Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 931 posts

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#601

Post by michaelscott »

alankay1 wrote: post #543
michaelscott wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that genetic programming and machine learning are effective avenues to pursue regarding this? Or is that introducing unnecessary complexity in many/most cases?

I think "real AI" could help (because it could also explain as well as configure). Systems that can't explain themselves (and most can't) are a very bad idea.

Because when things go sideways a human can't fix anything without copious amounts of reading/testing/poking around? I'm taking your meaning of "explain" literally here, which might be shortsighted.

Either way, the idea of machines or systems as "living" and able to communicate intent and process, even if only within their own "umwelt", is really interesting. Even a taste of that would make modern systems easier to debug and understand, if not more robust (which would be a better starting point for many systems anyway I suppose).

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#602

Post by heurist »

tomp wrote: post #474
heurist wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marijuana helped me realize there was a lot about myself I didn't understand and launched my investigation into more effective thought processes. I've become much more driven and thoughtful since I began smoking as an adult.

What kinds of changes to your thought processes did you make?

First of all, I now enjoy talking about myself :)

I stopped assuming I knew everything, and a childlike sense of wonder returned to my life. I began looking beyond what was directly in front of me and sought out more comprehensive generalizations. What do atoms have in common with humans? What does it mean to communicate? Do we communicate with ecosystems? Do individuals communicate with society? What is consciousness and intelligence? Is my mind a collection of multiple conscious processes? How do the disparate pieces of my brain integrate into one conscious entity, how do they shape my subjective reality?

I found information, individuals, and networks to be fundamental to my understanding of the world. I was always interested in them before, but not enough to seek them out or apply them through creative works. I discovered for myself the language of systems. I found a deep appreciation of mathematics and a growth path to set my life on.

I was able to do this exploration at a time when my work was slow and steady. It came along a couple years ago when I was 25, which I've heard is when the brain's development levels off. I feel lucky to have experienced it when I did because I was totally unsatisfied with my life before then.

Since then I've found work I love at a seed stage startup where I've been able to apply my ideas in various ways. I have become much more active as a creator, including exploring latent artistic sensibilities through writing poetry and taking oil painting classes with a very talented teacher. I've found myself becoming an artist in my work - I've become the director and lead engineer at the startup and am exploring ways to determine and distribute truth in the products we sell, and further to make a statement on what art is in a capitalistic society (even if I'm the only one who will ever recognize it). I've also become more empathic and found a wonderful woman and two pups to share my life with, despite previously being extremely solitary. Between work and family I have less time for introspection now, but I expect I'll learn just as much through these efforts.

Ultimatey, I've learned to trust my subconscious. I was always anxious and nervous about being wrong in any situation before, but now I trust that even if I am wrong in the moment my brain can figure out good answers over longer stretches of time.

I don't know how far cannabis led me down this path but it definitely gave me a good strong push.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#603

Post by richhickey »

alankay wrote: post #590
richhickey wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data like that sentence? Or all of the other sentences in this chat? I find 'data' hard to consider a bad idea in and of itself, i.e. if data == information, records of things known/uttered at a point in time. Could you talk more about data being a bad idea?

What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)

Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than critiques of data as an idea. Yes, there is a notion of sufficiency ('42' isn't data).

Data is an old and fundamental idea. Machine interpretation of un- or under-structured data is fueling a ton of utility for society. None of the inputs to our sensory systems are accompanied by explanations of their meaning. Data - something given, seems the raw material of pretty much everything else interesting, and interpreters are secondary, and perhaps essentially, varied.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#604

Post by heurist »

alankay1 wrote: post #592
heurist wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider the actor programming paradigm to be a good scalable model? It largely matches what I observe in both nature and where we seem to be headed with software engineering (containers in the cloud, near-trivial redundancy, stability, and scalability when properly designed). When I consider society I see a complex network of distributed actors, and when I consider my mind/brain I see the same. At this poi…

I have every reason to like Actors! But think about scaling for a while, ...

Great advice, I am currently lacking there. Thank you!

