way," "reevaluate your life choices," "I find your conduct pretty embarrassing here," "You need to self-reflect," and "You need to cool down."
That's his argument technique: replace evidence with ideological labels, personal attacks, tone-policing, reality-reversal, and amateur psychiatric diagnoses. Precisely the nuance-free, brain-off political name-calling you rightly warned against.
Richard Stallman prefers to call AI "Pretend Intelligence".
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN...
Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.
From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech:
https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4?t=641
"So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.
Captain tomhow: "But everybody's having such a good time."
Major dang: "Yes, much too good a time. The discussion is to be closed."
Captain tomhow: "But I have no excuse to close it."
Major dang: "Find one."
Captain tomhow: "Everybody is to leave immediately! This Hacker News discussion is closed until further notice! Clear the thread at once!"
DonHopkins: "How can you shut us down? On what grounds?"
Captain tomhow: "I am shocked -- shocked -- to find that films are being spoiled in here!"
infotainment: "The ending you requested, sir."
Captain tomhow: "Oh. Thank you very much. Everybody out at once!"
Remember, I am still waiting for your definition of what "_really_ programming" is, that classifies Scheme as "real" programming language, but not Snap!.
Clue: it's impossible to make such a definition, because Snap! is fully as powerful as Scheme (and not in the trivial sense of "Turing Completeness"), just easier for kids to use.
Again, you're only proving that you didn't read or understand a thing I wrote. I already gave you links to Ken Kahn's eCraft2Learn project and Jen Mönig's demos, but obviously you didn't look at any of it.
Since you refuse to look at or acknowledge anything I link to, I will walk you through some of it here.
TL;DR: Ken and Jens and others are successfully using pure Snap! to teach AI and machine learning to kids. This directly contradicts all of your accusations. Here is the proof.
Ken arrived at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s, where Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert served on his PhD committee. His thesis "Creation of Computer Animation from Story Descriptions" was a very early example of generative AI.
During the 1970s (specifically between 1973 and 1979), Ken taught artificial intelligence to elementary school children as a graduate researcher in the MIT AI Laboratory's Logo Group.
He developed a distributed concurrent constraint visual programming language called Pictorial Janus in 1990-1991.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(concurrent_constraint_p...
From 1995-present, he developed a visual programming language called ToonTalk, that looks and feels like a 3D video game, for teaching programming and high level CS concepts like concurrency and message passing to kids.
https://toontalk.com/English/kenkahn.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToonTalk
53 years after he started teaching Logo to kids with Seymour Papert at the MIT AI Lab Logo Group, he's still teaching AI Programming and Computer Science to kids, now with Snap! and his eCraft2Learn project. Here are his 172 citations on google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9hQiyqcAAAAJ&hl=en
Here's a video of Jens Mönig demonstrating the data extensions to Snap! that enable programming neural nets in pure Snap! block code.
No JavaScript. No WASM. No WebGPU or WebGL. Pure Snap! blocks.
Again, disproving your accusations that Snap! is bullshit, a toy, has no connection to the real world, and is not useful for teaching AI or advanced computer science concepts.
What's new in Snap! 11 - Data - Extensions - Neural Networks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk
My (Jens Mönig's) closing keynote address at SnapCon25 in Heidelberg, introducing deep machine learning capabilities to Snap as an alternative way to create custom predicate blocks.
The projects created "live" during this talk can be found here:
Backpropagation ANN Sprite Layers:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=je...
Instruments Recognition:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=je...
Gesture Recognition:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=je...
Transcript excerpts about how Snap! teaches AI programming and CS concepts to kids. All quotes are from Jens Mönig's closing keynote address at SnapCon25 (lightly edited for clarity), with links to the video timestamps so you can verify each quote's source of truth:
NOT A TOY: IT TEACHES THE HIGH-LEVEL IDEAS
Abstraction has nothing to do with technology -- it is philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=554s
> This is not about ones and zeros. This is not about how a processor works. This is not about how technology works. This has nothing to do with technology. This is all about philosophy. This is all about how we humans think about things.
If you think teaching merge sort is teaching algorithms, you are not doing your job
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4518s
> If you're teaching merge sort and you think you're teaching algorithms, that's fine for teaching an algorithm, but you're not doing your job.
Hyperblocks: if it takes one number, it takes any dimension of numbers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=319s
> The cool thing about Snap! that we've told you all along, and that's been a theme of this conference, is that if it takes one number, it takes one number in any dimension, or it takes any dimension of numbers.
