dorkmind

It's just ordinary newspaper-style writing in a shock jock style. (Insert stock joke about Milgram experiment.) I think it goes back to Bolshevism and especially the "talk hard" ethos of Pump Up the Volume. Hip-hop and rap are other influences.

https://archive.org/details/pump_up_the_volume_1990

Also, from an art point of view, I just like the idea of recontextualizing the computer as a device in a psychology experiment. The games you can play with this idea are pretty weird. For example: would you conduct a psychological experiment that attempts to get people better at rationalizing, and risks turning the subjects into monsters capable of rationalizing the decision to perform progressively more grotesque modifications of their body, apparently enhancing their abilities, in the style of Iron Man?

> If you look at the level of public interest, then I think it becomes important to actually look into these things

This argument actually works on hormonal teens...as for everyone else, I think this is called ad populum or something, at any rate the appeal to popularity.

A logical fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

> How much did Stalin sleep?

https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stalin-sleep

If you aren't already delegating everything already, and evaluating their work, and delegating the evaluation of that work...are your people just standing around watching you work as hard as possible?

Knowing who is working the hardest, and having some idea of what kind of bonus they expect at Christmas...

With all due respect, by now the roles at any organization, especially start-ups, are commodity off-the-shelf parts; SKU given by the bullet points of responsibilities on the job availability advertisement. At start-ups, you are also required to be a wild animal; reading any translation of Gilgamesh I'm sure will get the relevant point across.

This is part of the semi-cult semi-gang status of start-up corporations. Having silly ideas about the leader is part of the experience, part of the allure.

I can't underestimate how thrilling it is to be a part of a cult of personality. It's absolutely enchanting. I'm sure Jung would have a lot to say about this, or Freud. It is part of a natural primal instinct to fight and push oneself to the limit.

Reminds me of this: https://soundcloud.com/studybuddhism/strategies-for-2?in=stu...

> We’ve all been hearing the hype lately about low-code and no-code platforms.

This is the first sentence of one of these "articles". It's a classic buzzword, just another brand of enterprise software marketing gimmicks.

Anything to keep people from using, say, 3x5 index cards in an innovative way or applying the concepts like RACI matrix outside a computing context, to the organizational structure itself.

This entire ecosystem is fascinating; I highly recommend working in enterprise software for at least 18 months, which is how long I made it before my brain short circuited.

When will OpenAI make GPT-3 available for academic study? Or are there no plans to do so yet?

This is also said of mathematics, but rather when the student is successful in learning a theorem.

I would argue that outright heresy is the way to go; rebellion only gets you so far.

This is what happens when philosophy, sophistry, and ethics decide to go on vacation to the Bahamas together while their husbands work at major investment banks.

The release of the source code is actually more of a symbolic signal that the competitive value of the source code has reached a certain level. And that is within n orders of magnitude of the level where there is enough energy and money to pay lawyers to pursue, say, trademark violation or copyright infringement against anyone conducting such research.

So to be perfectly safe, one would be ultra-paranoid and stick to games released in the 20th century and then frame it as a kind of historical landmark in the video game market: what do video games in the 20th century say about what we knew about operant conditioning up to that point?

Example: suppose a behaviorist foundation and ask questions about really minute details related to visual and motor processing. Another: observe the expected and actual effects on behavior.

Would you conduct a Stanford Prison Experiment style of experiment if it were done with video games? That is, the players are associated with guards and prisoners, and they play out similar roles that the original experiment outlined, but in a virtual world?

I like LSD too; I wish the government would legalize it.

related: https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...

Bill Atkinson waited until 2016 to talk about LSD as it related to his work; Steve Jobs has also gone public about LSD.

LSD makes you pretty tough. Many people have a hard time digesting that, so they choose to be afraid of LSD instead of recognizing it.

What is the Tao-drug connection? I feel like this is a case of Orientalism where Western drug culture is getting in the way of popular perception of Taoism, especially Chuang Tzu. Why aren't intellectual snobs trading in-jokes about Taoism and Zen and Mahayana Buddhism and the Diamond Sutra? It's like they ceded a huge swath of territory to the stoners, and for no good reason, I might add.

