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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#41

Post by dekhn »

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…

I don't agree about grid computing. Many scientists got work done with it on aggregations of clusters. LIGO used pyGlobus to transfer large amounts of scientific data.

Re: What I Worked On

#42

Post by geofft »

yawn wrote: post #24
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.

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.

The burden of proof is generally on the positive, not the negative. If someone thinks there's something in Bel that's not in those languages, they can say what specifically they think that novel thing is. Otherwise there's no basis on which to have a discussion beyond "Bel is really cool!"

Re: What I Worked On

#44

Post by endergen »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

I only recall things that I think about a lot, which tend to be when I learned lessons and it had an effect on my life's direction. That and anything I found really interesting I still remember. For reference, I'm 42, so it's been 2 decades.

Re: What I Worked On

#45

Post by sillysaurusx »

myWindoonn wrote: post #28
sillysaurusx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 comes first.

Bel isn’t about first-classism. It’s about creating the simplest implementation of a multithreaded metacircular lisp. It’s fully open source, though it doesn’t run.

Re: What I Worked On

#46

Post by mtalantikite »

> Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past? I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question, and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be.

As someone that is largely in the same situation, also actively looking for what's next after years and years of programming and dabbling in various arts, this actually seems like a great exercise. I write every morning when I wake up, have piles of journals I've written, but haven't explicitly sat down to write that journal entry. Thanks for the prompt!

Re: What I Worked On

#47

Post by endergen »

inbx0 wrote: post #30
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.

Ha, I think Dark Mode would be more on hacker point!

Re: What I Worked On

#48

Post by myWindoonn »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #36
myWindoonn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no onomatopoeia in the English language for the kind of laughter that I'm currently emitting. There have been plenty of technical examinations of Bel [0]; it's just not novel. [0] https://lobste.rs/s/jec21l/thought_leaders_chicken_sexers

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

Re: What I Worked On

#49

Post by alexashka »

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?

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 winning lottery tickets in life for multiple generations without realizing it. Of course Paul's blissful ignorance is what enables him to live as he has and to write and publish this very essay.

I mean, what makes this essay worth reading, other than that it's Paul Graham? It's typical lottery ticket winner hubris to think 'I randomly stumbled into everything good in my life' is worth writing about in the first place. Oh well :)

Re: What I Worked On

#50

Post by PhillyG »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

I graduated less than ten years ago, and I don't think I could immediately name all the classes I took.
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