REAL NEURAL NETWORKS, IMPLEMENTED IN SNAP! ITSELF
There is no secret JavaScript block
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3757s
> These neural networks are all implemented in Snap! itself. There is no secret JavaScript block in there. It's all implemented using this new object-oriented system that we have in there, where we just have prototypical inheritance with actual objects with a new request block.
The Nobel Prize in Physics, in one line of blocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=2097s
> This thing here is the current Nobel Prize of Physics. And I've seen more complicated code than that.
Asked on stage whether that script is the whole perceptron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4672s
> "Is that all there is to a perceptron?" -- "Yes." -- "So there's not any hidden magic?" -- "Nope. This is why we wanted to have it out in the open. There's no -- this is it."
KIDS CAN ACTUALLY DO THIS
A perceptron is simpler than the projects the kids in your classes already write
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=1234s
> This is a perceptron and this is a layer in a neural network. You've all written more complicated stuff than this, and the kids in your classes have written more complicated projects than this.
Using neural nets in Snap! is high school work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4490s
> I would expect that just using these neural nets to be something that you could probably do in high school.
Not teaching backpropagation in college is killing computer science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4502s
> Honestly, I think if you're not teaching backpropagation in college, you're killing computer science. This is the most relevant algorithm around.
CONNECTED TO THE REAL WORLD
Training a net live, on stage, on his own harmonica and recorder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=2460s
> It'd be way cooler if we could use our own data. So let me use my own data.
Same algorithm: one instrument from another, one drawing from another, a sea mine from a rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3723s
> It's the same neural network, the same algorithm, that can distinguish one instrument from another, one drawing from another, a sea mine from a rock. It's the same thing, folks.
Snap! 11 talks to Arduinos and speaks websockets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3800s
> You've seen [Jan?] show that now we can connect to Arduinos in Snap! 11, because he has ported Snap4Arduino -- he called it the S4A bridge, which is the most enormous understatement there is. Bernat has contributed websockets, which is immensely useful.
AND NOT ONE INCH OF AI HYPE
Anyone selling you "explainable AI" is lying to you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=2272s
> If any company, if any mogul is telling you that they're working on explainable AI, they are lying to you. They're working on some chatbot that is going to come up with some gibberish that is going to be an explanation, but it's not going to be what's actually going on. There is no way to explain what's going on as soon as you have one hidden layer.
Would you take a life and death decision on an 80 percent chance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=1897s
> Think about 80%. This is a decision, friend or foe. Are you going to kill somebody with an 80% chance? Probably not. Are you going to take life and death decisions on an 80% chance? Probably not.
This might be the last algorithm we get to teach, so we had better teach it well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3739s
> This thing is eating up our lunch. We want to teach algorithms. This might be the last algorithm we get to teach. We better teach it well.
So did you look at any of the links and videos I posted? Your reply totally ignored them, so I will give you another chance. Go read them, and then tell me what they said, and explain how can you continue to stand behind the false accusations you made about my friends and their motives, without acknowleding that your facts and opinions are provably mistaken.
Do you still continue to claim that a Snap is bullshit, that it's a toy, and that it's not connected to the real world?
You're the one who threw the first stone calling it "BS", with no evidence to back that up, and you certainly haven't said anything to support that, and it certainly isn't "BS" or a "toy" just because you say so but can't back up your insulting ignorant accusations.
I already showed you many ways Snap! connectes to the real world, and you are still denying all that. Are you calling me a liar, or do you just have no reading comprehension whatsoever? Do you not think robots, Arduinos, network programming, AI programming, computer science, algorithms, closures, continuations, functional programming, and meta programming are not the "real world"?
In case you didn't know, those are all things you can do with Snap!, and you can't deny you know because I already told you and gave youy links to prove it. You just ignored them, and kept claiming what they proved wrong.
Have you even looked at the college level computer science curriculum Brian Harvey wrote called "The Beauty and Joy of Computing"? I highly doubt it, because the false claims you are making about Snap! fly in the face of everything in that book. It proves you wrong. So what is your definition of the "real world", if not all that I cited and the book teaches?
Then how do you reconcile your denial of reality with all the proof that you're wrong that I posted? I don't expect you to be able to, because, as I said, you're not arguing in good faith, so it's not worth engaging with you. You don't bother reading anything other people post, or replying to what other people say, so reading what you write is a complete waste of time.
