Viewing profile — mikelevins

Probably, if I could contact them. But all the links I turned up lead me back to the captcha black hole, and the only email address I've found elicits a reply telling me that nobod…

I was interested in the Steam machine, but I might not get one because I cannot log in to my Steam account, for no reason that I know. Steam's web-based process for resetting my pa…

In the early 1990s I worked on a couple of different projects at Apple that were done mainly in Common Lisp. When I was working on one of those, another of them hired a guy named D…

It's going pretty well, though it took at least six months to get there. I'm helped by knowing the domain reasonably well, and working with a principal investigator who knows it we…

Yes, I successfully fixed it. The fix was about ten years of regular practice of Chen style Taijiquan with good instruction. It’s not a quick, cheap, or easy fix, and it’s pretty h…

I'm finding that in several kinds of projects ranging from spare-time amusements to serious work, LLMs have become useful to me by (1) engaging me in a conversation that elicits th…

I've been experimenting with that from a slightly different angle: teaching Claude how to play and referee a pencil-and-paper RPG that I developed over about 20 years starting in t…

Besides programming, my hobbies are writing stories, writing and recording songs, drawing, and painting. None of them needs to cost anywhere near $3000. Any of them can cost as muc…

I think the decline in UI quality is real, but I don't think the web takes all of the blame. The blame that it does take is due to a sort of mixed bag of advantages and disadvantag…

It's called aging. Just wait until the first time you head back down the hall from the living room to the bedroom to get the thing you forgot to bring with you, get distracted for …

The essence of Common Lisp (and other Lisps) is the metacircular evaluator from John McCarthy's Lisp 1.5 Manual: https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Li... Thi…

And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability. When I was at…

At some moments there has to be a singular decision taken, such as which of two possible options to take. In such a moment some particular consciousness makes the decision, if it’s…

How do you know there aren't several different consciousnesses that all think they are Peter? How do you know they aren't just constructing whatever narrative they prefer to constr…

What makes you think a singular consciousness controls the body?

Or perhaps they all leave traces, but all write to the same log? And when reconstructing memory from the log, each constructed consciousness experiences itself as singular?

I was mikel@apple.com for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I persona…

Of course the dialects are not so densely distributed in North America, and English has only been evolving in the Americas for a few hundred years, but there are a bunch of dialect…

It is, but they borrowed it from Hegel. I’m not particularly a Hegelian myself (it seems to me more like a cute trope than a law of nature), but being a Hegelian doesn’t necessaril…

As a person with a graduate education in psychology who makes his living by being considered technical, who has made his living around 35% of my 37-year career as a technical write…

To be clear, the construction I’m endorsing is: "were available only in Lisp until recently", which is the construction that my editors typically proposed for similarly ambiguous d…

He says Lisp, rather than Common Lisp. Sure, given the context he's writing in now, maybe he means Common Lisp, but Joe Marshall was a Lisp programmer before Common Lisp existed, s…

We need art, too. We may not know what we need it for, but we evidently need it for something. We've been making art for a really long time. We've been smearing colors onto surface…

It's perfectly good and idiomatic English, but it's an ambiguous formation and your suggested edit does clarify it.

The author of the referenced post is one of them, though.