I love this: a DSL that makes clocks out of birds and math. Really, this is a glorious little project.
The thing I bounced off isn't the high-concept art, or the abstract math. It’s the combination of the two without enough bridge between them. You have to infer too much about how the poetic layer, the mathematical notation, and the actual machinery relate.
You can do mind-expansion by induction in a math journal. This is not that venue. And this project is too good to waste by letting people walk away confused.
I’d love a very plain “one clock, end to end” walkthrough: primitives, composition, graph, rendered result.
Verizon competes with T-Mobile and AT&T. Comcast competes with a different arm of AT&T, Google Fiber, various older satellite internet services and now Starlink.
Outside the US, broadband providers are still huge but differences in regulation mean there are five or six of them in most markets.
Overall, I think my point still stands: claiming that you can't build a giant company without Silicon Valley's growth formula is ridiculously narrow. The vast majority of big companies are built by other methods.
And many more who sell crops, chemicals, power, machine parts, cars, concrete...
Many companies have billions of customers and no trace of lock-in or virality at all. You might want to shift your perspective a little and remember that there is a world outside of Silicon Valley.
No, it really isn't a good idea to base your theories of psychiatric medicine on a satirical half-hour cartoon show about swearing construction-paper children.
It is true that there are some corners of the internet where probably-healthy people meet to discuss what it's like to have disorders that they probably don't have, or in some cases disorders that might not even exist.
But you really ought to talk to some actual doctors and patients before you conclude that their problems aren't real, or can be overcome by pretending they don't exist.
The biggest per-student spender on education in the developed world is the US:
> In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which was more than double the average of OECD countries ($18,400; in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).
And everybody knows that US outcomes in primary and secondary education are not great. (Actually they're considerably better than many realize, but not as good as, say, Finland, which spends much less). So budgets aren't everything.
And yet, at both the top and in the broad middle, US universities have some of the best outcomes in the world. So big budgets can still be good.
Human brains are complicated. Big groups of them are more so. Transferring output of some brains to other brains in big groups is not at all straightforward.
It's no wonder people would rather swap platitudes about bigger budgets.
If you want to learn about symbolic AI, there are a lot of more recent sources than PAIP (you could try the first half of AI: A Modern Approach by Russel and Norvig), and this has been true for a while.
If you read PAIP today, the most likely reason is that you want a master class in Lisp programming and/or want to learn a lot of tricks for getting good performance out of complex programs (which used to be part of AI and is in many ways being outsourced to hardware today).
None of this is to say you shouldn't read PAIP. You absolutely should. It's awesome. But its role is different now.
VS Code's goal is to get the low-effort 30% of devs who want something that will just work right out of the box, while providing enough functionality/customization to attract a significant fraction of the remaining 70%. And given that, it's pretty good.
But I'm skeptical it will ever be as good for someone who does want to make the investment in something like Emacs.
I am not going to say that this is wrong, because I haven't read the study. But it was produced by the Berkeley economics department, which could well be the most left-leaning in the country. Significant parts of it are outright Marxist. Which is fine. Diversity of viewpoints and all that. But when a bunch of leftist economists tell you they've proven something that leftists in general wish desperately were true, you should be skeptical.
At least wait for some corroborating evidence to come in before you start writing policy, because you'll hurt people if you get it wrong.
You’re being pedantic. I’m with you that “imbalance” sounds a little new-agey and imprecise, but I’ve talked to a lot of scientific and medical people about BiPD and I haven’t met one yet who didn’t understand what was actually being said: that bipolar disorder has some kind of physical, correctable cause in the brain. Somewhere in there, all those little lithium ions pummel a misfolded protein into shape or clog up an ion channel or something in such a way that the patient experiences relief.
It isn’t precise. But back in the real world, the “chemical imbalance“ explanation serves the very important purpose of explaining to a lot of ordinary people who otherwise wouldn’t understand that bipolar people who are manic or depressed are not in control of what they do. And that’s important, because when they’re manic or depressed, bipolar people often act like bad people.
> Even so, treatment breakthroughs have lagged and the drug often prescribed for the condition, lithium, was first used nearly 75 years ago.
This is false. I don’t know what this author was doing. Even reading Wikipedia would give you a better understanding than that.
Initial treatment for patients presenting with acute mania are antipsychotics like Risperdal or Geodon. After that they might try mood stabilizers like lamotrigine or seroquel, or any number of other things that are much more recent than lithium.
If you want to learn more about the wild world of psychopharmaceuticals, I recommend crazymeds.com, which also tells you a lot about how mentally ill people often view themselves. It’s fascinating even if you’re not crazy.
Dude, bipolar disorder can be just about cured in some people by dosing them with ground-up rocks. Lithium is a chemical element. If it isn’t inducing some kind of chemical change, what is it doing?
Or just remember that, on the timescale of the universe, 50 years is almost as brief as five minutes.
Soon you'll be dead, and everyone you love, everyone you know. And everyone who knows them, and everyone who knows them, and so on on down the line. And not just dead. Forgotten. Completely.
Does that change your priorities in life at all?
I take two things away from this exercise.
1. Try to be happy in the moment.
2. Try to build things that will outlast you. Nobody remembers the names of the architects of the Roman aqueducts, but people in Italy still benefit from their work today.
The problem is that it only covers half of what you need to know in linear algebra. What about the Spectral Theorem? What about positive definite matrices?
Agreed that the reviews are not in-depth. But sometimes inclusion on the list is enough.
I saw enough books on the list that I recognized and benefited from to convince me that the author has some idea of what they're talking about. That's enough to convince me that some of the other books on the list might be worth checking out.
Once you have a book title in mind, there are lots of resources you can use to find out whether it's worth reading -- Amazon comments, book reviews, the publisher's website, the table of contents, published excerpts, etc etc etc.
The most important part of a book search on the internet today is title discovery: picking one book to look at out of the gazillion books available. The author seems to have taken a pretty good stab at that.
The thing I bounced off isn't the high-concept art, or the abstract math. It’s the combination of the two without enough bridge between them. You have to infer too much about how the poetic layer, the mathematical notation, and the actual machinery relate.
You can do mind-expansion by induction in a math journal. This is not that venue. And this project is too good to waste by letting people walk away confused.
I’d love a very plain “one clock, end to end” walkthrough: primitives, composition, graph, rendered result.