HackerNews sadly never fails to disappoint. Thanks for taking the time to share, that was exactly what I was looking for! Would endorse this link for any lurkers.
The LISP (elisp?) syntax itself gives me a headache to parse so I think I'll stay away for now, but I'll definitely be thinking about how to build similar functionality into my high level application code -- self modification is naturally a big part of any decent AGI project. At the risk of speaking the obvious, the last sentence was what drove it home for me:
It is not just some opaque string that gets to enjoy all of the benefits of your language. It is a first class list of elements that you can inspect and have fun with.
I'm already working with LLM-centric "grammars" representing sets of standpoint-specific functions ("pipelines"), but so far I've only been thinking about how to construct, modify, and employ them. Intelligently composing them feels like quite an interesting rabbit hole... Especially since they mostly consist of prose in minimally-symbolic wrappers, which are probably a lot easier for an engineer to mentally model--human or otherwise. Reminds me of the words of wonderful diehard LISP-a-holic Marvin Minsky:
The future work of mind design will not be much like what we do today. ...what we know as programming will change its character entirely-to an activity that I envision to be more like sculpturing.
To program today, we must describe things very carefully because nowhere is there any margin for error. But once we have modules that know how to learn, we won’t have to specify nearly so much-and we’ll program on a grander scale, relying on learning to fill in details.
In other words: What if the problem with Lisp this whole time really was the parentheses? ;)
Glad you liked the post. I didn't do any effort to make the elisp readable, so please don't let that fully put you off the topic! :D
I keep meaning to expand on the idea. I keep not doing so. I have higher hopes that I can get back to the rubik's cube code. Even there, I have a hard time getting going.
But they said "sadly". They said "HackerNews sadly never fails to disappoint".
If they really meant the opposite that "HackerNews never disappoints" why would that be "sad"?
But since they said "sadly" I think they really meant what they wrote which is that HN consistently disappoints them. Maybe they meant that the Lisp articles on HN do not go into describing exactly how "code as data" works in actual practical matters and that is consistently disappointing? And they are finally happy when someone explained "code as data" to them in the comments section?
> In other words: What if the problem with Lisp this whole time really was the parentheses? ;)
I am yet to find a syntax style more ergonomic than s-expressions. Once you appreciate the power of structural code editing your view of s-expressions is likely to change
The LISP (elisp?) syntax itself gives me a headache to parse so I think I'll stay away for now, but I'll definitely be thinking about how to build similar functionality into my high level application code -- self modification is naturally a big part of any decent AGI project. At the risk of speaking the obvious, the last sentence was what drove it home for me:
I'm already working with LLM-centric "grammars" representing sets of standpoint-specific functions ("pipelines"), but so far I've only been thinking about how to construct, modify, and employ them. Intelligently composing them feels like quite an interesting rabbit hole... Especially since they mostly consist of prose in minimally-symbolic wrappers, which are probably a lot easier for an engineer to mentally model--human or otherwise. Reminds me of the words of wonderful diehard LISP-a-holic Marvin Minsky: In other words: What if the problem with Lisp this whole time really was the parentheses? ;)source is Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1609/aimag.v12i2...