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The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

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Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#81

Post by FpUser »

didericis wrote: post #43
toss1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup Except that it is only local or small risk minimization; the catastrophic existential risks end up maximized to the point of becoming inevitable. With companies, the MBAs happily optimize away anything that isn't immediate revenue. So manufacturing gets offshored, along with all the deep knowledge of how to make things. R&D gets shrunk and minimized because it is a quarterly expense with returns not immediately s…

The main thing that gives me hope is that the type of knowledge generation environment in the western world still hasn’t been acquired by dictatorial powers like China. Given the exponentially increasing technological change we’re experiencing, the knowledge transferred via the method you described will likely be surpassed and rendered obsolete relatively quickly (hopefully) and make that transferred knowledge less l…

>"educate those who are not in that first highly selective pool of people how to be good citizens"

My answer to blessed self appointed "teachers": how about fuck you? We'll "figure how to be good citizens" on our own.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#82

Post by davidthewatson »

Retric wrote: post #11
travisgriggs wrote: post #9

> The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. I've wondered about this a lot lately. It's not limited to software engineering only, you see it in other creative/human domains as well. Media production. Teaching. So on. But it's made me wonder, why doesn't the equation ever invert: "The world has tried to develop _m…

The basic premise of MBA programs is arguably to create interchangeable managers. One size fits all is less efficient at both the managerial and employee levels, the advantage is largely risk minimization.

Indeed. This gives rise to the triumph of robotomorphism over anthropomorphism, i.e. HR as human robots.

It's easier to hire humans that act like robots than to design robots that act like humans. Robots have an uncanny valley described on wikipedia, that, when reversed, leaves us with a robot-centric human critique:

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relation between a human's degree of resemblance to a robot and the emotional response to the human. The concept suggests that humans that imperfectly resemble actual robots provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the robotic human, a relation that otherwise increases with the human's robot likeness.

Inspired by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://medium.com/@jannaq/the-robot-takeover-is-already-her...

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#84

Post by the_af »

mepian wrote: post #4

This is blogspam, the original is still hosted here by the author himself: https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

I saw that it was from sourceforge and never even bothered clicking so as to not give them traffic. Will the taint ever leave Sourceforge? I think not, they squandered any good will forever.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#86

Post by didericis »

FpUser wrote: post #81
didericis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing that gives me hope is that the type of knowledge generation environment in the western world still hasn’t been acquired by dictatorial powers like China. Given the exponentially increasing technological change we’re experiencing, the knowledge transferred via the method you described will likely be surpassed and rendered obsolete relatively quickly (hopefully) and make that transferred knowledge less l…

>"educate those who are not in that first highly selective pool of people how to be good citizens" My answer to blessed self appointed "teachers": how about fuck you? We'll "figure how to be good citizens" on our own.

This perfectly illustrates the problem.

“Blessed self appointed teachers” should not and cannot exist in any functional actually meritocratic system. In order for mass civic education to be effective there needs to be a core set of criteria for what constitutes a good teacher and a good citizen that all parties negotiate on and largely agree on (to the extent possible) that’s actually (not just superficially) bottom up and not imposed by social engineering types.

The exact criteria for what constitutes a good citizen can and should be varied based on location and can and should be driven by the values of any given local community. But there also needs to be a convergence on higher order values that can help negotiate between communities that have different values. A good education system needs to incorporate local community values while also fitting into a larger system.

That is incredibly difficult to achieve, and impossible to fully realize. But that should be the aim. What we have now is based off an old Prussian industrial model that is serving fewer and fewer people while also increasing disunity by preaching grievance. The education system could be much much better and both serve and be run by everyone in a much more unifying and cooperative way if there was better leadership, less inertia in the old system, and a much clearer and beneficial social contract at the foundation of the system.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#87

Post by noobermin »

Nowhere near the same situation but the same spirit, a lot of computational science still uses fortran (f90, thankfully for more modern codes) and has resisted the push to use C++ like everyone else. Fortran still is the right tool for numerical software, so it's good we avoided the bandwagon.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#89

Post by marai2 »

lisper wrote: post #57

Author here. AMA.

Since this essay cycles here on HN perennially and inevitably people are curious about how your views about lisp, or other languages have changed, you might want to have a follow up page that you forever keep on updating as your views change? Maybe linked from the original article?

Such as: Year 2033 - lisp is still a great language for $xyz Year 2043 - I was wrong, I should have used COBOL all along, how was I so blind?

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#90

Post by galaxyLogic »

safety1st wrote: post #76
toss1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup Except that it is only local or small risk minimization; the catastrophic existential risks end up maximized to the point of becoming inevitable. With companies, the MBAs happily optimize away anything that isn't immediate revenue. So manufacturing gets offshored, along with all the deep knowledge of how to make things. R&D gets shrunk and minimized because it is a quarterly expense with returns not immediately s…

The entire strategic advantage of the west was sold out thanks to trying to standardize management? Come on, there's certainly an element of truth with relation to the downsides of globalization, but that's some pretty heavy hyperbole. In terms of what is wrong with this apocalyptic view of the future, I would start with the idea that China has some unassailable chokehold on the West. A lot of influence over our supp…

US needs China and China needs US. The Wealth of Nations. The only problem as you say is the authoritarian regime in China which opposes progress for its people, because the authoritarians have taken over so of course they look after their own interests not the interests of the majority. Therefore progress is coming very slowly to the masses. China used to be ruled by a "junta" but now it seems it is ruled by a dictator, a single person. He might be a good person, or evil, and so will his follower. At some point there will be a very evil dictator just like in ancient Rome.
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