Why is there no popular Taoist movement? Why was it marginalized in the hippie movement? Why did intellectuals allow the hippies to control the perception of Taoism?

Chuang Tzu is just so fundamental. I can't see how you can go wrong adding it to a standard Western education.

    YOUR LIFE HAS A LIMIT but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain! If you do good, stay away from fame. If you do evil, stay away from punishments. Follow the middle; go by what is constant, and you can stay in one piece, keep yourself alive, look after your parents, and live out your years.

You would think there would be more interest in psychological research. Or am I wrong, and it would be a copyright violation to download the source code and assets, compile, and ask volunteers to play the game?

I have a hard time believing the courts would object to psychological research conducted this way though; would video game companies really be willing to license this way? They would be liable for any ethical violations of experimenters; it doesn't seem like it would be a simple matter from the point of view of fiduciary duty. Better to leave the men in white coats alone.

Does listening to white noise increase the fractal dimension the same way as drugs?

I noticed that the book bindery closed in Berkeley a bit ago. It's a shame, since I had a conversation with the guy who ran it years ago, and the options he had were really dazzling. I think with a little life it could be turned into a hipster boutique, but perhaps I'm ten years too late...

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/12/02/an-afternoon-at-pett...

There are, of course, plenty of book binderies; this shop just had a ton of character. It should have merged with Castle in the Air! Alas, that shop has closed too.

Wow. This is going to have a big effect. We can't call Russians felons anymore!

> why did python decide to break backwards-compatibility

I think this is actually because of Mr. van Rossum's employment at Google. Taking money from one customer exclusively just killed Python's future. It would kill any ordinary business, too.

Programming languages are like religions...they survive on donations and free labor. I think Google should have been milked for cash and Python should have been used as a brand showcase for its donors in front of large conference crowds. Showing a bunch of stinking hippies that Corporate America (tm) is scrambling for a chance to throw money at you...it's a pretty picture!

I've actually wondered if a True Hipster (tm) ever thought of starting a company to develop software for vintage Apple hardware emulated by one of the many open source choices available. The thinking here is that such software affords a higher degree of reliability since the platform is totally dead.

The thinking for a long time was that computer software was compute-limited, that all applications were as intensive as video games, audio / video editing, and 3D rendering. In reality, people may pay for innovative interfaces and data formats when they organize their work in a new way. Software could be used in an "offensive" way to take entire industries as interlocking roles within organizations. Each of these roles, save manual labor and janitorial work, benefits from education, and the nature of that education is to develop certain patterns of thought & behavior.

Software could be designed with the educational background of the user in mind. I'm speaking mostly of enterprise software here, but it could be applied to CAD shops, publishing, anyone who has an education and uses a computer. I'm not talking about Mechanical Turk here.

The idea is to take education philosophy as the common software for all education computer-enhanced roles and design software for educated people that exposes stuff like

    - the ideal way to learn the structure of the software data model

    - text and point-and-click data input and output

    - data processing language

> Zuckerberg

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/17/technology/twitter-f...

This is the guy who screwed up so bad that Congress started going after silicon valley.

Our lawmakers have to clean up after this guy. He's the picture of ethical compromise, not engineering innovation!

Sounds like an untestable non-falsifiable theory. Similar to nuclear deterrence in that regard; it reminds me of the doctrine that one should cultivate a persona that appears more irrational than you really are when nuclear weapons are involved.

In short, it's closer to outright sophistry than science to introduce the quasi-religion which is a sort of a put down that has no basis in fact.

> This is a toy language implemented by a single person—use for quiet enjoyment only.

Quiet enjoyment training! Soundless hedonism! Or would that be unsound hedonism? Am I breaking the rules of propositional logic or first-order?

Can I make quiet enjoyment the focus of my online persona? Hot Ziggity! I need some cheese and toast!

Edit: Will ya look at this!

Self-Hosted: self-hosted parser and interpreter are done, work on self-hosted transpiler to C for bootstrapping is around 90% complete.

Compiled: Foolang is intended to be capable of producing native, monolithic executables—without compromising the interactive development experience.

