It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best." Or Steve Jobs [2] - "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Don't ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don't ignore reality either - that'd be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.
No, not for great wealth perhaps, but using myself as an example - the fact that I'm in my own apartment across the country from where I grew up, with an engineering job, that pays well enough for me to afford an expensive pocket computer cum telephone to write this on - anyone of those things alone would have blown the mind of 18 year old me - all three of them as one combined train is astonishing in hindsight. If I look at all the just that I've done in the last 20 years, I'm ought to be astonished, I've been stupendously lucky.
Now for a moment, look at all the dots connected to get where we are technologically over the last, 20, 40, 80, 120 years. For example just in communications, In 120 years we went from messages for the average person taking months to span the globe, to a situation where the average person in any country, can phone another average person in most any other country at anytime day or night without difficulty - that alone is astonishing to me. Never mind all the other improvements we've watched blink into existence.
The dots connect for everyone, some folks just get more of them.
Here's a good argument why the dots will connect eventually as long as you keep doing interesting things. One of my favorite books: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/
Connecting the dots is not entirely random. You can choose to do stuff that connects them. And maybe only connect some. In PGs case for example there's quite a lot of connection with lisp, startups and writing, though the painting never really seems to have been terribly useful.
A bit of both surely. There's going to be a lot of selection bias, but you should always be asking yourself "is this the kind of thing that might connect with other things in the future?".
I agree, this is a good one. It's a bit rare to get retrospectives like this. Typically they tend to fall into one of three categories: the 'great-man' biography, which are more history lessons than anything else. The very poor and/or very unlucky people, those born into genetic diseases, addicted families, or some bad misfortune. And the middling and very unread section of otherwise perfectly normal people without much to say.
PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.
The world is non linear, with discrete inflection points. Some of those points are outside of your control, but some are points where you made an important decision that correctly anticipated a non linear outcome. All positive non linear outcomes take time to compound, however, hence why you can’t connect the positive dots until enough time has passed to look back.
> 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, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling.
I wish every grad student had been forced to memorize this statement. Build something useable, not clever.
Rather than an outright hoax, I like the term "fad". There are fads in technology, some of which are directly inspired by what has become possible and some of which are mutations of of other ideas. Some fads have more worth or more longevity than others -- in the world of clothing, denim jeans are now a foundation on which to build; I might consider object-oriented language features to be similar.
Like stocks, you can buy ideas “low” and sell them “high.” Some ideas are cyclical too, AI, mainframes/cloud, etc... And this extends beyond tech for instance “equity” is currently hot but that may be short lived which is unfortunate.
> 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, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.
Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.
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.
Absolutely. Things that were commercial failures were often huge successes in the scientific community. If you don't see why something is popular it's probably not because it's useless, it's probably because you aren't the intended user. Which is fine but a very different conclusion.
And the early beowulf cluster stuff was definitely breaking new ground, and is the direct ancestor of the most powerful supercomputers in the world right now.
There were many cool things about grid computing and I think they got some of the abstractions right.
However, there was a larger gap in what was actually possible and what people claimed was possible. You'll see this gap in other software. However, if you compare the difference to what AWS says it can do to what it actually does, that's a pretty big difference.
The quality of the systems developed by a large company with of resources is going to be much better than a collaboration of different scientists and software engineering groups at different national labs and universities.
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling.
This happens with jobs too.. especially software jobs. Nobody wants to do software QA, want to know how to get a software engineering job when the market is tight or otherwise inaccessible... software QA.
Incidentally, I think being in QA and being a good engineer is a recipe for a very good career. A surprising number of QA software developers are... just not very good developers. Working with a good developer that just happens to specialize in QA is an amazing experience.
Without the benefit of hindsight we can't tell which of these building blocks will become the next paradigm. I think your expectation that progress should be a direct line where every step gets you closer is mistaken. It's often guided by a very subjective feeling of interesting-ness which cannot be formalized.
