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Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

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Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#141

Post by bmitc »

throwup238 wrote: post #65
xaellison wrote: post #50

Scientific American I think did a balanced article about this character: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231040033/https://www.scien... My favorite quotes: when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.” “There’s a tradition of scientists…

> “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.” That is a brutal take down. Did Dyson and Wolfram have a math-beef going or something?

I like Freeman Dyson, but it seems like he really didn't hold punches much. He seems very laid back and is to a degree, but if you watch a lot of interviews with him, you'll notice he throws around quite a lot of shade.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#143

Post by bmitc »

duped wrote: post #81
bachmeier wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it…

I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.

I've never understood what Knuth considered literate programming. I've seen some examples of his and find them incomprehensivle. I think the issue with Knuth's contribution is that he only seemed to concentrate on the specification of a markup language, marred by TeX baggage.

The key idea of notebooks today are their interactiveness, the dynamic between a markup state and view state, and their multi-paradigm and multi-language nature.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#144

Post by bmitc »

schiffern wrote: post #60
adamgordonbell wrote: post #23

So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to. We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-through…

> having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever. If you like this sort of thing check out Frink. https://frinklang.org/ I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own the…

Is there any notion of integrating Frink as a library in other languages?

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#145

Post by bmitc »

dachworker wrote: post #32

Here's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?

I looked into it a while back and the synopsis was that you needed to move there and that they paid poorly.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#146

Post by lodovic »

perrygeo wrote: post #133
martinky24 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, I'm gonna need a source cited on that one lmao. Absolutely no way.

Well it's an employee-owned company. Your data is as good as mine. You assert that Wolfram's work is worth less than $1billion. You're quite emphatic about that fact. Let's just do some back-of-the-napkin math to assess if your premise has any validity. Mathematica has been around for over 40 years. It has 1600+ employees. Tell me, how could a private company make payroll for 1600 top earners without hundreds of mill…

Existence doesn't guarantee profitability - they may have investors with a lot of patience and deep pockets. After 40 years, they should indeed turn a nice profit, but I'm not sure if it brings in billions. Many people see their product as educational software.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#147

Post by bmitc »

dachworker wrote: post #45
danpalmer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're very traditional – I don't think software or engineering is their edge, and I suspect they outsource a lot of that to cheaper locations – they seem themselves as being more research focused. Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though. They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I rem…

Wait, isn't software their product? Or are you distinguishing between their infrastructural and their math/science libraries?

I sent them an email asking what .NET version their .NET link library used, asking if it was still .NET Framework or if it had moved to .NET Core or 5+. The question seemed incomprehensible to them. They barely understood what I was asking, and I never heard back from them.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#148

Post by sriram_malhar »

duped wrote: post #81
bachmeier wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it…

I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.

Knuth's literate programming notably differs from notebooks in that it was designed to write explanations meant for humans, which meant that the author could present the code in chunks in the narrative sequence; the code did not have to be in execution order, unlike notebooks.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#149

Post by bmitc »

martinky24 wrote: post #42
dachworker wrote: post #32

Here's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?

- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers") - Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy) - As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well - Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuitin…

I think Mathematica is cool, but it is my understanding that Maple is actually superior to Mathematica in symbolic calculations.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#150

Post by contrarian1234 »

nojvek wrote: post #134

I liked his interview with Lex Fridman. He's full of himself but has interesting things to say. WolframAlpha is a gem on its on right. Yeah we have Gemini, GPT, Mixtral but when it comes to actual compositional compute, Wolfram alpha gets you the right answer and shows you the math.

I'm not super up to speed on everything he's said, but he didn't seem full of himself in that podcast. He sounded quite .. normal?
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