Edit: A follow up if you don't mind - have you investigated multi-agent autonomous systems or agent based modeling?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#605

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

alankay wrote: post #515
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #424

Hey Alan, You seem very disapointed and upset with the way computing has gone in the last decade. Speaking as a younger (15) and more satisfied (I still think the UNIX abstraction is pretty solid, despite what others may say) programmer, how do you not get depressed about the way technology is going? Also, what do you propose to eliminate the "re-inventing the flat tire" problem? Should every programmer be forced thr…

I do get depressed -- how could one not? -- the trick with depression is to not allow it to take you into in-action. Re: Unix etc. try to imagine computer systems without "operating systems" as they are thought of today (hint: look at the Internet, etc.). The basic heuristic here is to avoid the "when you criticize something you are implicitly buying into it's very existence!". First try to see if there is anything w…

...and I'm not sure I agree. The idea that code from randoms shouldn't be put into critical infrastructure is certainly true. But the idea that people shouldn't tinker, hack on code, and learn, even if they end of with non-optimal, possibly broken code, is a dangerous one, because that's how people learn. And yes, they should dabble in important things. How else do they learn them. It's then our job, as the Real World, to analyze our dependancies, and make sure we can trust them to be well written, and that they aren't just toys.

As for whether operating systems are necessary, by most common definitions (being, as I understand it, a set of software that defines a common base of abstractions over hardware, so as to allow multiple other pieces of software to access said hardware at a higher level of abstraction), yes, they are, if you don't want to go mad. But I get the feeling that isn't what you meant...

In short, I can respect your opinions, but I do not agree with all of them. Much of this derives from the mindset that tinkering with even the most important things, regardless of skill, is important to learning. If that makes me stupid, so be it.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#606

Post by stcredzero »

vanderZwan wrote: post #436
stcredzero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what do you think about the concept of "gamification?" Do you think high densities of reward and variable schedules of reward can be exploited to productively focus human attention and intelligence on problems? Music itself could be thought of as an analogy here. Since music is sound structured in a way that makes it palatable (i.e. it has a high density of reward) much human attention has been focused on the ph…

The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake; something that just happens to trigger all the right reward systems (the ones based on our love of patterns and structure, and exploiting the same biological systems we use for language) but isn't necessarily nutritious itself. However, all evidence points to him being wrong about this, making…

The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake;...isn't necessarily nutritious itself.

Note that I didn't mean that in a negative way. Also, if you want to consume macro-nutrients, cheesecake is a pretty effective way to get simple carbs and dairy fat.

is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.

I think there is something akin to this that can be found in games, and that there is something particularly positive that can be found in well constructed games.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#607

Post by alankay1 »

melchebo wrote: post #599
alankay1 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve was not the kind of person to have friends, but he and I were "pretty friendly" right up until his death -- this is partly because our lives intertwined closely a few times -- not just for Apple, but also for Pixar, and then later as I tried to get him back to real education as an Apple goal.

What do you think of their recent Swift Playground programming education effort ?

Answered (obliquely) elsewhere in this AMA

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#608

Post by gbenegas »

alankay1 wrote: post #535
gbenegas wrote: post #185

Hi Alan, I'm a CS student thinking about graduate school. 1. Would you suggest going into a popular field that excites me but already has lot of brilliant students? (for example AI and ML) Or rather into a not-so-popular field where maybe I can be of more help? (for example computational biology) 2. If I had to choose between studying my current favorite field at an average research group, or another still interestin…

Please try to avoid too much planning for your future at this point and just try to get to a place where things are going on. Any good educational experience will take someone who is trying to get from A to B and instead get them to C (note that an under-educated person is not in a good position to make big choices -- so learn more!)

Thanks for your advice! I hope I can keep my intellectual drive fresh in the different stages of my life, you are a great example!

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#609

Post by mdahlstrand »

gnaritas wrote: post #394
alankay1 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that you don't see what is on your retina, but something that is manifested by your brain (and this is why you can see images when you dream). So I'm guessing that there is a path for you to imagine images. It could be very similar to how most people who think they are tone deaf can be helped to hear pitches quite accurately.

Ah, yes, I'm hoping this is true as well hence my interest in what you said about learning to dream while awake. If you don't have any specific recommendations I'll continue researching on my own.

My personal experience is it's not as much "seeing" as "feeling" whatever I "see". Like with open eyes staring at but not looking at something, instead mentally focusing on peripheral, where the peripheral is more of an idea than the impression of photons hitting your retina. I often almost feel like I'm drawing the diagrams or interfaces I might think of, with sweeping gestures and so on. I definitely think it's something that gets better with practice.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#610

Post by alankay »

richhickey wrote: post #603
alankay wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)

Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than criti…

There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were.

The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors.

This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities are still not at all understood. Bundling an interpreter for messages doesn't prevent the message from being submitted for other possible interpretations, but there simply has to be a process that can extract signal from noise.

This is particularly germane to your last paragraph. Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence.

Post reply on HN