6 ms·

<3 it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she con

<3 it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast! (from the dedication page in SICP:) “I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” ~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)

HaZeust 2y ago
Kind of reminds me of the quote from the Steve Jobs movie: "The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"
- cjohnson318 2y ago
  Dude really hit it out of the park with the "bicycle for the mind".
- rpozarickij 2y ago
  I haven't see the movie (only a few clips), but I enjoyed hearing this analogy from Steve Jobs himself in many of his interviews [0]. Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8 [1] https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98 https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98
- ketzo 2y ago
  I’ve never seen the full quote, and I really love that last sentence. Reminds me of Ratatouille: “Anyone can cook.” We make software so that someone else can do something new with it that we ourselves never imagined. So important to remember that someone could be… anyone!
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    Yup! Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist CAN come from anywhere
- karolist 2y ago
  Internet tells me that human is not the most inefficient, but pretty much down on the list. Sorry to be that guy, but to me a joke or quote needs to be true to impact :( https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/ https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/
  - cm11 2y ago
    Funny, another commenter posted both videos, Steve Jobs saying it and Steve Jobs the film. Steve Jobs says what you say. Hollywood says it the other way. I suppose it also wouldn't be surprising if Jobs rehearsed this Hollywood-style for his interview.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- kilna 2y ago
  This "bicycle for the mind" guy died way sooner because of woo-woo bullshit magical thinking. He was an overprivileged marketer who had a better than average sense of what people would like, combined a shameless capacity to crib others' notes. Like most venerated billionaires, his main genius was his capacity to exploit.
  - endofreach 2y ago
    While i do not share the opinion that jobs was such a genius at all, reducing him to be just a marketer seems very narrow-minded. Sometimes it's about bundling potential rather than exploitation. I have read many stories of the people who worked for jobs, not many of the "first ones" seem to tell stories of being exploited. But many seem to be proud of how much work they put into their work guided by a guy who seems to be there mostly for saying yey or ney. Which seems to be crucial. Think about all the dysfunctional organizations you have seen or worked with. In my experience, most of them were lacking clarity, responsibility, personal investment & decisions. The potential to end all wars, end hunger, free societies etc is there. I mean just on HN, the potential to transform the world by tomorrow is there. There is enough people with good will, enough people in key positions, enough people who are the best in their field, enough people who love to hack away as a side project, enough people who enjoy debating etc... here on HN. All that is missing is the right approach to get a few of these people together with the right goal and by tomorrow we could take out / stop a lot of evil. This person must be able to "market", to bundle potential. But this person must also be able to identify potential & make hard decisions & do the things others would call "insensitive". Otherwise the people would quickly lose interest or be lost in chaos. Focusing potential seems to be the most crucial part. Having a lot of potential but high entropy seems to be irrelevant in most cases. Anyway, had to type it out because i just realized that partially i am doing the same mistake with my startup. Too stuck fiddling on the tech while knowing that i should be focusing on bundling potential. Currently i am just contributing to a entropic potential, which serves no one. Bundling it might serve the right people, at the right time with the right people. Which infects my mind with the question i have been struggling with: is there any way someone like jobs could have been more than just a marketer in your eyes? I do feel like i am looking down upon people like jobs who seem to be happy with just talking and never trying to really do the things themselves. On the other hand having this opinion of potential entropy... what do you think? Edit: just wanted to add the after thought that people most likely call these people geniuses, whose way of achieving results they can't quite comprehend. And usually for people too attached from the problematic domain, the same geniuses could appear like idiots or sharlatans.
- jstanley 2y ago
  We were promised bicycles for the mind, but what we got was public transport for the mind.
  - bostik 2y ago
    In true South Park style. Mr Garrison would be proud.
  - lamp_book 2y ago
    We had locomotives before bicycles, too. I think the industry can still get there.
  - sabhiram 2y ago
    Muni style. People crapping all over it from time to time.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    Well what we really ended up with is TV.
    - HaZeust 2y ago
      “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.” - Andy Warhol Life is a quote or song cue.
      - LoganDark 2y ago
        This sounds a bit like they're suffering from derealization, honestly.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
- hbn 2y ago
  The YouTube video for Vulfpeck's track, Barbara, is interspersed with the interview where he said that quote -- as well as the first take of it where he stumbled through it and then asked to restart from the beginning to reword it better! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Nice quote. Lost it now but I used to have a desktop wallpaper with the old Kraftwerk cover with "ITS MORE FUN TO COMPUTE". We need regular reminders. FWIW my little one is mastering the command line after a year of having to type to get things. Even if she turns out not into computers I won't grieve because if nothing else she learned to type, which is a useful skill itself.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xenadu02 2y ago
When some people were proposing Swift remove the ability to use Emoji in variable names this was my reply: > It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.
- vladxyz 2y ago
  As soon as I realized I could have emoji in bash function names I did a thing[0] with it. It breaks shellcheck, annoys people who I try to convince to use it, but it makes me very happy. [0] https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner
dkarl 2y ago
I miss the fun in software development in the workplace. Something has changed. When I started 20+ years ago, people would get excited about something new they learned and rush to tell other people about it. Now everybody is grim, too busy grinding and "managing their visibility" to show any pleasure. If it was just me and my friends who were joyless now, I'd chalk it up to us getting old, but my coworkers who are the same age as I was 20 years ago are just as grim if not more so. They're at a point in their career where so much cool stuff is new to them, and they're completely dry and professional about it. For example, I was in a huddle with a coworker, and we needed something from a parquet file. My coworker said he might have time later to write a script to extract the information, and I was like, "No, check this out!" and I started up duckdb and had the answer in under a minute. My coworker's response was just a monotone, "I've never seen that before. It looks useful." Not "whoa, cool!" or even a simple "nice." It was almost like he felt worse for knowing it existed. It makes me look around at my coworkers and wonder if everybody could possibly be as miserable as they look and sound? And if so, why?
- brewdad 2y ago
  Certainly not everyone, but a lot of the people who have entered the field in the past decade are chasing the money. The never had the passion for it but they were and are good at it, so here they are.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    The last remaining field is game dev. The pay is low and react kiddies cannot learn it in a week. I wish the pay was higher buy the passion remains there.
    - CM30 2y ago
      And if that ever feels too corporate/safe, there's also fan game development/modding. The lack of legal ways to monetise your work there means that everyone who'd only be interested in the field for money is quickly filtered out, leaving only those willing to plow a decade or so of their life into something for no financial benefit. Plus if you go back far enough, you can work on something where there's no room to abstract out anything and your code has to be optimised for the bare hardware itself, which is always an interesting challenge.
globular-toast 2y ago
I hope we can keep it alive. The latest volume of Knuth is full of puzzles, which is wonderful. But then I see the other top thread on HN where people are whining that they aren't getting paid more than 99.9% of the population for sitting at a desk solving problems all day. Sometimes I think those people don't deserve to be doing this job.
amelius 2y ago
For me what takes the fun out of computing is that package management is severely broken. I simply haven't been able to run the latest in DL because of driver issues, compile issues, issues with containers, etc. Sure I can get it to work if I spend 1+ days on it, but it just isn't fun anymore to try out something new.
Jeandouglas 2y ago
[dead]

