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samth

1,710 karma · joined June 8, 2010

I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Indiana University.
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samth··on Dots: Always-on agents
That works for some things, like signing into my library website (it's more annoying that you'd hope, though). It's not going to work to send text messages as me, though.
samth··on Dots: Always-on agents
The big problem here is that most things don't connect. AIUI, OpenClaw works by basically knowing your passwords. But that can't work for a real product, and that means that dots can't access anything that doesn't want to give it access.
samth··on Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
Random Lives seems like it was much less vibe coded and did a better job.
samth··on Racket v9.3
Yes, Racket is built on top of Chez (there's a legacy mode with its own runtime but that's not very important).
samth··on Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
How much more intelligence will it take to get people to be ok with data center construction? How much more intelligence will be needed to reduce overuse of antibiotics? How much more intelligence is necessary to enable free trade with Canada?
samth··on Polypad
This is the edtech product that my son (2nd grade) has liked the most from school.
samth··on Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good
HN should partner with Pangram to give an AI score to things that are submitted.
samth··on Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries
Is the protocol documented so that other people can build language front-ends?
samth··on Rivian's TM-B electric bike
You don't need 3000W, 1kW is plenty. I have a Yuba Mundo (one of the biggest long-tail cargo bikes) and my Bafang motor tops out around 1kW and it's plenty even for the biggest hills here in Bloomington (which is quite hilly).
samth··on Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model
I tried this also, and it was totally garbage for me too (with a similar refusal as well as other failures).
samth··on Is sound gradual typing dead? Performance problems in Typed Racket (2016)
No, this is exactly what is meant by soundness. Using the `Any` type in TypeScript can result in values that have type `integer` being actually strings, which is unsoundness.
samth··on Advanced Scheme Techniques (2004) [pdf]
The main implementation of Racket today is built on top of Chez Scheme, which uses the techniques described by Dybvig that I linked to.

In the earlier implementation of Racket, indeed it doesn't convert to CPS but does use something like A-normal form. There, continuations are implemented by actually copying the C stack.

samth··on Thoughts on Racket and Chez Scheme (2021)
The predictions from this post have almost entirely turned out to be wrong. Chez Scheme upstream decided to merge in Racket's changes entirely, and to make the lead developer of Racket (Matthew Flatt) a core Chez developer. These days Matthew is the most active Chez developer. Over the past few years, half of the serious Chez committers are people who come from Racket.
samth··on Advanced Scheme Techniques (2004) [pdf]
It's not true that you need to use CPS to implemented first-class continuations. There are plenty of slow ways to do it, and even if you want to be fast you can do multiple different things. Dybvig describes a number of options in his thesis: https://www.cs.unc.edu/xcms/wpfiles/dissertations/dybvig.pdf
samth··on Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction
The post doesn't mean there are 20 unemployed people, but that there are 20 interchangable pest control contractors who all do an adequate job, and so the one they fired was easy to replace.
samth··on On eval in dynamic languages generally and in Racket specifically (2011)
No, macros and eval are quite different. You can see this for example in Python or JavaScript, which have eval but not macros.
samth··on Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp
The big difference between SBCL and Racket today is support for parallelism, and that's about decisions made by both projects a very long time ago. Racket has incrementally added significantly more parallelism over the years, but supporting lightweight parallel tasks that do IO (as in a web server) is still not something Racket's great at.

(Source: I'm one of Racket's core developers.)

samth··on Reversing the fossilization of computer science conferences
This article is mostly whining that evidence-free speculation about how to write good software is no longer publishable in top conferences. And the major evidence cited is that there's a specific citation style required, a standard feature of every kind of publishing since forever. I promise (having reviewed many times for the specific conference under discussion) that no one's paper is rejected (or even denigrated) for failing to use appropriate citation style, people comment on it the same way they would comment on any other style issue.
samth··on AI 2027
I think it's not holding up that well outside of predictions about AI research itself. In particular, he makes a lot of predictions about AI impact on persuasion, propaganda, the information environment, etc that have not happened.
samth··on The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray
Just to be clear, the word "alpha" does not appear in the text of "Call of the Wild".
samth··on Bicameral, Not Homoiconic
Perhaps in that case you should supply the definition that the author ought to have known.
samth··on Bicameral, Not Homoiconic
Indeed, the Rust macro system was designed by people who had worked on the Racket macro system previously.
samth··on Bicameral, Not Homoiconic
Notably, the definition given in the Wikipedia entry referencing TRAC means that "homoiconic" is a property of an _implementation_, not of a language. This would mean that Lisp, a programming language, could not properly be described as homoiconic, since it admits multiple implementations including those that do not have this property (eg, SBCL rather clearly doesn't).
samth··on Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo (2016)
History is of course valuable to learn, but as a criticism of the work this is almost precisely the "turn to the camera and say that he's the same kind of communist I am" tweet made flesh.
samth··on NPM and NodeJS should do more to make ES Modules easy to use
We considered that syntax, but `from` was not a reserved keyword already, whereas `import` was, so the parsing situation with the actual syntax was much better.
samth··on The Moral Economy of the Shire
This is just entirely false. As a counterpoint, I recommend this passage about the washing in the Texas Hill County. https://x.com/trainallday247/status/1796732464838160650
samth··on Racket Language
Very few people I know doing real work in Racket have a SLIME-like workflow. In general, Racket discouraging this style is related to us being a bunch of professors, but not really in the way you say. Instead, it's because it's not possible to give a sensible semantics to the top-level, especially in the presence of macros. We care a lot about macros, and we also care a lot about sensible semantics, and thus the attitude towards the REPL. The slogan in the Racket community that "the top level is hopeless" expresses this sentiment.
samth··on OpenAI Sora's first short film – "Air Head," created by shy kids [video]
It's a mistake to call this "Sora's" film, any more than a photograph is "Canon's" photo. Sora is just another tool here.
samth··on Total Functional Programming (2004) [pdf]
> Our hardware has state.

Indeed it does. But why is this opposed to a connection to mathematics?

samth··on Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
The idea that Mitchell Baker "insinuated herself" into Mozilla is ridiculous. She was an early Netscape employee, one of the original creators of the Mozilla project, and a founder of the Mozilla Foundation.
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