Verifying my Blockstack ID is secured with the address 1P1RHGSy9qY7AqsmSrYKBB4yyTipzwM7f5 https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1P1RHGSy9qY7AqsmSrYKBB4yyTipzwM7f5
A friend built this service to solve the following problem: if you’ve ever built a voice agent or chatbot that needs to call into real phone systems, you know how painful testing can be. https://testvoice.ai/ makes that process simple. You can buy a real phone number, build dialplans visually, and make or record real calls in just a few minutes.
It’s designed for developers working on voice AI or IVR traversal. You can map call flows, test how your agent handles prompts, and verify latency or routing. All from a web interface.
Under the hood it runs on Freeswitch , postgres, python/ Fastapi, and nextjs, and includes features like call recording, versioned dialplans, and IVR traversal testing.
Importantly, both Awlaki and his teenage son who was later targeted in another drone strike, were both American citizens. You can argue as much as you like in favor of the joys of murder and assassination as a way of organizing the world, but there is no conceivable argument that this is constitutional.
Cicada 3301 is fascinating. Taken at face value (and that's a huge assumption to make) it appears to be a self-styled
"cypherpunk freemasonry" of sorts. Care to cite or summarize the evidence and case for a satoshi/cicada link (other than "hey wouldn't that be so awesome if...")?
I don't know why no one has answered this (it is brought up a few places in this thread) but if I had to guess why they didn't want to go this route I would say it's the trade-off of not not having your data be native. They presumably have a somewhat highly involved pipeline/topology of computations that data flows through. In the interests of good readable and maintainable code, having a nice declarative data representation is a big plus, and doing the computation with native Java data structures is apparently fast enough for their needs.
In Clojure the data structures work consistently across the language, which to me is one of many reasons why Clojure is a better Lisp than Common Lisp (but CL has its place).
> Moreover, those Lisp experts I have learned from didn't even mention Clojure.
On the contrary, Clojure is and has since its inception been praised and often adopted by prominent users of Scheme and Common Lisp (the list is too long, but for example the late Daniel Weinreb declared Clojure the future of Lisp). The Clojure conference in Portland this last few days is a perfect example of the cross-fertilization between the Racket/Scheme logic programming subcultures and the Clojure logic programming subcultures.
This whole "I used the language for 2 weeks so now I am qualified to change it radically" attitude is well-established in the Lisp community (yes I know Steve Yegge is a veteran lisper, but this still applies, especially to some of the other commenters). The authority on this is Brucio, the fictional author of "Lisp at Light Speed" http://replay.web.archive.org/20080722232746/http://brucio.b... Bruce's First Law of Lisp is "If it does not do exactly what you expect with zero hours consideration or experience, it is a bug in Lisp that should be fixed."
I agree, JavaScript development can be maddening, even with (and because of!) helpful plug-ins like Firebug. Lispers spoiled by swank/slime in emacs may like https://github.com/ivan4th/swank-js as a JavaScript dev environment.
It surprises me that important contributors like technomancy would not have some additional priority or clout. Without leiningen I doubt we would see one tenth of the explosion of interesting activity going on in the community. That said, I don't think anyone would like the results of democracy.
It's written in Java, so can be trivially ported to Clojure and made incrementally more Lispish, no? The kernel is still Linux but that could be fixed too, why not?
However, in addition to the observation that the communication modes or skills differ, the author makes the claim that the development of one mode/skill will produce deficiencies in the other. I don't think the author provides sufficient evidence that such an effect occurs, and I would further argue that such evidence would have to come from a more empirical rather than introspective source of knowledge (although for sure, personal experience would be what inspired the more rigorous experiment). My own experience is that quite opposite skill sets can and should be developed by individuals. Also from my own experience I would argue that knowing when to employ each different approach to communication is itself an important skill for hackers who use many different programming paradigms and technologies, as well as people who communicate with all different kinds of people (various subcultures of "creatives", scientists, academicians, business people, different socioeconomic/ethnic cultures). I think that being self-aware and well-developed is the key skill for both human-human and human-computer interaction.
