mtraven

> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT

The whole point of Emacs is that it is a radically customizable platform, and if you don't like the behavior of some feature you can modify it yourself with a few lines of Lisp. Forking the whole project over a change to one obscure feature makes zero sense.

Status: Emacs user since it was implemented as TECO macros (1981 or so), but I don't use registers.

  Location: San Francisco
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  Technologies: Clojure, Java, SQL, Python, R, Dataviz, Typescript, Spark...
  Résumé/CV: https://hyperphor.com/mike-travers-resume.html
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Everything about me: http://hyperphor.com

What I say these days: Unix went from the worst operating system around, to the best, without getting appreciably better.

Not entirely true. But the Unix model of computation has obviously won. The Lisp Machine model, well, nobody even understands what that means any more.

Couldn't Andreesen hire somebody to at least make his brainfarts sound interesting?

I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.

https://www.amazon.com/Inconsistency-Robustness-Studies-Logi...

I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now.

Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be.

For more of Minsky's thoughts on human intelligence, here's a recent book that collected some of his writings on education: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin... (disclaimer: I wrote the introduction).

Carl Sagan: Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? ... I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent.

Have you ever looked at a Unix man page?

And while Common Lisp has some functions that might be swiss army knives of functionality, that is not "the philosophy of Lisp", it's a particular style. Clojure and Scheme are just as much Lisp as CL, and as other people have noted, their style is very similar to Haskell.

Mostly quiescent at this point, and mostly about politics and religion and other non-technical matters.

But since its been going for 17! years, there's enough thoughts on Lisp to interest hacker types http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/search?q=lisp

Negroponte himself has always been a politician, a hypester, and a sleaze. His one true innovation was in fundraising – he was able to get industries that weren՚t used to funding research (eg the newspapers) to pony up for industry consortia. This was, maybe, better than the usual DoD funding that kept the AI lab alive, but it came with constraints of its own, including trying to impose IP agreements on the graduate students that made it difficult to open-source software. And of course in later days (I was mercifully gone by then) the creative approach to fundraising ran into even more serious issues with Jeffrey Epstein.

I՚d say evaluations of the Media Lab as an institution should be done separately from evaluations of any particular program or researcher who may have passed through there, because while the institution has some fundamentally broken aspects, there has been a lot of good work done there.