Performant: type-annotated and compiled Foolang code should perform about as well as equivalent -O0 C++ code. To be fair: this will require more effort from the compiler than C++, but not drastically so—a partial evaluation pass should cover most of it.

Type inference: while Foolang's typesystem should be considered weaksauce by today's standards, doing basic type inference is critical for the intendend functionality.

Supervised and isolated threads: Foolang threads will not share memory, hopefully providing a subtrate for fault tolerant computing akin to what Erlang does. (Unlike Erlang Foolang does allow thread-local side-effects.)

Smalltalkish development environment: while Foolang keeps it's code in files and allows you to use your favorite editor, it still wants to provide an integrated experience similar to Smalltalks.

Extensible syntax & code generation: Foolang is intended to offer a compile-time computation facility similar to Lisp's macros, allowing both syntactic convenience and ability to generate code.

Why not declare AT&T, Comcast, et al. to be public utilities, by an Act of Congress?

I saw this the other day: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1403062097156657156

I'm hearing a preacher put a capstone on the Protestant Reformation with hints of Islamic Alchemy. I don't quite understand what is going on, but it sounds like a mixture of sophistry and engineering.

It's a good thing Hollywood did him because he's relevant, and as far as I can tell, there isn't any explanation for that. He should be a random rich dork, but he's the Great Sorcerer of the West.

1. NYT asks for money up front via that link. I've learned that for some journals, if you use a search engine to query for keywords in the title ("jpeg file sells for 69 million" in this case, without the double quotation marks) then you can click on the same link, but this time you get to read it for free!

2. As for the content, the art world is generally known for money laundering. I suspect that NFT will be used for money laundering as well.

Bitcoin will implode once it becomes an intolerable burden on the global financial system. I think greed is going to sink the network because there is already an "out of control" mentality present in its origin. There just isn't interest in converting bitcoin to a central bank...unless El Salvador wants to build it?

Do cocaine cartels use bitcoin?

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the wiki page for CUDA has a list of open problems in CS research:

    Accelerated rendering of 3D graphics
    Accelerated interconversion of video file formats
    Accelerated encryption, decryption and compression
    Bioinformatics, e.g. NGS DNA sequencing BarraCUDA[55]
    Distributed calculations, such as predicting the native conformation of proteins
    Medical analysis simulations, for example virtual reality based on CT and MRI scan images
    Physical simulations, in particular in fluid dynamics
    Neural network training in machine learning problems
    Face recognition
    Distributed computing
    Molecular dynamics
    Mining cryptocurrencies
    BOINC SETI@home
    Structure from motion (SfM) software

I'm sure what Google is doing is higher up the food chain, but I think this list is a good starting place for undergraduates, especially juniors, who want to focus on CS research. I would only add bio-statistics specifically to this list and mention the possibility of applying AI to bio-engineering.

Do you think this would appeal to post-secondary students?

It's hard to overestimate how the greed-based ethics compromises of silicon valley are a direct result of the intention to create silicon valley and the genetic material that went into it.

This all comes at a price: paranoia surrounding math research, which everyone assumes is the control function for electronic creation.

It's just an experiment in creating toys for mathematicians, who have better uses for their time anyway.

> fewer young men are in the work force Hmm.. I should change my name to "Fewer Young Men" and get a job!!

Magicians and facts don't mix.

It's hard to overestimate how greed-based ethics compromises dominate the genetic material of silicon valley.

This all comes at a price: paranoia surrounding math research, which everyone assumes is the control function for any electronic creation.

It's just an experiment in creating toys for mathematicians, who have better uses for their time anyway.

10 years too late...better late than never!!

I think you need to read the first few chapters of After Virtue to appreciate the concept behind creating things for people to enjoy directly; it's a form of art, essentially reducing the overgrown calculator known as a "computer" to a beautiful vase holding a flower arrangement.

Here is the link: https://archive.org/details/4.Macintyre/page/n17/mode/2up

This is a sort of test playground for marketing, brands, and so on since the programs occupy a no man's land between games, academic research, toys, entertainment, and programming.

It also satisfies the self-feeding dogfood condition: similar to games such as RoboWar, it is difficult to resist the temptation to experiment at the simulation level, a phenomenon that could be described as the MFTL effect.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/MFTL.html