Something can be both legitimately revolutionary/interesting, but also significantly over-hyped and misrepresented, often with strong for-profit incentives. Some recent good examples of this include progress in cryptocurrencies, decentralization, and ML/AI.
It isn't a hoax, but the OP is exactly right: if it were more usable, people would see it for what it is, and not for what the silly media narrative makes it sounds like.
As long as your technology is only usable by a high priesthood, you can make it look like magic.
There are many many practical example of modern ML (especially DL). Would be interesting to hear why you think those examples are not indicative of a field which is useful/not a hoax.
I think it depends on what you call it. Instead of calling it AI or even ML you could call it pattern recognition or automatic model parameter estimation, but it doesn't sound as cool.
This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some art classes and because they were not for credit, I just flowed and drew ( https://lingxiaolingdotus.firebaseapp.com/art ). Tbh I felt more alive placing some hasty marks on paper than I ever did doing "research" in a lab.
"I'm only up to age 25 and already there are such conspicuous patterns. Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn't require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn't require the students to learn anything."
I fear I'm one of these unsuspecting losers...except I guess that comment makes me suspecting.
IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.
Thank you! I want the same, but sadly consumer culture drives so much of the U.S. (assuming you're in the U.S). And because consumer preference is so arbitrary, there's an irreducible amount of arbitrariness that flows through the system regardless of how well the internal org incentive is set up or managed. Basically I'm saying if the value of your product is imaginary, then the people who can sell imaginary value gets the top pickings.
The most pure people I find are in quant finance, engaging the market at the abstract "number" level purifies everything, even if money corrupts at the individual level.
Since we're commenting on a pg essay, IIRC startups are said to be the place where you CAN play it straight and get rewarded justly. The core idea being you can't fake or politic your way into making something users want.
I wish I could find the link to the essay that directly states this but I'm having trouble finding it now (and my Google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough to locate it).
>It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated.
As someone who came out of the same "prestigious and selective place as you", this take hits hard. I will say, part of what you learn doing research is if you even enjoy doing research.
ha! I remember seeing you around the building. To be fair I really enjoyed the subject, it's just art is soulful in a way that other subject can never be for me. I imagine it's the same for music for a lot of people. I still code now and would never do art as a job.
The hardest part is realizing there's an opportunity cost to every decision you make, and it can be anything from another fubar direction or something more meaningful. I've come to think that attempting to find deep meaning in work is a gamble that some get lucky in.
Whether or not it's meaningful, solve some problems and enjoy it. Joy is not the same as meaning and it's less of a gamble to land on it
Thanks! And yeah I took Chinese painting when I was 7-8 so it stuck with me. And yeah the beetle was a request from friend, it's still on the shelf at her house :)
> "How should I choose what to do? 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. If this surprised me, who'd lived it, then I thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people, and encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last sentence of it."
I loved the ending. The essay was primarily for him. It seems that some of the best writing, similarly to the best products, is when you yourself are the recipient.
> One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it's worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious.
You might be able to reinterpret this through the lens of the old saying about how, during a gold rush, the people who "made shovels" made most of the money while a few miners got all the press.
We don't usually hear about the folks making provisions or shovels. If you dig into Seattle history, you may learn about how early Seattle was financed in part by providing raw materials after San Francisco's fires (apparently parts of downtown Seattle are fill dirt used as ballast for empty lumber barges traveling back from SF), but things got really interesting after the Seattle Fire. The reconstruction was financed in part from being a jumping off point for the Yukon Goldrush. Most colorfully, by a particularly successful Madame (as in brothel). If you're not a local, you'd never hear and probably never care about such things.
The supply of people who want to go on an adventure is far more reliable than the supply of profitable outcomes for those adventures. Most salesmanship is already about selling a story, not a product, and there are few stories sexier than an adventure you haven't taken yet.
The checks clear whether the customer is batshit insane or on to something great (in which case, you played a small part in that and might benefit from having done so).
The tour is not entirely scripted. Each guide seems to have their own favorite anecdotes that they will offer. You could probably take that tour every few years and learn something every time.
Maybe these are bad examples? To a certain degree these created/heavily-defined the market they serve, whereas the "shovel" concept might require selling a solution to an existing market.
I’ve enjoyed many of pg’s essays, but this is my favourite of all time.
I often feel burned out and uninspired these days, even after past successes. It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.
What really impresses me is the calm he displays throughout all of this. He never seemed to have self-doubts about not being able to make enough money, not being able to find the right partner to start a family...
He seems to have been guided by a deep trust into himself and his abilities.
>It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.
It's a good feeling that after "retirement" this all still lies ahead of you if you still want it.
> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there.
I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it mentioned in any community which are actively working on programming language design (e.g. Rust, Zig, TypeScript). Maybe he's happy with the result regardless of how useful people have found it, but surely it must be somewhat disappointing to see it go unnoticed by?
> I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared.
This is not unlike a doctoral dissertation. Invest years of your life and effort, produce nice results, have people cheer for you after you successfully defend it and then nobody cares for the results anymore.
The Bel part felt deeply in tune with the rest of Paul's life - it's something he did because it was interesting to him and he wanted to.
If anything, Viaweb is the odd thing out, since it was pursued with the explicit intent of making money (though I expect the whole affair was fascinating from the inside anyway).
Not everything has to be evaluated in terms of its popularity, "success" or "impact".
Another PG (Phil Greenspun) had this comment on Bel:
If you weren’t persuaded by the existing 100+ dialects of Lisp that have been created over the years, Bel from Paul Graham should change your mind and lure you aware from the dark and tedious arts of C and Java.
After you’ve saved bigly in development time on your next project, you can thank me!
As a Lisper, I had not been able to understand what Bel was when it was released, and still do not understand it after reading the shorter explanation in this post.
Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just needs to be "sold" a bit better.
As somebody who liked reading about Bel but gave up after the first paragraph of the source code, something to note is that (a) most new ideas are failures, (b) I’m happy for Mr pg for trying new things, I like when people try to do something new, without regard for success, (c) great ideas take time to be appreciated in full - it may very well be tha t Bel will be a great success, but once understood by people far smarter than me and (d) (importantly for me), I appreciate the reminder that the path least travelled can be the most rewarding and it reminds me not to lose heart in my own crazy projects. I really liked the quote that the intentions on why we do things is important - the going will get rough, but we will persevere if we do it for the right intentions (our own happiness).
Bel will most likely not gain traction; but the fact that Mr pg spent four years and enjoyed his time developing it, makes it to me a highly successful outcome for himself:) outward Success is not a requirement for a successful project, the only thing matters is whether we achieved our internal goals on it.
Give that pg is someone who can walk away from running YCombinator to work on other stuff for fun, he probably doesn't care about maximizing utility or impact at this point.
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.
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.
So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out.
Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all.
If they do something, this is more to please me, as they are good kids, but they would spend all day playing Roblox and watching Youtube.
Not sure if you have some insights that can help me be better parent and support them better.
Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin...
If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's done poorly these days. I suggest you start with the essays and writing of John Taylor Gatto; his writings were ludicrously inspirational to me. Here is the first article I ever read that made me realize that I was a deficient learner and had never truly engaged in learning: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Consider that Roblox and Youtube are essentially slot machines for dopamine. If you want to engage with your children as creative, disciplined learning machines, they must be weaned off of addictive superstimulus-coded platforms, which is damn near impossible given the tech demands of modern school. I don't have any advice for you on that front, except that the more time you can spend with them the better. Perhaps you can start by playing Roblox and watching YouTube videos with them (taking care to only offer them positive and genuinely interested feedback on what they choose to do), and after they've built you into their habits, begin steering them towards more productive activities.
Btw, HN doesn't have DMs and your email address isn't public. (It's on my list to make that explicit on the profile page.) So if you want to be contactable, you need to say how in your About field.
It sounds like you're doing the opposite of what your parents did. They resisted giving you a computer which made you want it more intensely. Whereas you gave it to them freely and are probably subconsciously pressuring them to get interested in it (e.g. your last sentence says "help me be better parent and support them better" but I think what you really meant was "help me figure out how to get them interested in computers") which is making them perceive it as work or something forced on them and are therefore rebelliously opposing it.
I know it's a truism but I think it's worth appreciating how rebellious kids can be. At least that's how I was. Tell me I can't do something, I will be obsessed with doing it. Tell me I have to do something or I should do something, I lose all interest in it.
Or they're simply not interested in computers.
Or you can try inspiring wonder and fascination and fun around computers.
I think it's probably more to do with being interested in things. I was really interested in computers and being online when I was young. I didn't have my own computer, my parents bought my sister one even though she didn't like or use computers, and I was always competing with my dad to use his. Later, I'd be vying with everyone for the phone line, to the point where my parents got an extra phone line, and (by then we had two computers) my brother and I would be always trying to use both phone lines so we could both be online.
Now, as an adult, I have more computers than I could reasonably use (I originally wrote "more than I could want" but that isn't true). I still use computers all the time and I'm pretty much always online. I love it and I expect to continue to going forward and, hopefully, expand my connection to computers and the internet, as technology permits.
My kids are too young to have an opinion on computers, and part of me is kind of concerned they won't have an interest in tinkering with computers or programming as I do. My father is an amateur radio enthusiast and I never really connected to that hobby. Maybe my dad trying to pressure me into studying the books (or maybe the requirement to study books) kept me from getting into it. Maybe I just had different natural proclivities. If my children show an interest in computers I won't restrict their access (except for not allowing them to use Windows). If they're into something else, I'll enable them (provided it's a healthy interest). We'll see.
Same, but I've realized my kids aren't me, and most people aren't me. Most young children I encounter are not innately fascinated by computers and itching to get programming ASAP in the way that I was. But they don't seem to be autistic like I was/am either.
I've tried to introduce them to Squeak, robots, and various such things on offer nowadays as gateways for children to get into tech, but the curiosity isn't there just yet. This is fine. They are into other things that I wasn't into at all.. like dancing, sports, or just being kids! :-)
Prevent your success from spoiling your kids. Your kids probably are not jealous of anything they see because you provide them anything they want. I think a parent should think and figure out how to create a challenging environment for their kids. Not just artificial challenge like games. Real challenge that will shape(and I think improve) their personality.
I'm not a parent so I can't give concrete advise, just sharing my thoughts.
I had to do the same thing and thought that was funny. I still remember I had been saving my paper route money for a while and my dad took me out on a walk and after some silence him saying "Breck, I've decided to help you buy the computer.". They put in 50% and I paid 50%. Even then had to do a payment plan with the kid in the city who could build computers on the cheap.
Nowadays I let my 2yo play with my some old laptop that is 100,000x more powerful than the first machine I had.
I have the same problem. One thing to try to get them to do is build their own Roblox game with you or maybe build some compute machines inside Minecraft. My kids also want to make their own you tube channel so I look at it as broadcasting experience, story telling, and they also Facetime with their friends while playing so they get socialization as well.
Another idea is to take them on a trip with no electronics and internet. Camping or a cabin. Maybe with another family or friends so the kids can play together. That way they can see life without roblox and youtube and the change in scenery helps with that.
The pandemic has made this a little harder to do though.
The 80s-90s was a small window in time where computers were becoming powerful enough to do cool things without modern UX hiding all the implementation details.
I got into computer programming when I got a Mindstorms Lego set, which built off my love for Legos.
My younger brother learned some about C literally because he wanted to write cheats for Counterstrike, or more accurately how to remove the DRM-components of cheats that he didn't want to pay for.
You just gotta find a gate-way drug activity, as well as a gate-way programming language because going straight to Lisp is like going straight to heroin.
I've found the "drug" for foreign languages , by letting them watch certain cartoons when home goals are met (good behavior etc), with the caveat they can only watch with audio that is a specific foreign language.
