enkiv2

Those are also things that became widespread during the 50s.

R.O.B., mentioned at the conclusion of the article.

The user's manual & technical manual have VOCOL documentation. I've only skimmed it, though.

http://www.robotu.com/Gemini_files/User_Manual.pdf starting on page 55

http://www.robotu.com/Gemini_files/Tech_Reference.pdf starting on page 47

I suspect roms/VOCREM.BIN in the 'software' package is actually the compiled VOCOL code, but I haven't disassembled it to find out yet.

Author here, making a quick correction about the RB5X.

When I wrote the article, I believed it was still produced by the original company. I later learned that while the same company produced the RB5X for about 20 years after its initial release, eventually the name & the remaining stock was sold off, twice.

They kept afloat despite only having produced a handful of bots because the stock of parts was kept in somebody's garage & ever few years when an order came it, the gang got back together to build one.

If you've got an interest in these things & aren't confident about your ability to build one from scratch, the RB5X seems like a good choice: help them clean out their garage. If you are confident in your ability to build one from scratch, I recommend downloading the code, designs, & instructions for the Gemini from Mike Fowler's site -- the Gemini is more capable than even newer robots on the market at a price comparable to what they originally asked for, & the price of components can only have gone down since.

I wrote something like this, based in part on ideas from PLN: https://hackernoon.com/mycroft-a-predicate-logic-language-ov...

The fifth generation project didn't actually use prolog, but instead a custom prolog-like language.

However, there's still work being done adjacent to 5G using real prolog, by people who thought it was an interesting idea: https://github.com/bitlaw-jp/the-constitution-of-japan

Prolog is still used in the development of expert systems, though when those systems are shipped, they have often been rewritten in an imperative language based on a Prolog prototype.

The fifth generation project, from what I understand, died because of a dedication to custom hardware using already-obsolete fabrication tech -- mid-70s flipflops-on-IC tech over late-70s microprocessor-on-IC tech, wire wrap, etc. There was an inability or unwillingness to iterate on original committee designs. By the time it folded in 1998, everything involved looked like stone knives and bearskins. Those boxes wouldn't have been able to run it fast by 1980 standards.

You can't master one language without learning others. If you learn several, mastering them will become easier, in proportion to the number you have already mastered.

HN draws a lot of its user base from the fame of the Y Combinator VC firm, and a little bit from the occasional good thread being cross-posted elsewhere. So, a good recipe for creating a similar community is to attach yourself to an existing brand the way HN did. (As with HN, the results are going to be mixed.)

I agree that web pages shouldn't have executable code. I think that's a separate issue from whether or not, given that web pages already have it, javascript is a reasonable choice. It's also a separate issue from whether or not live-editing ASTs for rich text is an appropriate GUI layer for javascript.

Basically, to the extent that web tech is acceptable at all, it has no interactivity. HTML and CSS aren't particularly good even as representations of static rich text, but they are far, far worse as graphics toolkits.

Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8

Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI

At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo

This one ("moving away from defensive programming") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj3lzsr0_I

Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsD-3jtXz0

Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ

Everybody should understand procedural generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU

Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=narjui3em1k

More hypertext history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8

Even more hypertext / UX stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs

A great explanation of Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY

Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc

Finally, these aren't tech talks but instead UI demo reels. If you have any interest in UI or UX, you should watch them. They are wonderfully cheesy, mostly doable, and despite being more than 20 years old, nobody has bothered actually implementing the useful features shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M

That title is way too clever!

Cybernetics for the Masses is great, and Lepht has some really interesting ideas. It's too bad they seem to have dropped off the grid. Does anybody know what happened?

Fundamentals can be really useful -- they're time-savers, and they're made extra valuable because most professional programmers (even those with degrees) don't really have them.

Since you have experience in development for real problems, you should have an easier time learning the fundamentals, since you'll have context & you'll be able to easily recognize potential applications. People who go into a university CS program having never worked on a real project tend to find things like time complexity unnecessarily abstract.

You're probably not behind the curve because of lacking fundamentals. Most code people get paid to write is absolute trash, showing neither common sense nor understanding of freshman-level topics. Understanding fundamentals will put you ahead of the curve permanently.

In response to some questions, comments, & corrections on mastodon, I have expanded the article. In particular, I added some context for people unfamiliar with Project Xanadu, embedded videos explaining and demonstrating ZigZag, and added footnotes explaining some mechanics and details that aren’t directly relevant to a breezy intro to the language but might be misunderstood by people unfamiliar with ZigZag in general.

No, this is totally reasonable and basically what I meant by 'escrow' in my original comment. Most systems that perform microtransactions & handle credit card stuff themselves basically do it this way -- including Google, when it comes to Adsense and Adwords.

Generally speaking, you should be swapping roles periodically.

In my experience, it works best if the person sitting is performing the planning aspects, while the person standing is critiquing or looking for bugs/typos.

If there's too much of a difference in experience level between the two people doing pair programming, I don't see the point -- it's not very effective as a didiactic tool, compared to throwing a junior engineer at a problem way over their head and waiting until they figure it out themselves.

