cmontella

5 ms·

31.
by cmontella 1y ago
I'm working on a programming language called Mech: https://github.com/mech-lang It's for building robots, scientific computations, user interfaces, reactive systems, and so forth. Currently working on docs for thi
32.
by cmontella 1y ago
Science absolutely depends on people meeting and exchanging ideas. Whether that happens at a conference as they exist today is one thing, but if you don't spend money on getting people from around the world to meet and exchange ideas,
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by cmontella 1y ago
> for all intents and purposes What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay attenti
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by cmontella 1y ago
That's an interesting counterfactual but it doesn't really mean much to reality. Fact is, what happened is that public research got the results where private industry did not, and everyone is better for it, including private indus
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by cmontella 1y ago
> If the OP's specific research was into The Changing Mating Habits of the Delta Smelt Due to Habit Destruction, then probably it was money that could far better spent paying tuition for, say, medical students or even just letting t
36.
by cmontella 1y ago
The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is not suffici
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by cmontella 1y ago
If that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise
38.
by cmontella 1y ago
Please read my sibling reply about DARPA grand challenges. This knowledge was built using public dollars by people who publish papers, which are being read today by people building products. That's the great cycle of progress. Notably
39.
by cmontella 1y ago
Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars,
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by cmontella 2y ago
Thank will follow along with great interest!
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by cmontella 2y ago
Bill Wadge ruined my life! I stumbled upon his book on his language Lucid in the library when I was in grad school, and it opened up my eyes about different programming models. It inspired me to try making my own programming language and I’
42.
by cmontella 2y ago
This is really cool! What do you mean by "the" compiler for our chip? Is this a compiler backed like LLVM which generates efficient machine code, that other languages can target? I'm an author of a dataflow programming langua
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by cmontella 2y ago
I’m working on a programming language for robots called Mech! https://github.com/mech-lang/mech Mostly a research project until I find some more people interested in pushing it further. A recent blog for anyone who wan
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by cmontella 2y ago
Looks like a great lineup, can't wait!
45.
by cmontella 2y ago
It's bimodal. Most of the world uses one paradigm of programming (declarative programming via Excel and SQL), while developers use another paradigm (imperative programming via Python/C/C++/Javascript et al.).
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by cmontella 2y ago
Thanks for the kind words, and I agree it is a shame, but we a ran out of money! Chris raised $2m from investors, and we spent that over 3 years with a pretty minimal burn rate as far as SF startups go. We couldn't really show a path t
47.
by cmontella 2y ago
How do you deal with writing code with multicursors when you have to type the same thing multiple times? With monospace I just ctrl+alt+down a couple times on aligned text and then type. With proportional fonts I don't suppose it'
48.
by cmontella 2y ago
> A Truly Relational Language... Value Database I helped on a language called Eve about 10 years ago. A truly relational language was exactly what that language was supposed to be, or at least that's what we were aiming at as a solu
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by cmontella 2y ago
Trace debugging can be inefficient, but it's also highly effective, portable between all languages, and requires no additional tooling. Hard to beat that combo.
50.
by cmontella 2y ago
Well I don't agree with your premise on what University is supposed to be. There's a lot one has to learn about how things have been done before one can even conceive of whether or not an idea is new. Today we stand on the shoulde
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by cmontella 2y ago
Personally I have dyscalculia and to this day I need to add on my fingers. Still, I ended up with degrees in physics and computer engineering. I don't think those things you mention are useless, but they never worked for me so I don&#x
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by cmontella 2y ago
Yeah! Computer science students can do more "science" with the LLM. Before they spend all their time just writing and debugging. Instructors are happy if students can just write code that compiles. When every student can write cod
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by cmontella 2y ago
They're allowed to use whatever tools they want. But they have to meet higher standards in my classroom because more is going to be expected of them when they graduate. What would be unfair is if I don't prepare them for the expec
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by cmontella 2y ago
FWIW I teach upper level courses. I see LLMs as almost sufficiently advanced compilers. You could say the same thing about gcc or even standard libraries. "Why back in my day we wrote our own hash maps while walking uphill both ways!
55.
by cmontella 2y ago
I teach at the university level, and I just expect more from my students. Instead of implementing data structures like we did when I was in school, something ChatGPT is very good at; my students are building systems, something ChatGPT has m
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by cmontella 2y ago
That sounds like a feedback control loop. That's the basis of a programming language I'm writing ^_^
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by cmontella 2y ago
The problem with edtech is they make the key mistake of taking the curriculum intended for pen / paper / chalkboard and they just put it on a tablet and expect it to work. Seymour Papert wrote "Mindstorms" about this ver
58.
by cmontella 2y ago
The first one was great; I still get more traction from the 10 minute video I posted at HYTRADBOI-1 than any talk/paper I've presented at SPLASH. I had more salient questions about Mech than I've ever gotten from SPLASH, VC h
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by cmontella 3y ago
That’s the point — any person sitting on massive wealth is definitionally Smaug-like, because that’s exactly what Smaug did.
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by cmontella 4y ago
> Where's the gradient? Do they fly at the boundary between different wind speeds? At the surface of the water, windspeed is lower than at higher altitudes, so that's where the gradient is. If you watch an albatross soaring ove

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