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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#111

Post by vram22 »

johnyzee wrote: post #110

Great read! Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end resulted in the 6502 becomin…

I did a fair amount of hobbyist programming on the Commodore 64 and BBC micros in their respective BASIC dialects and 6502 assembly language, and loved it. Only a bit later did I get to know of higher-level languages like Pascal and then C (though C is a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily negative ways*).

Re: What I Worked On

#112

Post by anonymouse008 »

hinkley wrote: post #82
alexashka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a class thing. It's not that it's easy or hard to ruin your life financially - if your parents have the attitude of 'go live your dreams, be happy', then there is no financial ruin, because the only ruin in your mind, is not getting to live your dream. People who have the 'dream' attitude tend to come from families who lucked into financial stability. In some sense, this is a story of a family that's been winnin…

My kids have one set of grandparents who will not let them fail, even if something happens to us. There are good, respectable degree programs that will get you a job where you never lay in bed worrying about money. But if you want to be rich? You may have to take a bigger risk on a more prestigious program that not only looks good on the resume but introduces you to a social network of other future (or current) rich…

Bankruptcy discharge and payday loans. So sad to see it waged and no one knows it’s happening.

Re: What I Worked On

#113

Post by UncleMeat »

zozbot234 wrote: post #65
ve55 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something can be both legitimately revolutionary/interesting, but also significantly over-hyped and misrepresented, often with strong for-profit incentives. Some recent good examples of this include progress in cryptocurrencies, decentralization, and ML/AI.

Sure, but many people disagree that ML itself is revolutionary. The basics of it were known (referred to, quite appropriately, as 'data mining') as early as the 1990s and perhaps earlier. We've added a smattering of new techniques since then, and compute power has been expanded via GPGPU, but there was no "revolutionary" shift in the field. Even multi-layer ("deep") neural networks are very old tech.

Perceptrons are indeed old tech. But try training models for even something as simple as handwriting recognition using techniques from the 90s and modern techniques but with the same training set and compute resources. You'll get much better results with the modern stuff.

Re: What I Worked On

#114

Post by skybrian »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #45
myWindoonn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You first. Bel claims to do what Kernel does (metacircularity with everything first-class) but isn't open-source, doesn't have a solid whitepaper detailing its theory and practice, and is clearly just a rich dude spending his unlimited time on fun things.

Aha. You’re jealous of his money and freedom. That makes more sense. You can achieve what you want out of life too. If you want freedom and fun things, then pursue it! Throwing bitter swipes at someone’s years of work is... well... are you sure you want to spend your life this way? To your point: a solid whitepaper is a fine thing, but it matters more what you can do with a work than how it’s described. The substance…

You just summed it up in a way that sounds more interesting than anything else I read. (I started reading the specification and got bored before getting to anything about multithreading.)

Maybe writing a solid abstract would have helped?

Re: What I Worked On

#115

Post by sbierwagen »

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…

>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.

This essay gets linked to a lot on here, but you might be interested in Rao's "Sociopaths/clueless/losers" taxonomy: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Re: What I Worked On

#116

Post by staunch »

Some are lamenting that PG's work on Bel doesn't seem meaningful in terms of the practical programming world of building things, like many of us do in our jobs.

But I think Bel is best viewed as PG painting with code. He lost interest in using acrylic and canvas, so he turned to his favorite paintbrush and canvas: vim and Lisp. And created art with it. And, at least for some people, Bel is beautiful art that provokes deep thoughts and insights. It's unquestionably his own signature style of art.

Re: What I Worked On

#117

Post by johnyzee »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #35

>>> What these programs really showed was that there's a subset of natural language that's a formal language. Don't take this as any fanboy stuff, but pg is still good at putting big thoughts in small sentences. Its a sort of mental zip function. Also this is why I still type into google things like 'rubik solve how-to' instead of my daughter doing "show me how to solve a rubiks cube"

Yes. He is a gifted writer, very succinct. Funny that his writing pursuits all seem to be incidental, like the Lisp books (per his own account), and the essays, which certainly played a part in his success.

Re: What I Worked On

#119

Post by xiaolingxiao »

samstave wrote: post #98
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. :)

Thanks! And yeah I took Chinese painting when I was 7-8 so it stuck with me. And yeah the beetle was a request from friend, it's still on the shelf at her house :)

Re: What I Worked On

#120

Post by hinkley »

> One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it's worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious.

You might be able to reinterpret this through the lens of the old saying about how, during a gold rush, the people who "made shovels" made most of the money while a few miners got all the press.

We don't usually hear about the folks making provisions or shovels. If you dig into Seattle history, you may learn about how early Seattle was financed in part by providing raw materials after San Francisco's fires (apparently parts of downtown Seattle are fill dirt used as ballast for empty lumber barges traveling back from SF), but things got really interesting after the Seattle Fire. The reconstruction was financed in part from being a jumping off point for the Yukon Goldrush. Most colorfully, by a particularly successful Madame (as in brothel). If you're not a local, you'd never hear and probably never care about such things.

The supply of people who want to go on an adventure is far more reliable than the supply of profitable outcomes for those adventures. Most salesmanship is already about selling a story, not a product, and there are few stories sexier than an adventure you haven't taken yet.

The checks clear whether the customer is batshit insane or on to something great (in which case, you played a small part in that and might benefit from having done so).

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