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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#21

Post by hinkley »

chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

An alternative that seems to work is chasing grants, or defense contracts.

But then the choice becomes "build something usable, or only work for someone who hired a 'grant writer' that is making 125-250% of your salary"

Re: What I Worked On

#22

Post by sillysaurusx »

myWindoonn wrote: post #13
sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

It’s nice to see even pg goes through phases of “I have no idea what to do next.” By the way, bel is underrated, and I say that not as a pg fan. The ideas in it are novel, because of its simplicity. The scheduler in particular is elegant. I suppose I should have taken some notes on what surprised me the most. But, basically, the idea of using a stack as the source of truth for all computation was both ... strange, an…

Bel has nothing not in Scheme, Kernel, Clojure, or SBCL. You might be participating in hero worship.

Eyeroll. Try a more substantive comment and we’ll talk.

Clojure in particular has nothing like what bel has. No program does.

I don’t claim it’s novel, I claim it’s a simple solution to a hard problem. Possibly the simplest.

Re: What I Worked On

#23

Post by hinkley »

Grimm1 wrote: post #17

> My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep. My thought is a bit of an asides from the main essay content but this applies to real people as well as story characters, just because someone has feelings strongly doesn't mean anything other than that. A few of my strongest feelings about various things are rather mundane and at worst destructiv…

"Suffering is not a personality," as the old advice goes.

Re: What I Worked On

#24

Post by yawn »

myWindoonn wrote: post #13
sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

It’s nice to see even pg goes through phases of “I have no idea what to do next.” By the way, bel is underrated, and I say that not as a pg fan. The ideas in it are novel, because of its simplicity. The scheduler in particular is elegant. I suppose I should have taken some notes on what surprised me the most. But, basically, the idea of using a stack as the source of truth for all computation was both ... strange, an…

Bel has nothing not in Scheme, Kernel, Clojure, or SBCL. You might be participating in hero worship.

Holy low effort comment, batman!

The first sentence offers no proof of how any of these individual languages address what you're trying to communicate. I'm not saying you're incorrect...it's just, like, offer something. The second sentence is unnecessarily snarky and adds 0 value.

Re: What I Worked On

#25

Post by Brajeshwar »

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

I have set few websites to default to the reader-mode. http://paulgraham.com is one of them.

Here is how: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c55fa4aqqu9mmph/CleanShot%202021-0...

Re: What I Worked On

#27

Post by zozbot234 »

chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

> Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.

The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.

Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.

Re: What I Worked On

#28

Post by myWindoonn »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #22
myWindoonn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bel has nothing not in Scheme, Kernel, Clojure, or SBCL. You might be participating in hero worship.

Eyeroll. Try a more substantive comment and we’ll talk. Clojure in particular has nothing like what bel has. No program does. I don’t claim it’s novel, I claim it’s a simple solution to a hard problem. Possibly the simplest.

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.

Re: What I Worked On

#29

Post by ISL »

DC1350 wrote: post #18
mplewis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, Paul Graham has a lot of money.

I know he does now but I’m talking about the earlier sections of the essay. He mentions taking time off from art school to work because he needed more money. What’s interesting to me is how he just decided to go to art school, study philosophy, or work on projects that had nothing to do with his career when he wasn’t already financially secure. The common narrative around really successful people is that they work re…

One can certainly suggest survivorship bias in this sort of situation. Another commonality I've found with very-successful people: they work really hard, but they might not be aware that they're working much harder than others.

Two anecdotes:

1) A pianist in my high school was Eastman or Julliard-bound. One day, I watched her sight-read a new piece. It was beautiful. As someone who struggled mightily sight-reading single-threaded trumpet parts, I asked, "How do you sight-read like that?". The innocent and frank reply: "Oh, I'm just having fun to see what it sounds like."

Sometimes (not always), people can be on another level.

2) The truly outstanding see themselves as normal. I think everyone sees themselves as normal. Freeman Dyson, from [1]: `I asked him whether as a boy he had speculated much about his gift. Had he asked himself why he had this special power? Why he was so bright?

Dyson is almost infallibly a modest and self-effacing man, but tonight his eyes were blank with fatigue, and his answer was uncharacteristic.

“That’s not how the question phrases itself,” he said. “The question is: why is everyone else so stupid?” '

I've never thought that Dyson said this with any malice, simply as an honest reflection of his experience.

For me, if I want to get something done, I have to work really, really hard on it.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-dan...

Re: What I Worked On

#30

Post by inbx0 »

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

Don't know if you are interested in feedback for the site, but IMO the low contrast of the gray hurts to read. I don't mean this as a knee jerk "all text must be #000 on #fff" reaction, but maybe something like --color-body: hsl(0, 0%, 10%) would be a good compromise.
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