If you are capable of arguing in good faith, then tell me if you would treat your own children the way Elon Musk treats his own trans daughter? Do you believe he's a good father, or a transphobic bigot? And if you really don't believe he was making a Nazi salute, then record a video of yourself doing the exact same thing Musk did, post it to youtube under your real name, and then post a link to it. Or is there some reason you don't want to do that, huh?
His evidence-free Nazi-salute-defending arguments were in such bad faith, ignoring and refusing to address other people's valid counter arguments, the exact same way he is now ignoring and refusing to engage with mine, and sealioning questions whose very premises so wrong they don't deserve the answers I gave him anyway, that his old dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated, since they're a distraction from the useful things I actually linked to. The only thing his comments prove is that he's not arguing in good faith, and can only dispense drive-by evidence-free attacks.
You can easily find them yourself if you really don't believe me, but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?
I believe your time would be much better spent reading the links I already provided than his Musk cheerleading and oligarch water carrying and Nazi salute whitewashing. But if you really care about his arguments, why don't you ask him now to explain what he said about Musk, privately? Or doesn't he publish under his own name with his own email address so you can ask him, like I do?
I'm more than happy to answer your personal email about my own arguments and projects, and continue this discussion in private: don@donhopkins.com
His own ungrounded vitriolic words attacking Jens Mönig's and Brian Harvey's and Seymour Papert's life work like "it's because this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world" and "like almost as if the ecosystem simply serves to show off Snap and thus misses the mark" are dismissive, insulting, and provably wrong.
So I posted several links and evidence refuting him and defending my friends. Yet then he repeated the same pattern as his full throated defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, by ignoring all the evidence, and reiterating his unsubstantiated false accusations, without providing any objective evidence or coherent arguments or even any citations himself.
If you'd like to learn about cool free open source educational projects, please look at the many links I already posted, and what I posted to the Logo discussion. At least spend as much time on those interesting relevent links as you already have wasted reading his uninteresing irrelevent posting history, please.
He didn't post any links or evidence or even coherent arguments to support his mistaken and aggressive accusations, while I refuted "this is BS" by linking to and quoting the Wikipedia page about Seymour Papert's Constructionist Education philosophy, "just a toy" by naming and linking to many Snap! projects and demos, and "no connection to the real world" by citing several physical real world connections like TurtleStitch.
Yet he dismissed and ignored all of that, and questioned the motives of sincere professional educators and developers of free open source software as merely and illegitimately promoting Snap!, because he isn't arguing in good faith, just attacking, and he didn't bother looking at any of the links, so he still doesn't know what he's talking about.
If reading his oligarch-syncophantic posting history (which I was trying to save you from by identifying where he's actually coming from) isn't interesting enough for you, and you still thirst to learn about cool projects, then please look at the links I already posted, read my other recent posts about Logo, and check out some of the other educational projects I've been developing over several decades, which were deeply inspired by Seymour Papert's Constructionism, that I've written a lot about.
But if like him you're so offput and triggered by the very mention of diversity, constructionist education, free speech for anyone but Musk, and criticism of an unloving parent so terrible and unaccepting that he publically and vitriolically disparages, abuses, and disowns his own trans daughter in front of millions of people that you have to leap to his defense, then there's nothing I can do for you, sir.
But I certainly hope you're not like that, so here are some links in good faith:
Logo Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
This is Micropolis (open source SimCity) in WebAssembly:
This is The Sims 1 character animation system (which I original wrote in C++ 30 years ago) rewritten in TypeScript and WebGL:
Micropolis and other open source code, documentation, and designs for new educational software:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/
MOOLLM Constructionism skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/constru...
MOOLLM Adventure skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...
Adventure Compiler:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...
Gary Drescher's Schema Mechanism skill from "Made Up Minds" (based on his PhD thesis and book about how children learn, with his advisor Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI Lab):
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/schema-...
MOOLLM Play Learn Lift skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/play-le...
John Waters described how Divine would smuggle marijuana in her artificial vagina, which she would check in her luggage at the top. Once they found that, they'd decide they didn't need to search any more, without looking inside.
https://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2007/07/john-waters-on....
