Viewing profile — DonaldFisk

I initially responded to CSMastermind whose post explicitly mentioned LLMs and the Turing test, which involves interacting with a computer solely by typing and reading text. You fi…

> If something is indistinguishable from a human in its outward behavior, then I'd be forced to admit that it's as intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever as a human, regardless of…

I think that recent LLMs do pass the Turing test, but I don't think it is a good test for intelligence, for two reasons: emergent complexity and pareidolia. Arguably, ELIZA passed …

The breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News. A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the …

I have always assumed that Alan Kay compared Lisp to Maxwell's Equations because of the similarity between the interplay of eval and apply in Lisp on the one hand, and the interpla…

I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner w…

People smoke a lot less. We have antibiotics. Life expectancy is up.

It's confusing because different people mean different things when using political terms. The political compass ( https://www.politicalcompass.org ) has two axes: left-right and li…

I was puzzled by this: (rplacd (quote tt) (quote ...)) and later (print (cdr (quote tt))). But it appears to be valid in PDP-1 Lisp (though not in either Lisp 1.5 or modern Lisps).…

I'm interested in how they work, but building anything like them, given the hardware I have, would be impractical. I've seen others use them, including to answer some questions I h…

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Els…

It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and so…

This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...

General Relativity. It explained the anomaly in the precession of Mercury's perihelion, and the bending of starlight by the Sun (double the value predicted by Newton's law). The te…

Anglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.

I wrote something similar here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/GroundBreakingLanguages.html We agree on Algol, Lisp, Forth, APL, and Prolog. For ground-breaking functional language, I …

Sadly, not part of this course, though Lisp and Prolog are very useful for other things. C's fine for building neural networks from scratch, and you can glue different subsystems t…

Why not? It was called AI at the time.

Written Chinese stayed the same while the spoken language evolved from the 5th century BC until the 1911 revolution, after which people began writing Chinese the way it's spoken in…

Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.

Here's Trump's claims debunked in detail: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/08/recapping-trumps-deceptive... "But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t bas…

It's well worth a read for anyone who wants to implement their own Lisp. I'd say it's the precursor of Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec though. I have copies of both.

Newton wrote, "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed…