drob518

30 ms·

811.
by drob518 11mo ago
Humans are weird.
812.
by drob518 11mo ago
As much as the tech industry loves to hate on Microsoft, it’s really quite amazing what they were able to do with fairly primitive tools operating on huge, complex code bases.
813.
by drob518 11mo ago
Oooo that’d be nice.
814.
by drob518 11mo ago
Why do we want to prevent people from walking?
815.
by drob518 11mo ago
Bonus points for cleverness.
816.
by drob518 11mo ago
If they experience a flood of orders every time they are mentioned in the media and people flock to throw them money when they are in trouble, it seems like they should raise prices commensurate with their costs increasing and should probab
817.
by drob518 1y ago
I laughed so hard. Really curious what the pre-prompt was.
818.
by drob518 1y ago
Yea, that’s what I first thought. “Surely, designers encounter this situation all the time and they already do this!?!?” I guess not.
819.
by drob518 1y ago
God
820.
by drob518 1y ago
Remember back when Uber was basically 100% Uber Black? That was nice.
821.
by drob518 1y ago
Now you’re just making stuff up.
822.
by drob518 1y ago
Heh!
823.
by drob518 1y ago
Well said. In fact Calvin shouldn’t be a manual for life, I think. What makes it so funny is we know that Calvin is way off base all the time, but he’s got a great imagination and we’ve all struggled in the same ways, with the same things,
824.
by drob518 1y ago
My personal favorite and my grandfather’s personal favorite (“What’s that boy and his tiger going to do next?”). My son learned to read at age 5 using Calvin and Hobbes books (lots of funny conversations of the form, “Dad, what does X mean?
825.
by drob518 1y ago
Was there any particular reason they did that, or was it just a random coincidence (that was the team that wrote it and the hardware they had access to was that particular machine and that particular machine ran MDL, otherwise, it would hav
826.
by drob518 1y ago
Yea, I get that MDL came from MIT, but I have to think that MACLISP was far more used at MIT at that time. But maybe not.
827.
by drob518 1y ago
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, I’d say. Amazing!
828.
by drob518 1y ago
Nice.
829.
by drob518 1y ago
Nice. Yep, we wrote our own adventure games in BASIC as well. There were a couple problems with that, however. First we weren’t able to come up with a sophisticated parser like Infocom had. We ended up with basic “verb object” parsers, ala
830.
by drob518 1y ago
It’s very Lispy, but it’s not strictly Lisp. Why, for instance, use “<“ and “>” to surround various forms but not others? If they were to make a mini-Lisp, I’d expect something more like Gnu Emacs Lisp, something that’s obviously a Li
831.
by drob518 1y ago
Ha! They probably assigned an intern to reply to all the kids wanting to help them write the “next one.” Too funny! They had class, Infocom did.
832.
by drob518 1y ago
When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and
833.
by drob518 1y ago
I’m curious why they chose MDL rather than Lisp for it. Sure, it would have been ancient MACLISP or whatever, but why not leverage what was already in wide use at MIT at the time?
834.
by drob518 1y ago
So, the guys at Azul actually had this sort of business plan back in 2005, but they found that it was unsustainable and turned their attention to the software side, where they have done great work. I remember having a discussion with someon
835.
by drob518 1y ago
I don’t have a lot of hope for this. As a species, we don’t seem to be able to agree to what is or isn’t reality these days. The best we can hope for from an LLM might be some forms of “both sides are equally bad” rhetoric, but that is alwa
836.
by drob518 1y ago
This doesn’t make much sense. One of the benefits of immutability is that once you create a data structure, it doesn’t change and you can treat it as a value (pass it around, share it between threads without cloning it, etc.). If you now al
837.
by drob518 1y ago
Well, yes, if your shop hires poorly, immutability won’t save you. In fact, nothing will save you.
838.
by drob518 1y ago
Cool. I didn’t realize ML had such a focus on immutability as well. I have never done any serious work in ML and it’s a hole in my knowledge. I have to go back and do a project of some sort using it (and probably one in Ocaml as well). What
839.
by drob518 1y ago
Yes, if your immutability is implemented via simple cloning of everything, it’s going to be slow. You need immutable, persistent data structures such as those in Clojure.
840.
by drob518 1y ago
Aren’t they the same thing? /sarc

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