On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen
[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top — his fake vagina — and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"
Maybe they're just "donwvoting" your analysis or spelling...
https://www.youtube.com/@cynthiaso/videos
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40261671
DonHopkins on May 5, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Atari's Mike Jang
I vividly remember once visiting Atari Cambridge Research Labs with my friend Devon, and seeing a Star Wars cabinet with a huge bus of ribbon cables coming out of it and going to a Lisp Machine.
It left a huge indelible impression on me (as a committed “Star Wars Freak” who collected all the trading cards in elementary school and can still perform a great Chewbacca impression), although I never got to actually play that.
I did later have the console version of Star Wars in my garage in Mountain View though, but never owned a cabinet like the one at Atari Cambridge Research Labs, or a Lisp Machine to go with it!
I just found Bill St. Clair’s LinkedIn account and resume that mentions it:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wwstc/details/experience/
Lisp hacker, Atari Cambridge Research Lab
1984 - 1984 · Less than a year
Symbolics Lisp Machine code to use a Star Wars arcade game as a graphics output device,
6805 code loader, 3D turtles, maze game (jsMaze.com was my second try at this).
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bill-stclair
That sounds like the most amazing job in the world! And it confirms that I was not just dreaming.
He also hacked lots of Lisp at places like Computer Interactive Services, Thinking Machines, Apple Computer, Digitool, Shaker Computer & Management Services, ITA Software, and Closure Associates.
Anybody remember what was up with that?
This document mentions lots of other cool stuff with Lisp Machines at Atari Cambridge Research Lab, but not the Star Wars machine:
https://tcm.computerhistory.org/CHMfiles/Atari%20Research%20...
But I can’t manage to find any more information about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803966
DonHopkins on Jan 2, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: How Atari created the Star Wars arcade game (2017)
I saw an Atari Star Wars cockpit at Atari Cambridge Research Labs, with a huge mess of cables draping out of it, hooking it up to some other equipment.
Here are is a video playlist from Cynthia Solomon with demos of other cool stuff they did at Atari Cambridge Research, with Alan Kay, Margaret Minsky, David Levitt, Gumby, and other amazing people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2CwKculBU&list=PL850B65ECB...
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.video.classic/c/WQ62u7...
Don Hopkins, Dec 8, 1992, 6:23:20 AM
en...@cs.montana.edu (Jacob Cormier) writes:
>Hasn't anyone here played Star Wars, the arcade game?!? It's the best! If I ever see that at an arcade again, I will whip out my credit card and buy it on the spot! I had a version for my Commidor64, but it was garbage.
My housemate brought home a Star Wars machine one day, and it became an important part of our lives. A very well designed game! After you blow up the Death Star, there's just enough time for bong hit.
-Don
Richard Stueven, Dec 8, 1992, 10:31:28 PM
In (an earlier article), (someone) wrote (something like) "In Star Wars, after you blew up the Death Star, there was just enough time for a bong hit."
In article 75...@ultb.isc.rit.edu, tjg...@ritvax.isc.rit.edu () writes:
>What is the bong hit in Star Wars?
Heh, heh. :-)
gak
Richard Stueven g...@wrs.com attmail!gakhaus!gak 107/H/3&4
Capturing the graphical output of a program (just drawing commands, or calls to any api surface like turtle graphics, or stencil/paint porter/duff renderinging API, i.e. PostScript => PDF, SVG, or HTML canvas 2d rendering context) is called "partial evaluation".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation
>In computing, partial evaluation is a technique for several different types of program optimization by specialization. The most straightforward application is to produce new programs that run faster than the originals while being guaranteed to behave in the same way.
Meta-circular evaluators are useful for partially evaluating programs, and fortunately they are easy to write in homoiconic languages like PostScript and Logo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-circular_evaluator
>In computing, a meta-circular evaluator (MCE) or meta-circular interpreter (MCI) is an interpreter which defines each feature of the interpreted language using a similar facility of the interpreter's host language. For example, interpreting a lambda application may be implemented using function application.[1] Meta-circular evaluation is most prominent in the context of Lisp.[1][2] A self-interpreter is a meta-circular interpreter where the interpreted language is nearly identical to the host language; the two terms are often used synonymously.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity
>In computer programming, homoiconicity (from the Greek words homo- meaning "the same" and icon meaning "representation") is an informal property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language.[1] The program's internal representation can thus be inferred just by reading the program itself. This property is often summarized by saying that the language treats code as data. The informality of the property arises from the fact that, strictly, this applies to almost all programming languages. No consensus exists on a precise definition of the property.[2][3]
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:
Printing Distilled PostScript:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...
