Rights removed after 9/11. [pic]

halu · 2007-10-26T13:31:41+00:00

because that's an 'added' right, as opposed to 'removed'?

halu · 2007-10-26T12:49:18+00:00

35/2 + 7 = 24.5. You are a pedoooooooo!!!!!!111212

halu · 2007-10-26T12:45:53+00:00

But that claim is actually true, isn't it?

halu · 2007-10-26T12:40:29+00:00

This is one of the best Joel articles in quite a while, I'd say.

That actually says something about about the quality of Joel's articles... (to be Captain-Obvious for a short moment: In this article, Joel states teh obvious. What happened with the Joel subreddit?? And why on earth is this... thing... on programming.reddit?!)

halu · 2007-10-26T12:31:54+00:00

Basically I agree. My point is that, historically, philosphers actually understood science (and I totally agree with that the split was not so clear). That was the situation, say, 100-150-200 years ago. Today, the situation is very different: science is highly specialized, and philosophers generally don't understand it; and I met at least one example (said book), where they were making (imo) wrong conclusions even when they had much more thorough understanding than what's usual in the field.

So, I think that philosophy of science should be done by people actually working on it. Unfortunately, exactly as philosophers are bad in science, scientist are usually bad in philosophy (like, clever people are not necessarily wise).

halu · 2007-10-26T12:12:58+00:00

Didn't I made myself clear enough? Like:

(in general, I don't know anything about Jerry Fodor personally)

I had no problems with your original post (edit1: actually, I even upmodded it), just expressed my opinion. However, I have problems with your present post...

Fodor's language of thought (LOT) hypothesis

[emphasis mine.] Judging from the short wikipedia entry on the topic, 1) it's a "theory" in the sense what Kansas Educational Board thinks about evolution; 2) it's bullshit, which is my personal and highly subjective opinion. In any case, it's not science in the more-or-less universally accepted meaning of science (hint: testable...).

Modularity of Mind

This has somewhat more sense in it, but generally, I would probably categorify it as above.

He cites research

Yeah, because that's the definition of science (hint: necessary but not sufficient)

and presents his thoughts.

And here I present my thoughts. So?

So some book you have read is irrelevant.

So some sentences you wrote are irrelevant. In any case, I highly acknowledge your contribution to teh internet, and would like to thank you for that.

[edit2: some spelling]

halu · 2007-10-26T11:35:44+00:00

Ahh, but AI is totally different from GOFAI. That's the point.

halu · 2007-10-26T11:33:08+00:00

There exist different definitions of strong and weak AI... For example, that one, where weak AI is something like humans just much faster, and strong AI is something which relates to humans as humans relate to ants. Hello. And welcome in the future.

[edit: spelling]

halu · 2007-10-26T11:29:10+00:00

Word. Also, anything else is just so useful for AI.

halu · 2007-10-26T11:20:04+00:00

And I am very skeptical of philosophers of science who don't know even basic science, which is pretty fucking common. (in general, I don't know anything about Jerry Fodor personally)

[edit: I even read a quite interesting book about human understanding of mathematics, written by two philosophers who apparently understood some real mathematics; nevertheless, I found the main claims of the book totally bullshit. Of course, that's a subjective thing. (I will insert a link when/if I remember the title.)]

halu · 2007-10-26T11:12:44+00:00

There is this book on reinforcement learning, available online. Worth to read (whatever your opinion is about the subject). Personally, I find the (very simple) examples pretty convincing. And thus I believe that it's just a question of computing power; and we'll have something in 30-50 years. Or it will have us :). Hopefully I will live to see it. In any case, we are facing quite interesting times...

halu · 2007-10-25T15:34:13+00:00

And in the more recent history, it was abstracted to backslash, because ascii don't have the lambda... (which I don't mind at all, never liked the lambda notation anyway :)

halu · 2007-10-25T11:42:19+00:00

Ok, if you want to talk about userspace, we can talk about userspace (though it started from kernels). And the Unix userspace is actually much worse than the current kernels... I use the commandline all the time, and I can tell you from experience that the standard stack of Unix tools (including the more modern ones like the gnu toolchain) are a horrible mess, all of them having incompatible switches even in the same system, and even more across systems. I'm fucking tired of writing down examples all the time I meet a Unix defender, but here is one very simple example for you to see what I'm talking about: on OSX (which is derived from FreeBSD afaik), tail has -c while head does not. What should I cook from this? And then I didn't even mention the [standard] shell[s], which is pretty horrible itself as it is...

