juliangamble

This is the fridge that is used in the book and movie 'The Mosquito Coast'.

But would it have run Shufflepuck Cafe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128631

I am so proud to be an Australian technologist today.

Some more

- Cambridge Centre for Computing History - https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

- London Museum for Science - Babbage's Difference Engine https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/charles...

- National Museum of Computing (near Bletchley Park Museum) https://www.tnmoc.org/

- Bletchley Park Museum https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

- Manchester Museum (Manchester Baby) https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/meet-ba...

I visited these all last year in a single trip to the UK and it was incredible. I can recommend it to anyone who has spent some time thinking about the history of computing.

I'd like to call out the work from Nada Amin in this area:

Dafny and verification-aware programming, including proof by induction to verify properties of programs (for example, that an optimizer preserves semantics). Dafny Sketcher (https://github.com/namin/dafny-sketcher)

Multi-stage programming, a principled approach to writing programs that write programs, and its incarnation in multi-stage relational programming for faster synthesis of programs with holes—with the theoretical insight that a staged interpreter is a compiler, and a staged relational interpreter for a functional language can turn functions into relations running backwards for synthesis. multi-stage miniKanren (https://github.com/namin/staged-miniKanren)

Monte Carlo Tree Search, specifically the VerMCTS variant, and when this exploration-exploitation sweet spot is a good match for synthesis problems. VerMCTS (https://github.com/namin/llm-verified-with-monte-carlo-tree-...), and Holey (https://github.com/namin/holey).

Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS

Thanks for your article. The references section was interesting.

I'll add to the discussion a 2018 Nature letter: "Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0102-6

and a 2024 Nature article "Modeling hippocampal spatial cells in rodents navigating in 3D environments" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-66755-x

And a simulation in Github from 2018 https://github.com/google-deepmind/grid-cells

People have been looking at spacial awareness in neurology for quite a while. (In terms of the timeframe of recent developments in LLMs).

> Anything more complex than a few lines, you can just copy it from lib\ folder of the CD-ROM. There's a component for everything. You want to left-pad a string?

This got me.

They started with a different, more brilliant idea, of using human brains as a giant neural net, then backed away from that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832

“Zero success” seems a bit strong. People have been able to get 96% accuracy on MINST digits on their local machine. https://norse.github.io/notebooks/mnist_classifiers.html I think it may be more accurate to say “1970s level neural net performance”. The evidence suggests it is a nascent field of research.

Quibble: Both Clojure and Scala have a Software Transactional Memory implementation, and the original Clojure Ant demo showed this.

I did the tour of Bletchley Park today and my Tour Guide said he'd met Betty Webb, that he mourned her loss, and that when he had met her at a reunion, she had remained tight-lipped about what her work had been on.

> These “limitations” inhibit truly intelligent behavior in machines, LeCun says. This is down to four key reasons: a lack of understanding of the physical world; a lack of persistent memory; a lack of reasoning; and a lack of complex planning capabilities.

The University that hosted "The Little Schemer" and all its derivatives. Those books were a delight and taught me to think about programming in a way that other languages had not. (Even if I didn't go to that University). https://prl.khoury.northeastern.edu/teaching.html

I had been to a Scheme conference in Washington, adjunct to the Clojure Conference one year, and it was attended by many undergraduates from Northeastern, (and the authors of those books that I got a photo with.)

I have to feel sympathy for those undergraduates I spoke to. They gave a strong feeling, even then (8 years ago), that it was time for the University to move on in language choice.

I had a similar experience in the late 90s when the world was picking up Java, and our University insisted on teaching in Eiffel.

Like a @Nanoraptor concept art, except real…

I’ve tried different part detectors, and nothing has been as good as the Google Image search (download the Google App if you’re on an iPhone.) I’ve found it surprisingly good at identifying LEGO parts.

There is some code to generate Lego images from Lego 3d files here and use it to train models:

https://github.com/jtheiner/LegoBrickClassification

It is based on this post (which others have mentioned)

https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-lego-the-software-side/

> Acorn did ship a computer with the 65816—the Acorn Communicator—but when Sophie Wilson visited WDC in 1983 and saw Mensch and crew laying out the 65816 by hand, it struck her: if this motley crew on a card table could design a CPU, so could Acorn. Thus Wilson and Steve Furber forged their own CPU: the Acorn RISC Machine.

I’ve heard some claims that to get closer to brain-like energy efficiency you’d need to use a spiking neural network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiking_neural_network

The author spends lots of time modelling axial tilt to represent the seasons.

Then there was this gem:

> I also used this program to create digital building instructions. My takeaway from this is that it works really well for small models, but it has serious usability problems on larger models. When you make changes to the model or change an early step in the instructions, it will often break the layout of the instructions in many places so that most of it needs to be redone. This was a lot of tedious work, but I ended up with a 264 page, 436 step instructions PDF.

Wow.

Charles Petzold (author of The Annotated Turing, and Code - The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software) is in the process of writing a book about this. You can see drafts here:

https://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2016/12/Computer-of-the-...

https://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2019/06/Computer-of-the-...

21:48 the reasoning is facinating. "OOP thrived in an age of monoliths. But program units are getting smaller. They don't need as many internal boundaries. They are often coupled by less strongly typed schema."

The health and environment effects of that one aren't great: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/

Perhaps the more apt analogy is that we need "a John Von Neuman" to come and organise the pieces to give us that leap.

There have been several PhD theses on trying to fix nitrogen to grow wheat in the dessert. To my knowledge none have been successful.

The original holder of the insulin patent gave it away free - and yet thousands of American families have struggled to pay for it: https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2021/the-astronomical-pri... I get that this engineering is cool. I think there are other ways to ensure that American families have access to medication.

Aussie!

Aussie!

Aussie Aussie Aussie!!!

> The U.S.’s Skylab embarrassment over Australia resulted in no human injuries. President Jimmy Carter apologized for the mess. The city of Esperance issued NASA a $400 littering ticket that they never paid.