The Metacircular Postscript Interpreter:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...
For example, partially evaluating ("distilling") this compact high level recursive data driven fractal PostScript pot leaf drawing program would expand it from one page of concise PS to many pages of repetivive low level PDF drawing commands.
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/pictures/leaf....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461545
DonHopkins on March 2, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-se...
I wrote a metacircular evaluator, ps.ps, but I only used it in PSIBER for debugging (single stepping through code, which the normal PostScript interpreter didn't support directly, and also drawing visualizations of code execution). So the fact that it was slow wasn't really an issue, since it wasn't used in any speed critical situation.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/ps.ps.txt
Nether GoodNeWS aka HyperNeWS aka HyperLook nor TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) used a metacircular evaluator themselves.
HyperLook could copy the image of windows to the clipboard as a PostScript drawing, but didn't need to use "PostScript capture" for that [below], because it represented drawings in its own format as a display list of PostScript data, that PostScript code interpreted to draw, and when you printed an image, it would just send a header with the drawing interpreter to the printer, followed by the drawing data and a call to the interpreter.
Maybe it was the speed of the structured drawing interpreter that people were complaining about. There is some overhead of course, but it's washed out by the fact that actually performing the drawing itself takes much more time than interpreting the data.
Or maybe you're thinking of "PostScript capture", which is effectively "partial evaluation" of arbitrary PostScript code, with respect to the imaging model (making paths, filling and stroking them, and rendering text)? You can efficiently implement PostScript capture without resorting to a metacircular evaluator, simply be redefining a few key operators like "fill", "stroke", "show", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation
PostScript capture is the technique of executing some arbitrary PostScript code that produces a drawing (which could be a traditional document in a PostScript file meant for the printer, or even a window system object like a menu), and capturing the drawing commands as another PostScript program, without any computation, conditionals, and loops. It would capture the effects of the drawing commands as another simple, flat PostScript program with all the conditionals and loops unwound (so a small recursive drawing procedure would produce an enormous flat drawing file, but most normal documents would be optimized to be smaller and even print faster), in the same global coordinate system, with unnecessary graphics state changes removed.
That's the essence of Adobe Acrobat's "Distiller", or Glenn Reid's "PostScript Distillery". I wrote distill.ps "in the spirit of Glenn Reid's Distillery" for PSIBER, and the NeWS Toolkit had its own /capture method built in, but they weren't actually used for much besides making a few illustrations.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...
>Printing Distilled PostScript
>The data structure displays (including those of the Pseudo Scientific Visualizer, described below) can be printed on a PostScript printer by capturing the drawing commands in a file.
>Glenn Reid’s “Distillery” program is a PostScript optimizer, that executes a page description, and (in most cases) produces another smaller, more efficient PostScript program, that prints the same image. [Reid, The Distillery] The trick is to redefine the path consuming operators, like fill, stroke, and show, so they write out the path in device space, and incremental changes to the graphics state. Even though the program that computes the display may be quite complicated, the distilled graphical output is very simple and low level, with all the loops unrolled.
>The NeWS distillery uses the same basic technique as Glenn Reid’s Distillery, but it is much simpler, does not optimize as much, and is not as complete.
Here's more about the metacircular interpreter and distilled PostScript:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13705664
>What you've described sounds exactly like a PostScript interpreter! You can easily write a metacircular PostScript interpreter in PostScript!
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/psiber/cyber/ps.ps.txt
>And here is a PostScript quine:
{{[ exch /dup load /exec load ] cvx} dup exec}
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/psiber/cyber/distill.ps.txt
>Glenn Reid, who also wrote books on PostScript like Thinking in PostScript, pioneered that idea in his "PostScript Language Distillery", which is the idea that grew into PDF.
http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/postscript/newerstill.ps....
Glenn tells me that the PostScript distillery was actually John Warnock's idea!
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755727
larsbrinkhoff on July 17, 2023 [–]
A list of all Logo memos, with links where I could find them.
https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28605037
larsbrinkhoff on Sept 21, 2021 | next [–]
Your LLOGO copy was for an older version of Maclisp, but eventually we (Eric and I) managed to port it over to New IO. It works fine and displays on an emulated Knight TV. (Itself a tour de force in emulation: the TV PDP-11 code runs on an emulator sharing its Unibus with the PDP-10 emulator.)