HaZeust 2y ago

Kind of reminds me of the quote from the Steve Jobs movie: "The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"

cjohnson318 2y ago
Dude really hit it out of the park with the "bicycle for the mind".
rpozarickij 2y ago
I haven't see the movie (only a few clips), but I enjoyed hearing this analogy from Steve Jobs himself in many of his interviews [0]. Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8 [1] https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98 https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98
ketzo 2y ago
I’ve never seen the full quote, and I really love that last sentence. Reminds me of Ratatouille: “Anyone can cook.” We make software so that someone else can do something new with it that we ourselves never imagined. So important to remember that someone could be… anyone!
- HaZeust 2y ago
  Yup! Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist CAN come from anywhere
karolist 2y ago
Internet tells me that human is not the most inefficient, but pretty much down on the list. Sorry to be that guy, but to me a joke or quote needs to be true to impact :( https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/ https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/
- cm11 2y ago
  Funny, another commenter posted both videos, Steve Jobs saying it and Steve Jobs the film. Steve Jobs says what you say. Hollywood says it the other way. I suppose it also wouldn't be surprising if Jobs rehearsed this Hollywood-style for his interview.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kilna 2y ago
This "bicycle for the mind" guy died way sooner because of woo-woo bullshit magical thinking. He was an overprivileged marketer who had a better than average sense of what people would like, combined a shameless capacity to crib others' notes. Like most venerated billionaires, his main genius was his capacity to exploit.
- endofreach 2y ago
  While i do not share the opinion that jobs was such a genius at all, reducing him to be just a marketer seems very narrow-minded. Sometimes it's about bundling potential rather than exploitation. I have read many stories of the people who worked for jobs, not many of the "first ones" seem to tell stories of being exploited. But many seem to be proud of how much work they put into their work guided by a guy who seems to be there mostly for saying yey or ney. Which seems to be crucial. Think about all the dysfunctional organizations you have seen or worked with. In my experience, most of them were lacking clarity, responsibility, personal investment & decisions. The potential to end all wars, end hunger, free societies etc is there. I mean just on HN, the potential to transform the world by tomorrow is there. There is enough people with good will, enough people in key positions, enough people who are the best in their field, enough people who love to hack away as a side project, enough people who enjoy debating etc... here on HN. All that is missing is the right approach to get a few of these people together with the right goal and by tomorrow we could take out / stop a lot of evil. This person must be able to "market", to bundle potential. But this person must also be able to identify potential & make hard decisions & do the things others would call "insensitive". Otherwise the people would quickly lose interest or be lost in chaos. Focusing potential seems to be the most crucial part. Having a lot of potential but high entropy seems to be irrelevant in most cases. Anyway, had to type it out because i just realized that partially i am doing the same mistake with my startup. Too stuck fiddling on the tech while knowing that i should be focusing on bundling potential. Currently i am just contributing to a entropic potential, which serves no one. Bundling it might serve the right people, at the right time with the right people. Which infects my mind with the question i have been struggling with: is there any way someone like jobs could have been more than just a marketer in your eyes? I do feel like i am looking down upon people like jobs who seem to be happy with just talking and never trying to really do the things themselves. On the other hand having this opinion of potential entropy... what do you think? Edit: just wanted to add the after thought that people most likely call these people geniuses, whose way of achieving results they can't quite comprehend. And usually for people too attached from the problematic domain, the same geniuses could appear like idiots or sharlatans.
jstanley 2y ago
We were promised bicycles for the mind, but what we got was public transport for the mind.
- bostik 2y ago
  In true South Park style. Mr Garrison would be proud.
- lamp_book 2y ago
  We had locomotives before bicycles, too. I think the industry can still get there.
- sabhiram 2y ago
  Muni style. People crapping all over it from time to time.
- azinman2 2y ago
  Well what we really ended up with is TV.
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.” - Andy Warhol Life is a quote or song cue.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      This sounds a bit like they're suffering from derealization, honestly.
- throwaway14356 2y ago
hbn 2y ago
The YouTube video for Vulfpeck's track, Barbara, is interspersed with the interview where he said that quote -- as well as the first take of it where he stumbled through it and then asked to restart from the beginning to reword it better! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Nice quote. Lost it now but I used to have a desktop wallpaper with the old Kraftwerk cover with "ITS MORE FUN TO COMPUTE". We need regular reminders. FWIW my little one is mastering the command line after a year of having to type to get things. Even if she turns out not into computers I won't grieve because if nothing else she learned to type, which is a useful skill itself.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xenadu02 2y ago

