Interestingly that's the one point of the article I have a disagreement with. Yeah, good thinking comes when reformulating your ideas. Also, reformulating ideas is part of the traditional writing process. However it's does not necessarily focus writers/thinkers on the reformulating ideas in their most value adding form.
I've watched some YouTube videos narrated by AI that were created by those who's native language I assume to be Chinese but the value of the content is higher and more concentrated than those from the native speakers.
While I've watched many for whom English is not their first language struggle in technical talks and lose most of the meat if their discussion to their struggle with the language conversion.
While the example of language barriers being skipped over and providing value in that circumstance is obvious I suspect more is possible by avoiding unnecessarily focus on prose or technical aspects of communication and focusing on the ideas themselves.
Imagine if the cost of not assuming a background in technical/textbook writing were zero. Freeing up authors to explain more thoroughly. Perhaps, more effort can be spent on thinking up analogies, metaphor or examples to help communicate an idea.
I think this game is a better intro to lean than the Lean for Functional Programming book. However I've gotten stumped on some of the puzzles and had to Google some solutions for them since some tactics and semantics weren't explained well enough that I could intuit how to use them. And naturally, I would avoid their use until they are crucial to finishing a level (at which point I needed Gemini would point them out to me). Unfortunately, some levels even Gemini can't help with because it was trained on older versions of the game.
Reading this makes me wish someone would really try to make Project Xanadu a reality. A network built on Content Addressable Storage and a Version Control System is some thing I'd really like to see invested in.
The spec was kept proprietary and patented until about 2019. All you had before that was ramblings by an eccentric character who was 100% sure he was correct.
> Bottom crums in the granfilade represent atoms. Atoms come in two varieties: characters and orgls. Character bottom crums are stored as spans of characters, rather than individual bytes. These consist of a pointer to a block of physical storage, either in core or on disk, containing the bytes themselves, and an (integer) length, telling the number of bytes in the block. Since each of these bytes has an implicit wid of 0.0.0.0.1, the character span has a wid of 0.0.0.0.〈number of characters in the span〉. Orgl bottom crums are stored in a similar fashion, but instead of literal data bytes, pointers to the fulcrums of orgls (poomfilades) are stored.
Was this jargon normal in 1984 because we hadn't invented words like "addresses" and "structs" yet?
It's not a reality for a lack of trying. Multiple people have spent (literal!) lifetimes working on Xanadu and multiple businesses poured a great deal of money and effort into it way back in the day.
It continues to not be a thing because, even though the idea is superficially appealing to a certain engineer mind and that's why people get sucked into the cult, in reality it's not something anybody wants and it's solving a problem nobody has.
Right. I knew those people back when Autodesk owned Xanadu. The fundamental problem was that tracking and paying for text ownership and viewing down to the word level isn't really very useful. The Xanadu people were libertarians into micropayments. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Not cheap views, expensive ones, like Lexis/Nexis.
Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.
A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it does not.
A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works.
Some complex systems actually work.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. One has to start over, beginning with a working simple system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
> Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.
What would make images harder than anything else? My naive self thinks, "hey, isn't that just one long base64-encoded word?" Apparently not, or they would've done it and moved on.
And why do you say that about distributed systems? What I've read of Xanadu (primarily the Wired article) made it sound like there'd be a relatively small number of commercial servers everyone else would subscribe to. Cue IBM's "five computers are enough" apocrypha. Is that what you mean?
I find everything about Xanadu fascinating, in kind of a slow-moving train crash sort of way, and would love hearing more bystander takes!
> What would make images harder than anything else?
Because diffs of image files are not very useful. Nelson's thing was very fine-grained tracking of who wrote what. That doesn't map well to images or video.
I just finished writing a long rant on the other Project Xanadu related submission today where I specifically noted that Xanadu has a feature called a "permascroll" where everything you publish gets written into the permascroll and then transcluded into actual documents. This is a very "video editor" concept. Actually, the Xanadu model of transclusions and history would translate extremely well into nonlinear video editing; it's arguably better for video than it is for text.
Images wouldn't work unless you made a "Xanalogical image editor" that stores a list of edits and references to source images as you made or imported them. The tumbler number structure would have to be extended to include rectangular references into image files. It would work in theory, but in practice would probably bog down every computer that needed to load an image, and you'd get hit with shittons of fees for each one.
I can only imagine audio having to be stored as some kind of standardized DAW project file, with transcluded sample packs that would get you micro-transactioned for each one.
Huh, that 2nd to last article almost sounds like Amiga mod files. You pieced together samples, often, um, “borrowed” from other mods, into song-specific selection, then included a list of which samples to trigger at which frequency at which time. For example, you’d include one bass drum and one snare drum, and instructions on how to arrange them into rhythms.
Xanadu as a DAW might look a lot like that, except with explicit and documented reuse of another person’s samples.