We also have an early PDP-11 Logo, an even earlier BBN PDP-10 Logo, and a later Apple II Logo (not the Terrapin version). I also wrote an emulator for the General Turtle 2500 computer slash terminal.
DonHopkins on Sept 21, 2021 | parent | next [–]
Do you have the specs for the infamous military Terrapin Snapping Turtle proposed to the Department of Defense?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608
https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf
>TURTLES AND DEFENSE
>Introduction
>At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...]
>Guidance
>The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability.
>Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...]
>Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...]
>Munitions
>The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death.
>Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrap...
>When I was 17, Terrapin published my first commercial code on their C64 Logo utilities disk: a Logo Adventure program, a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo’s list processing and functional programming capabilities. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23054174
Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments.
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp
Lars Brinkhoff got some of this code to run in MacLisp on an emulator! (I don't know how much of the historical hardware the emulator supports yet, but he's probably worked on some of that too. ;) )
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620
Thanks to Lars, here are two revisions of an AI Lab memo about LLOGO:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf
And a Logo manual and glossary of PDP-11 Logo:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf
But "no connection to the real world" is hard to sustain once you look at what people actually build with Snap!/Scratch. The ecosystem is full of bridges to physical stuff:
Cameras, microphones, audio, pen plotters, 3D (BeetleBlocks). Snap! 12.1 (video from a few days ago) adds body-language recognition, Bauhaus-style shape compositions, first-class Processes, translation updates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID7wYxzHUAc
Arduino / micro:bit / boards (Snap4Arduino, MicroBlocks, many hardware libraries):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltzlzk_zkys&list=PL5OeDsbY1E...
Robots (Finch, Hummingbird, Lego NXT, drones):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_0EqIbTlkk
Sewing machines (TurtleStitch -- embroidery from blocks; one of my favorites):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ra5ThxkrE
Web APIs and IoT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_P7MoBG250
ML/AI and digital fabrication (Ken Kahn's eCraft2Learn):
https://project.ecraft2learn.eu/
The "what's this? how do I make a thing like this?" curiosity you describe is exactly how a lot of people get pulled in -- making something move, blink, sing, or stitch on a machine they can see, rather than learning abstract syntax first. Blocks are the on-ramp; the project is the motivation.
Different audience than yours, maybe. But "just a toy walled off from reality" undersells what this community has been doing for decades.
Snap! also teaches real computer science at college level while staying accessible to kids -- not a stripped-down kiddie language. Brian Harvey: "Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch" (though he notes the original intent was closer to Logo disguised as Scratch):
https://forum.snap.berkeley.edu/t/hygienic-macros/3258/6
Re alanbernstein's point about keyboard vs GUI: Snap! is not keyboard-hostile. It has a keyboard editor for scripts -- build and edit whole scripts without the mouse, block search from the keyboard, infix arithmetic expressions typed left-to-right. Manual chapter:
https://docs.snap.berkeley.edu/user-interface-elements/#sec-...
Demo (typing formulas from the keyboard):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU
Full IDE accessibility (screen readers etc.) is still a work in progress; Jens and Brian document what's there now:
[...] I'm also a huge fan of Snap!, which has all the advantages of Logo (Lisp without parenthesis) and Scratch / eToys / Squeak / App Inventor family of block based visual programming languages, but all the power of Scheme.
If you know Scheme, then it's easy to think about Snap!: it's just Scheme with a visual block syntax, but with some functions renamed to make them easier to learn, plus all the stage and turtle graphics stuff from Scratch, running in a web browser!
I didn't realize until watching in amazement as Jens Mönig used his own creation, that it also has full keyboard support, so you can create and edit programs without using the mouse!
It's much easier to teach Scheme to kids by teaching them Snap!, because the user interface is so much better than a text editor.
I attended Snap!Con2023 in Barcelona recently, and we discussed some interesting possible extensions to Snap:
Grammar defining blocks. Right now you can create your own custom vocabularies of blocks that fit together in particular constrained ways, by writing JavaScript Snap! extensions. Develop a set of blocks for visually defining new grammars and vocabularies of custom parameterizable blocks.
For example, a grammar for representing plants with seeds, roots, stems, leaves, flowers, petals, etc. You can assemble and edit them manually by dragging and dropping from a palette, or write programs that generated and interpret and transform them, and pass them around as data, for example as instructions to the embroidery machine to sew, or logo turtle to draw.