When some people were proposing Swift remove the ability to use Emoji in variable names this was my reply: > It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.

vladxyz 2y ago
As soon as I realized I could have emoji in bash function names I did a thing[0] with it. It breaks shellcheck, annoys people who I try to convince to use it, but it makes me very happy. [0] https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner

dkarl 2y ago

I miss the fun in software development in the workplace. Something has changed. When I started 20+ years ago, people would get excited about something new they learned and rush to tell other people about it. Now everybody is grim, too busy grinding and "managing their visibility" to show any pleasure. If it was just me and my friends who were joyless now, I'd chalk it up to us getting old, but my coworkers who are the same age as I was 20 years ago are just as grim if not more so. They're at a point in their career where so much cool stuff is new to them, and they're completely dry and professional about it. For example, I was in a huddle with a coworker, and we needed something from a parquet file. My coworker said he might have time later to write a script to extract the information, and I was like, "No, check this out!" and I started up duckdb and had the answer in under a minute. My coworker's response was just a monotone, "I've never seen that before. It looks useful." Not "whoa, cool!" or even a simple "nice." It was almost like he felt worse for knowing it existed. It makes me look around at my coworkers and wonder if everybody could possibly be as miserable as they look and sound? And if so, why?

brewdad 2y ago
Certainly not everyone, but a lot of the people who have entered the field in the past decade are chasing the money. The never had the passion for it but they were and are good at it, so here they are.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  The last remaining field is game dev. The pay is low and react kiddies cannot learn it in a week. I wish the pay was higher buy the passion remains there.
  - CM30 2y ago
    And if that ever feels too corporate/safe, there's also fan game development/modding. The lack of legal ways to monetise your work there means that everyone who'd only be interested in the field for money is quickly filtered out, leaving only those willing to plow a decade or so of their life into something for no financial benefit. Plus if you go back far enough, you can work on something where there's no room to abstract out anything and your code has to be optimised for the bare hardware itself, which is always an interesting challenge.

globular-toast 2y ago

I hope we can keep it alive. The latest volume of Knuth is full of puzzles, which is wonderful. But then I see the other top thread on HN where people are whining that they aren't getting paid more than 99.9% of the population for sitting at a desk solving problems all day. Sometimes I think those people don't deserve to be doing this job.

amelius 2y ago

For me what takes the fun out of computing is that package management is severely broken. I simply haven't been able to run the latest in DL because of driver issues, compile issues, issues with containers, etc. Sure I can get it to work if I spend 1+ days on it, but it just isn't fun anymore to try out something new.

Jeandouglas 2y ago

[dead]