Check out IPLD (the model that powers IPFS), which translates hash-linked DAGs and handles merkle DAGs (git) natively. There's been several attempts to build Xanadu'ish things on various types of networks, web2, web3, p2p, etc, but it just doesn't seem to be what the majority wants. Maybe someday...
I really enjoyed this video (watched it the other day). It makes me feel like it's possible for me to understand the math that I'm currently trying to understand.
I remember seeing some very strange, deliberately creepy images that were generated to accompany a two-paragraph creepypasta about a 19th Century Belgian expedition into the jungle.
They were actually rather good in a sort of "fake collodion image" sense, and the eerie early-DALL-E quality to them really helped the spookiness.
But I can only remember this technicality and the feelings with any clarity, not any of the details except in the broadest sense. I cannot bring these images to mind in any meaningful way.
They were deeply wrong and it's only the wrongness I really remember. It confounds memory.
Modern image generators have ironed out all the structural wrongness.
> I remember seeing some very strange, deliberately creepy images that were generated to accompany a two-paragraph creepypasta about a 19th Century Belgian expedition into the jungle.
I can’t think of anything more unsettling than the actual events that took place in the Belgian run Congo Free State in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Wikipedia article is scarier than any creepypasta you could write in that setting.
I'm glad that it's open source now and they are supporting a lot more hardware. There are some interesting features that I hope the language design community pays attention to.
It's built on top of MLIR so you can make compiler optimizations in a library instead of the compiler. I believe Reactant.jl has been using MLIR for optimizing higher level abstractions in Julia. Imagine a Lisp with that capability.
Mojo as MLIR++ is how I've thought about it as well.
Many users will find transpiling static python to mojo an interesting path.
Updating py2many --mojo to 1.0 to see what breaks.
Also looking forward to translating existing python adt module to mojo Variant in phase 2. I hope the mojo pattern matching proposal looks more like rust (expression) and not like python (statement).
IMO saying julia is literally a lisp is just not worth the type of discussion it generates. I'd much prefer to say the important part: Julia learned a ton of very important lessons from the lisp family of languages, and has integrated a lot of them.
The parser and lowering passes were in femtolisp, and yes Jeff wrote femtolisp.
However, There's now a pure julia implementation of the parser that's on by default, and the julia implementation of lowering is also almost done and ready to replace the femtolisp one.
But honestly, these things aren't really what I mean when I say julia is lispy, those are just easter eggs. I more mean the language design and semantics.
I know where you're coming from. I've been worried about all the supply chain attacks on npm too. And I'm far from a security expert. However, if you're okay with installing binary packages via `curl somesite.com | sh` I don't think you are in a better position with regards to security.
Security is just one of my concerns. I'm actually more worried about borking my system because it's doing some out of band stuff with various javascript pieces that already exist on my system (not by my choice!).
I write command line tools primarily with Python and one thing I always try to do is to limit myself to the standard library, which, with Python, is quite sufficient for most of what I do.
Anyway, most of what I write is designed to be installed in a virtualenv, which restricts the blast radius to one specific application.
As sometime who's never used Wolfram Languages before this project has gotten me interested.
For sometime now I've been looking into a good CAS for my app. I've tried a few algebra problems with Sympy, Sage, Xcas, Maxima and Woxi. Of these only Sage, Maxima and Woxi were capable of giving the expected answers.
After trying it out I became fascinated by Wolfram language and other term rewriting languages they are pretty interesting even though most have little to do with CAS like WL.
Anyway I've been looking at this project and plan to seriously use it in the future. So, I've noticed a few things when attempting to run wljs (I had to wrap it with a shell script to get wljs to see it as wolframscript executable). First the version number system variable gives a string instead of the expected real number type (As a temporary hack I modified Woxi to give what wljs expects). There also is a variable that tells to the absolute path of the of the current file and it is wrong when it's used in an imported script. After working around that with hard coded paths things became more difficult.
Edit: just checked my pc and the variables are called $VersionNumber and $InputFileName which is incorrect if the file is evaluated via Get["filepath"].
Anyways, I'm interested in helping out don't know if I can.
I've watched some YouTube videos narrated by AI that were created by those who's native language I assume to be Chinese but the value of the content is higher and more concentrated than those from the native speakers.
While I've watched many for whom English is not their first language struggle in technical talks and lose most of the meat if their discussion to their struggle with the language conversion.
While the example of language barriers being skipped over and providing value in that circumstance is obvious I suspect more is possible by avoiding unnecessarily focus on prose or technical aspects of communication and focusing on the ideas themselves.
Imagine if the cost of not assuming a background in technical/textbook writing were zero. Freeing up authors to explain more thoroughly. Perhaps, more effort can be spent on thinking up analogies, metaphor or examples to help communicate an idea.
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