That said, I sometimes get a lot out of performing the 'coaching' role for someone who has a lot more experience than I do, if they generally aren't good at explaining their logic, because it provides me the opportunity to ask very specific questions with very clear context about how and why they are making particular decisions. Sometimes, such questions reveal the logic behind behaviors that were learned through experience and never consciously considered yet have big ramifications on performance, code structure, or engineer effort.

Credit card fee structures make it a little complicated. Generally speaking, you'd want to pool both the input and the output, and then use paypal or something similar -- i.e., require a minimum of a couple dollars to be put in escrow, and then actually flush the payment once it reaches a couple dollars. That way, transaction fees don't totally overwhelm actual payments.

I haven't seen general-purpose systems optimized for micropayments in this way. Aside from flattr, I've seen token-coin (a blogging platform, essentially), and places like patreon roll their own system internally.

Yeah. The article kind of bothered me by assuming that its reader is trying to maximize profit, rather than maximize happiness with a sustainable income.

I love to code. I code for a living. If UBI was established, I would quit my job and code for free, because being told what to do is inherently frustrating.

Hot take: noticing cats is way more valuable than making money.

I love that there's a really rich gopher-centric community on the fediverse. It should be noted that the gopher people overlap heavily not just with forth but also with experimental hypertext.

You can (and should) export & backup your following list.

Migrating posts is complicated -- it's straightforward to export all your posts with third party tools, but you shouldn't expect to be able to move them to a new instance unless you're running it yourself, in order to avoid the possibility of faked histories. (I personally keep a backup of all my posts, and it's fairly straightforward to re-format them as a static html document if you feel like you need to re-host them for archival purposes.)

Personally, I recommend keeping accounts on several instances, and posting to different accounts corresponding to your various interests. This makes it less irritating for members of your social group that don't want to hear about particular topics, makes migration in case of instance apocalypse easier, and encourages you to stretch out your identity a bit (rather than feeling like you need to stay 'on-brand' like people do on twitter).

I wrote a bot that provides randomized follow suggestions (from its follower list) -- https://botsin.space/@FollowFriday

As for interesting people to follow (biased in favor of people who post interesting technical content) I recommend https://mastodon.social/@natecull, https://cybre.space/@a_breakin_glass, https://mastodon.social/@hisham_hm, https://mastodon.social/@tomharris, and https://hackers.town/@thegibson

I'm at https://a.weirder.earth/@enkiv2 at the moment.

Have you ever seen an apache project? The norm for code quality is abysmal, even in open source (where it's much better on average than proprietary hacks).

HR generally doesn't have the training to distinguish good code from bad code, and will be counting your repos or the lines of code in your repos if they look at your github at all.

Ultimately, the bigger issue is whether or not you feel like your competence should disqualify you from a position. If you feel that way, then you should do something about it before applying for jobs. A good way to improve your skills is to fix the code you've already written, and doing that in a public repo demonstrates progress in a way that technical peers can appreciate.

(Re: trendy frameworks -- fashion has nothing to do with fit, and trendy frameworks are overhyped specifically because people use them when they are inappropriate for the task at hand. It's not hard to pick up a new framework on the job if you're asked to do so; I would avoid trendy frameworks and focus on the basics until somebody who controls your paycheck tells you otherwise. After all, which framework is currently trendy is liable to change inbetween getting a job and being able to start work, and the people making decisions about which frameworks will be used are almost inevitably tied to the trend cycle but ten or fifteen years behind it.)

Generally speaking, people in group #4 throw an athena license or BSDL on it (though sometimes they'll throw a GPL or something on it instead).

Group #4 accounts for most individual open source projects (though not most code, since big projects tend to be huge); we discount it at our own risk.

I think you're just being bitten by the availability heuristic here. It's seemed completely ubiquitous to me since around 2014.

Tracery is straightforward enough for kids old enough to read. It doesn't produce pretty pictures, but it might be a good fit for the older kids.

You might think of grabbing an OLPC machine, making a couple demos with turtle (like, lsystems or something else with knobs that are easy to tune), and giving them that.

The Computer History Museum has a youtube channel with a lot of material on it. While it's mostly old material (oral histories from people who were movers and shakers in computer science in the 40s and 50s), it has a lot of re-uploads of technical talks from more recent conferences too. (For instance, they hosted some transfers of VHS recordings of Alan Kay lectures on OO at some mid-90s conference at Sun.)

I kind of hate the way this article is titled, considering that literally all the quotes from professional economists involve them saying "oh, this isn't very radical -- we've been saying this for 50 years and nobody has listened".

Phytohormones don't bind to human receptors.

Doesn't literally any diet that induces ketogenesis qualify as "a keto diet"? Or, has somebody branded some particular ketogenesis-inducing diet "THE keto diet"?

I'm vaguely aware of some non-epileptics trying to induce ketogenesis in order to lose weight (which seems pretty dangerous, and maybe self-defeating since smelling like turpentine is less attractive than having curves), but real ketogenic diets (as recommended by medical professionals for intractable epilepsy) generally contain plants.