The power of editing and revising printed text with a keyboard is not something that can be easily duplicated using voice. Consider trying to write code in this way. It's easy to say words but faster to type when you need custom spellings and editing words at a character level. It seems awkward to have to edit text with speech (easier to type something like C-space down down C-s quote . right C-space C-k M-x end-of-buffer C-y than to say it). Maybe some combination of keyboard and voice would work. Voice is not be ideal for a workplace situation, unless it is subvocal silent speech, which it sounds like is a technology that is almost ready.
He's a monumental figure, working for something extremely important, and surrounded by people who are very wrong. While Nader is much less respected than Stallman, the magnitude to which their respective fields are ungrateful for their respective contributions is about the same. Stallman's contributions I would argue are much bigger than Nader's. Come on he invented the OS that is now the basis of the majority of internet business. I think he deserves a little more respect for that contribution. If Nader had done something equally big in his work of keeping rogue corporations in check, we would have gone on a more Canada-like path than the Reagan-led path of decline that we did go down. Free Software has become a major force that continues to grow and improve our lives. Nader's contributions were not lasting, and have mostly been reversed by decades of corporate think tank astroturfing and lobbying that has whittled away the rights and protections of individuals.
Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary biologists with the anti-science rightwing religious groups. While I am on the side of science of course, it annoys me how counterproductive the whole fight has become. The need for evo bio people to fend off ID types in arguments has made the pro-science public less humble, and less accurate too, because we forget how little we actually know about how evolution works, and instead cling to the politically strongest ideas that science generates. In fact, many fundamental problems that need to be solved are being bullied into the margins by the need to make evolutionary theory seem stronger than it really is. In the last 10-15 years The MIT Press has put out several good books delving into the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, among other things exploring the role of complexity in evolution. It may surprise some that "natural selection" is not universally agreed on, as there is a competing paradigm in which the production of forms is the driver of change, and selection is hypothesized to be a filter, having more of a conserving than progressive force on organisms. The problem is that too many scientists outside of biology assume that the neo-Darwinian synthesis popularized by philosophers like Dennett and Dawkins (also fighters in the battle against religion, not coincidentally), is the one and established view, and allow it to shape the interpretation of results in other fields. Perhaps if we were to ignore the creationists instead of fighting them, then we could acknowledge the primitive state of our models and make some real progress.
Have you ever been to common-lisp.net? It's no CPAN, but same idea. In practice you've got everything you need to work with, no need to reinvent the wheel.
I think (today's) Lisp could be blub, but only if Lisps were to become the standard category of programming languages. Then some other more advanced meta-lisp that is a few layers of abstraction up, and applying some yet-undiscovered principles of computer science in its high-level semantics would be at the cutting edge, and the vanilla lisps would be mundane and practical-seeming.
I’m a Perl developer and a big fan of Lisp. However, it should be well known by now that Common Lisp is the only dynamic language that beats C in performance. It also defeats Python and Ruby in productivity and joy. And the code is beautiful and clear to read. It used to be that there weren’t any good routes to using Lisp for the web, and it didn’t used to be fast either, but now both of those obstacles have been overcome. Ruby is unstable and keeps changing, making previous code unusable. Anyway Ruby is just a lame hack impersonation of a Lisp. Everyone should skip the trends and use Lisp. If for whatever reason Lisp is not an option, Perl is the alternative that’s been around a long time and is going to keep growing. It has CPAN. End of story!
I use Lisp whenever I can. I think most people who have been initiated into thinking in Lisp would prefer to use it over other languages in most circumstances. Many recent languages have grown to accommodate Lisp thinking in differently branded packages for this reason. It is fair to view Lisp as the ultimate high-level language that will persist as other languages come and go. The main reason is its ability to process itself. That's a key innovation that makes it more than just another programming language. There are programming languages, and then there is Lisp.