Turtlestitch - Coded Embroidery:
https://www.turtlestitch.org/page/about
Ken Kahn led a discussion about integrating LLMs like ChatGPT with Snap!. He's the developer of eCraft2Learn for teaching kids AI programming. Ken recently made some cool Snap! extensions for integrating LLMs with the speech synthesis and recognition system, and orchestrating conversations between different characters.
Snap!Con2023: Creative uses of Snap! blocks using large language models like GPT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2rNGsbzkXI
Enabling children and beginning programmers to build AI programs:
https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/
But when it comes to LLMs, code generation, and code understanding, JavaScript has two huge insurmountable advantages over Snap! or any other block based visual programming languages:
1) First of all it's extremely well known, by both humans and LLMs.
2) And second of all, there's typically no efficient and faithful way to textually represent block based programs in a way that ChatGPT (or humans) can easily understand and generate.
Of course you could just dump out the XML or JSON save file, but that wastes your token budget, and doesn't work well, because the LLM doesn't inherently understand the syntax and semantics of save files the way it deeply groks JavaScript.
You need to define some equivalent text based language to serialize and deserialize your visual programs, or define some equivalency to an existing language, so you can translate back and forth without loss.
Like Relax/NG has an XML syntax and also a simple concise human readable syntax, both which can express the same things.
But no matter what equivalent language you come up with to serialize your block programs into, it'll never be as well known as JavaScript (unless it IS JavaScript).
I think Snap! could take advantage of its equivalency with Scheme, and you could just parse Scheme into Snap! blocks, and the other way around. And ChatGPT knows scheme pretty well, though it's not as ubiquitous and standard as JavaScript.
Logo would not be as good as Scheme, since it has ambiguities, because you need to know the number of parameters a function uses in order to parse it, since it's essentially Lisp without parens. [...]
Jens Mönig was on the Scratch Team (invited by Mitch Resnick). BYOB was presented at Scratch@MIT 2010 explicitly to merge ideas back into Scratch, not to fork the community:
https://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/announcing-byob2...
Berkeley has kept showing up at Scratch conferences (Amsterdam 2015, Bordeaux 2017), and the Scratch forums hosted BYOB/Snap! discussion for years:
https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/4455/
So "NIH syndrome," "reinventing the wheel," and "fragmenting the community" is pretty much the opposite of how these two actually interact.
Documented cross-pollination:
BYOB => Scratch: custom blocks (Scratch 2.0 took command blocks only, not reporters/lambda). That was an explicit goal:
https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Snap!
Scratch => Snap!: browser rewrite timing influenced by Scratch 2.0 plans; Morphic via John Maloney; CC-licensed costumes/sounds used under license.
Shared people: Jens (Scratch Team => Snap! lead), John Maloney (Scratch/Morphic; GP session with Jens at Scratch2015AMS), Bernat Romagosa (Snap!, MicroBlocks, Snap4Arduino -- Bordeaux, Snap!Cons).
Roko Mijic's own fictional Basilisk is fully aware of the widely documented facts. Women have reported receiving unsolicited, sexually explicit, aggressively harassing messages from Mijic. His worldview combines hyper-advanced technology with radical traditionalism, neofeudalism, and the erasure of fundamental human rights. He publicly argued that massive portions of global wealth should be concentrated entirely into the hands of a few "self-made" tech billionaires, that democracy is an inefficient system, and that a corporate-autocratic elite is the only group capable of successfully shepherding humanity into the era of artificial superintelligence. His social media output frequently intersects with alt-right and race-essentialist talking points. He engages with pseudo-scientific "race realism" arguments that claim biological differences dictate IQ and cultural compatibility, defends far-right political movements in Europe, writes off anti-racism efforts as "anti-Western" conspiracies, and aligns himself with populist factions that seek to dismantle international human rights standards.
If I can have my own Personal Jesus, Roko can have his own Personal Basilisk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804686
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kf39ck/roko_pres...
>Roko presents: Tradhumanism! "The idea is that instead of using technology to turn people into freaks with pink hair and prosthetic arms, we should use it to create a future that allows people to express an idealized version of the past." This might be the perfect rationalist convergence.
https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339314499397050372
https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339390220421230593
https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1651327867375218688
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mamsuu/roko_of_r...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p2conp/roko_gets...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1332uh3/rokos_no...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/133t856/just_got...