jshaqaw

This is interesting but also just hilarious at a meta level. I was a “low frequency” ie manual fundamental based hedge fund investor for many years. In general I think hft is a net benefit to liquidity when done in compliance with the text and spirit of regulations. But no real world allocation of resources is improved by having to game transactions to this level of time granularity. This is just society pouring resources down a zero sum black hole. Open to hearing contrary views of course.

Turbo Pascal was such an amazing product for its time. Those of young ones may not realize how horrible life was before Borland nailed IDEs - especially on home systems which didn’t exactly have advanced terminal capabilities.

My first neural net code (very very bad) was on a 286/287 back in the early 90s. 286 is kind of a forgotten chip since 386 32 bit changed the game but give a kid (ie teenage me) a 286, a 40mb hard drive, and Turbo Pascal and I felt like I could build anything!

I love the spirit of this so believe me I’m not here to denigrate it. Just sharing anecdote of building one of those “retro style” Linux/pi kits with my kids some years ago. I thought having a bare metal style machine would get them entranced by computers like it did in the early 80s. But you can’t roll back the clock. Kids today live saturated in a computerized and digital world no matter how much we may try to shelter them from it. When I saw a bare DOS prompt at age 7 it felt like all the magic in the world at my fingertips. But not for my kids. What once was science fiction to me is no more amazing to them then the fact that we have 24 hour indoor electric lighting at the touch of a switch. It’s just a different world today.

Retro lisp machines are cool. Kudos to the team. Love it.

That said… we need the “lisp machine” of the future more than we need a recreation.

Agreed. People point to the edge cases where orthodoxy and conformity crushed the brilliant innovator but for every one of those there are 1000 cranks or embittered dead end researchers claiming that only a conspiracy prevented their genius from being recognized.

I crisis in quality and also a crisis in innovation. How many years has it been since a software innovation which matters to end users? It’s been new emojis for a decade.

You would think these tech oligarchs might be concerned with some other problem facing th world. This is the only one they seem to care about and much of it just seems like fragile ego.

There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be: 1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and 2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys

We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.

Lots of finance people from an earlier era ended up there from the movie Wall Street which is hilarious since it was not intended as something glorifying the sector

Nothing gave me an intuition for assembly like TIS-100

After trying the Vision Pro at an Apple Store I’m more convinced than ever that immersive VR entertainment is the future. I have no doubt we will need high end graphics arms races for a while more.

The choices thing is interesting. I go both ways on this. Some of the story choices lead to places you don't want and didn't foresee. Part of me wants the story to go where I want it to go and thus I will wiki the conversational choices. Part of me loves that this is a story and stories can take your characters where the story takes them. In life we make all sorts of "conversational choices" where the ramifications long in the future are hard/impossible to foresee but profound.

Overall though I love the game. Nothing is perfect but this game is a blast and kudos to the developers more making something so deep, interesting, and fun.

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I remember being very proud of winning BG1 without looking up hints. Now I find myself on the wiki. Why? I’m almost 50. I’ve got kids, businesses, life, etc… I can’t play a game for hours on end of immersion every night. I get to game in an hour here hour there slices through the week. If I spent 8 of those slices looking for some random nugget instead of moving the story forward there is no way I’d keep playing. I have no illusions that I’m “beating” the game organically but I’m having fun immersed in a fantasy world and having fun is the only point here.

PS - if you aren’t playing BG3 - this game is fantastic and a worthy heir to the BG 1/2 standard

Some tech bros gonna stop reading at the “more likely to be alpha” part and start snaking on kitty litter.

I want this mostly so I can invoke an output function as GTF(Lisp)-Out

"gtfl-out &rest expressions => no values"

There are sadly no easy fixes here. Approaching 50 with a life of ADHD here. I’ve managed to build a great life but always against that burden. Thankful that when I was younger I didn’t have the universe of constant connectivity at my fingertips or I don’t know that I would have had the strength to nail things back then.

A few comments: - Most people start meds and feel like a superhero getting their powers. Like “wow now I can actually do all those things I dreamt of”. Be careful. The surge doesn’t last. Medication will always help but that initial WOW will fade. Don’t get so attached to it that you feel like crap when it does.

- It sounds trite but nothing has helped me so much as trying to make serious meditation a habit. That and exercise/diet/regular sleep. I know - it’s boilerplate. That doesn’t make it untrue.

- Give yourself a break. You are who you are. Try as much as you can to succeed within the grain. That doesn’t mean don’t try to be disciplined and ambitious etc… But dreaming what another you without ADHD might have been … well it just isn’t all that productive. We get the hand we get and it’s up to us to maximize our happiness within those constraints. Try to focus on (hopefully) all the good cards you did get.

The heck do I do with an M4 in an iPad? Scroll hacker news really really fast?

Apple needs to reinvest in software innovation on the iPad. I don't think my use case for it has evolved in 5 years.

I can't say this has topic has come up in any recent New Atlantean Royal Council meetings but we would welcome you to make a presentation on the matter.

My grandfather somehow assisted Hemingway in setting up New Atlantis and the documents declaring him and my grandmother Sir and Lady hang proudly in my living room. As far as I know my family is the sole remaining royal line of New Atlantis. Hilarious that this keeps coming up.

It’s 2024. We should be able to pitch some PE firm to help us buy the global banana supply as an option on future antimatter value.

People confuse code at the exploratory phase with final production code.

Linked lists are a massively flexible data structure which can be great when you are still feeling your way around a problem domain.

Once you have a good sense for the shape of your data it is relatively trivial to go back and update the codebase with performance optimized structures.

Does YouTube count? Yes I think TikTok is largely a hellscape for my daughters around this age. But one of them learns all sorts of crafting projects via YouTube and the other has taught herself an incredible amount on how to draw. Would be a shame to throw away access to resources like this with the bath water.

My favorite phenomenon of which you speak are the guys who haven’t thought about math since 11th grade or physics ever aside from seeing some Joe Rogan clips with Eric Weinstein but will pound their keyboards with fury that “STRING THEORY IS A BIG LIE!!!”

As a mid-90s Westinghouse winner weird nerd who never ended up in academia because of a desire to be left alone to do my research thing this hits hard:

"Biology Professor Jason Sheltzer has an interesting thread today that points in this direction. Through an ad hoc analysis, Jason discovered that while 66% of the top national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002 pursued careers in academia, this number dropped to less than a third for winners from 2003 to 2014. Now, for this to support my and Nate’s observations, you have to assume the Science Fair winners are good representations of the Weird Nerd. I personally think that’s a valid assumption! If you scroll down in his thread, you will see indeed some illustrious names of current academics among these winners. I’ll add to this list recent Nobel Laureate Katalin Kariko, who describes in her book having scored 3rd in her country in the Biology Olympiad. This is the closest thing Eastern European countries have to a Science Fair."

* Finalist but not top 10 which is what the data here was about.

Yes I agree the precedent was set there. I didn't like that either but this feels like a different scale of things at a more fraught time.

Wonderful world when the worlds richest man starts using the legal system to spend his “enemies” into oblivion.

Sadly I never even saw the CM-2 I used. Just got in via telnet.

Depends on location. UWS is high ground. Its just rainy and wet but that's it.

It couldn’t keep pace with a Cray for any tasks that weren’t optimized for its architecture. If your problem fit the SIMD model like the genetic algorithms I was implementing at the time it was just amazing.