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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#91

Post by dang »

myWindoonn wrote: post #48
AlexCoventry wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no techincal examination of Bel in that essay. It's a dismissive aside at the end, based on threads the author perceives in Graham's intellectual history.

There's a couple good comments in the discussion thread. In particular, there's a comment halfway down the page which points out that Bel's original introduction [0] has only a few specific characteristics (metacircularity, long contemplative period before implementation, formal methods) and that those have been core concepts in the Lisp community for decades. [0] https://github.com/alephyud/bel

If you mean https://lobste.rs/s/jec21l/thought_leaders_chicken_sexers#c_..., that's not serious criticism. (And like the other article, is obviously motivated by extrinsic animosity. Articles like that get reactions based on how people already feel. Those who share the animosity like the hit, those who don't don't.)

pg's idea for Bel was to express existing programming language constructs in the style of McCarthy's original Lisp, so to complain that it doesn't introduce new ones misses the point. You can't make serious criticism without knowing what the project was trying to achieve. (IIRC, Bel does actually contain a couple of unusual constructs for a Lisp, but not because pg was trying to invent any. They came up as side-effects of making the program clearer and smaller.)

Similarly, it makes no sense to complain that Bel isn't being used as a programming language. That's not its intent. Its intent is to be the minimal executable explanation of what a programming language is, in the way that McCarthy's Lisp explained what computation is. Obviously that would be unusably slow as a real-world platform. The important thing is that it runs at all.

Re: What I Worked On

#92

Post by bidirectional »

myWindoonn wrote: post #12
_Microft wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. This is not unlike a doctoral dissertation. Invest years of your life and effort, produce nice results, have people cheer for you after you successfully defend it and then nobody car…

The analogy is not great, because the f-expr-based Lisp Kernel [0] did arise from a doctoral dissertation, and is far more interesting than Bel. The Lisp world has respect for Shutt's work but not for Graham's, and that's not by accident. Edit: Hey, I'm just doing what you did. You started this comment thread by both posting a top-level comment, and also starting replies to other folks. So, uh, have you read Shutt's…

Well a more forceful version of your counter-argument would be that Claude Shannon laid the foundations for the information age in his thesis, rather than linking to some obscure Lisp work. But really, that wasn't their point -- most theses go nowhere, the few that do are obvious exceptions to that rule.

Re: What I Worked On

#93

Post by inetsee »

This takes me back. I first started studying programming when I was 14. I had discovered a programmed-instruction test book in the library that taught machine language. Not assembly language, machine language. You had to write out the instructions as numeric values, and the addresses as numeric values too. I even did a book report on the book, which forever cemented my nerd cred. Fortunately, my family moved the next year. I am still astonished that the library had that book. The town I lived in had a population of about 10,000, and the primary business was growing oranges.

Later I bought myself a TRS-80. The less said about that computer, the better. In my opinion, it deservedly earned the nickname Trash-80.

I bought one of the first IBM PCs. It cost more than four times what I paid for my first car. At my first job after graduating college I worked with a DEC PDP-8. It had all of 6k bytes of memory (the odd number is because it had 4k of 12-bit words). While I was there we upgraded the memory (6k more bytes for $5000, 32k bytes hard disk drive for another $5000). Occasionally I will compare the performance to cost ration of my current computer to my old IBM-PC. My current machine cost me about $1000 in parts, and it has 8G memory, and 4Tb hard drive. That's 8,000 times as much memory, and 400,000 times as much storage as the IBM-PC. And the IBM-PC cost me $3500.

Re: What I Worked On

#94

Post by hota_mazi »

meagher wrote: post #19

If you want to read with more readable (I think) formatting, check out this CSS proxy site I made: https://pg-essays.now.sh/worked.html

Yes, it's baffling to me that pg still hasn't understood that the essence of the web is to let clients handle the formatting.

Instead, he actively puts
at the end of each line to prevent exactly that.

Re: What I Worked On

#95

Post by aborsy »

nmfisher wrote: post #70
sdevonoes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.

Have you used speech recognition (or speech synthesis) lately? It's incredible, leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a decade ago. Not everything in ML is as rosy as the papers make it out to be, but to call it a "hoax" is going way too far.

There are a lot of things that look incredible, but don’t constitute much progress scientifically.

For example, a rocket landing on moon looks incredible. But I don’t think physicists would consider moon landing notable progress.

So, with data and compute you could do applications.

Re: What I Worked On

#96

Post by nerdponx »

timr wrote: post #89
nerdponx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? In the last 5 years, we have made incomprehensibly huge improvements in power and usability. It's an active field, and improvements are still coming at a steady pace. We have already revolutionized search, natural language processing & machine translation, image/audio/video processing, robotics, game AI, and advertising (for better or worse). And on top of all this,…

> Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. > What the fuck more do you want? If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.

Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats.

What are you even talking about?

It sounds like you're upset that cutting-edge technology still requires training & expertise to use and deploy effectively in industry.

Re: What I Worked On

#97

Post by pnathan »

This is a very good essay. It feels that pg is more reflective now than he was a few years ago. In particular, he is calling attention to how the dice fell; how things worked out well.

I'd be interested, as a purely personal matter, in seeing a painting show of pg's work. I came to painting long after I came to programming.

I'm almost 40. This statement:

> If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.

is a true one, and, frankly, has been more and more impressed on me for the last five years or so.

Re: What I Worked On

#98

Post by samstave »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #83

This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some…

FYI, I really like your art - most specifically the beetle. Do Want.

Would love to see some landscapes, along the lines of japanese / chinese landscapes - as that the feeling I get from your style.

More insects though. :)

Re: What I Worked On

#99

Post by [deleted] »

yters wrote: post #33

Ironic pg passed up philosophy in his search for immortality. Not only is that a focus of philosophy, even in today's materialist worldview, but philosophers are some of the most ancient and best preserved thinkers. The ideas of the ancient greek philosophers still hold sway today, even in popular culture, see Plato and The Matrix, or how the US government is organized in checks and balances to preserve liberty. In f…

[deleted]

Re: What I Worked On

#100

Post by jeremysalwen »

DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

Definitely a class difference. From the essay

> Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980."

Based on a quick search, the price was probably about $1200-$2000 inflation adjusted dollars.

I grew up in probably a similar environment, my dad was also a physicist, and I also had access to computers from a young age, and I was encouraged to explore interests in technology, science etc, without pressure to make sure I found a successful career. Over time I've realized that paradoxically, a culture of not valuing money/success is actually a marker of being upper class, because 1. You are quite likely to succeed even without any specific plan if you are well educated 2. The risk of financial ruin is not the same if your friends and family are financially stable enough that if worst comes to worst you would always have a place to sleep.

Because this safety net does not involve any assistance except in the darkest timeline, it's very easy to forget that it exists as an invisible insurance that not everybody has. I wish everyone did.

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