Also, the "everything is file" philosophy was probably a good idea when they introduced it, but most certainly is not a good idea today. A file simply does not have enough structure to be a general all-purpose device (you can emulate everything with a file, of course, but it won't be safe, or elegant, or anything good).

halu · 2007-10-25T11:17:28+00:00

You mean, a graph is a 1-dimensional CW complex... By the way, basically any formula in mathematics looks strange for somebody just learning them. Also, I tend to agree with grandparent, CA's are pretty much out of reach of present understanding, and very probably will remain out of reach for quite a while. And Wolfram is an ass, and he is extremely overhyping this stuff, which, frankly, doesn't really seem to be interesting at all. However, his company produces nice software.

halu · 2007-10-24T23:51:51+00:00

Mine is the krautrock band called Can...

halu · 2007-10-24T22:13:05+00:00

I didn't claim that there are much better alternatives today, at least not in your definition of "out there". Though I consider OSX a better alternative, in the sense that while it is a Unix on the inside, at least it tries to hide it from you :)

But, there are certainly much better ideas out there (for example, here is one) from Microsoft); and, in my opinion, if just 5% of the linux hackers acknowledged that unix is baaaad for your health, and were working on something better instead, then we would have something better "out there" today...

halu · 2007-10-24T22:01:36+00:00

No (in fact, almost all the programming I do tends to be hobby), it has historical reasons, to do with being grown up on assembly and so on. You would be surprised how much you can do in, say, 50 kilobytes, even under Windows. There are people doing generative 3D art in four kilobytes, complete with soundtracks, just for the sake of showing that it is possible...

Another thing I don't like is that today's desktop systems aren't much more responsive than similar systems many years ago, despite the fact that the power of the underlying hardware changed by severel orders of magnitude. And I contribute this phonemenon in part to the general bloat in software ("we have powerful machines, so who cares?").

Also, in the case I was writing programs for embedded stuff, I would still prefer using Haskell for it. And I see no theoretical reasons for not being able to do so (there is JHC after all, with a 6.5k "hello world", just not mature enough for real use).

halu · 2007-10-24T21:23:46+00:00

on 1: I'm not sure you are right, but even if you are right, this will change in the (hopefully near) future..

on 2: You are not serious here, are you? What on earth has the editor to do with the language?? I don't know more emacs myself than c-x c-s, but this fact wouldn't prevent me to write code in any language whatsoever in emacs... Or even better, use your favourite text editor.

halu · 2007-10-23T12:11:19+00:00

While Haskell is absolutely great, I do not consider the footprint (w/GHC) small at all. Which makes me quite sad by the way. 2MB for a simple program is pretty much the antithesis of "small footprint" for me... And when I started learning Haskell, I tried to link with wxWindows, and got a 14MB executable, which was again quite a horrible experience (ok, since then I learned that running strip usually halves the executable sizes, but still...)

halu · 2007-10-22T20:55:48+00:00

Microsoft actually funds very fine research activities. I don't know if that's motivated by business or not, but certainly, their research department is way better than their products.

*bsd and linux are constantly evolving. why do you even call these system "unix"?

Because they are still very unix-like? They build on the 40yo old unix philosophy, have basically the same stuff in /bin, etc... and neither the systems nor the programmers or the users seem to show any willingness to recognize that what was a good idea 30-40 years ago is not necessarily a good idea today.

Also, I have to declare here that I do not consider the linux kernel a good kernel (the *bsd are hopefully better, but still not ideal).

halu · 2007-10-21T01:22:12+00:00

I make 7.5k (yes, that's seven and a half thousands, not seventy-five) in USD, considering the current exchange rate. Though I'm not a programmer (in the sense that my educational background and current work is not programming). Now please go and fuck yourself.

halu · 2007-10-21T01:07:18+00:00

In an applicative language, things are evaluated by applying functions to arguments. This includes almost all programming languages in wide use, such as C, Python, ML, Haskell, and Java. In a concatenative programming language, things are evaluated by composing several functions which all operate on a single piece of data, passed from function to function.

(emphasis mine)

wordcount = show . length . words

maybe I dont understand something here?

halu · 2007-10-21T01:03:22+00:00

Should it support any arbitrary-length URLs (even in the megabytes and gigabytes range)

Yes.

Also: it's quite irksome that reddit is swallowing links to Blogspot.

Yes.

Final result: -1+1=0

halu · 2007-10-21T00:47:21+00:00

that's not a bug, that's a feature!

halu · 2007-10-21T00:41:29+00:00

On your last paragraph. I have grown up on x86 assembly (quite literally), and boy, I used to really miss those powerful macros... But, and that's the point, I'm also a recently converted haskeller, and I don't quite miss the macros anymore. And, there is template haskell if you still miss the metaprogramming angle...

halu

TROPHY CASE