The next step is the hardest one. Once they read, I can probably migrate to a 4th language, and leverage RPGs for that purpose. Or I can branch out to programming like you say, but that may be much more difficult.
You need to have a partner that is supportive of this. If you don't present a united front, any (learning) policy will soon be forgotten.
Motivation should be a significant part of teaching. Pedagogy is quite outdated in this regard, as a whole I think.
Not a teacher, but some thoughts.
Direct "telling" of motivation, i.e. a rational explanation, doesn't necessarily achieve intuitive motivation, which is excitement, that knack for learning or doing something great; but I'm certain it's a good step. Talk to them: why should they learn things in the computer? You can make games, you can change the world (it's complicated, but it's true enough to be valid to tell children!), you can understand how nature works (when building models and simulations); you might use (increasing chance) it in most jobs you can get in the future, from a writer to financial analyst to lawyer. And motivation ought to be about taste as well -- show, and tell, how it is awesome what you can build, how it is awesome how everything works, develop their internal (intuitive) motivation and sense of beauty.
Try to get them to do it, however simple: make a tiny simple game using perhaps pygame or scratch, or draw some lines using p5.js. Let them have fun. Teach them about science and philosophy. Things will develop from there I'm sure.
Readit News
It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best." Or Steve Jobs [2] - "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Don't ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don't ignore reality either - that'd be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2013/drew-houstons-commencement-address
[2] https://singjupost.com/full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungr...
Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.
No, not for great wealth perhaps, but using myself as an example - the fact that I'm in my own apartment across the country from where I grew up, with an engineering job, that pays well enough for me to afford an expensive pocket computer cum telephone to write this on - anyone of those things alone would have blown the mind of 18 year old me - all three of them as one combined train is astonishing in hindsight. If I look at all the just that I've done in the last 20 years, I'm ought to be astonished, I've been stupendously lucky.
Now for a moment, look at all the dots connected to get where we are technologically over the last, 20, 40, 80, 120 years. For example just in communications, In 120 years we went from messages for the average person taking months to span the globe, to a situation where the average person in any country, can phone another average person in most any other country at anytime day or night without difficulty - that alone is astonishing to me. Never mind all the other improvements we've watched blink into existence.
The dots connect for everyone, some folks just get more of them.
tl;dr When in doubt, study maths.
PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.
You might be underestimating the value of the YC portfolio and PG's stake in it.
Dead Comment
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, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling.
I wish every grad student had been forced to memorize this statement. Build something useable, not clever.
The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.
Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.
However, there was a larger gap in what was actually possible and what people claimed was possible. You'll see this gap in other software. However, if you compare the difference to what AWS says it can do to what it actually does, that's a pretty big difference.
The quality of the systems developed by a large company with of resources is going to be much better than a collaboration of different scientists and software engineering groups at different national labs and universities.
This happens with jobs too.. especially software jobs. Nobody wants to do software QA, want to know how to get a software engineering job when the market is tight or otherwise inaccessible... software QA.
Without the benefit of hindsight we can't tell which of these building blocks will become the next paradigm. I think your expectation that progress should be a direct line where every step gets you closer is mistaken. It's often guided by a very subjective feeling of interesting-ness which cannot be formalized.
Lots of random trying things out in various places and times until one of them sticks.
But then the choice becomes "build something usable, or only work for someone who hired a 'grant writer' that is making 125-250% of your salary"
Not everything in ML is as rosy as the papers make it out to be, but to call it a "hoax" is going way too far.
It doesn't even make sense, it's like saying marijuana is a hoax because my uncle smokes pot and still got cancer.
Here are some alternative statements that make more sense (and contain more truth):
* There is a lot of snake oil and outright fraud being sold to unwitting managers.
* There is a lot of empty hype being fed to general public through the pop sci media and mainstream news.
* Deep learning specifically has not borne fruit in all (edit: or even most) problem domains.
* Lack of good quality data (and qualified people to analyze it) is a bigger problem than lack of advanced models and computing power.
As long as your technology is only usable by a high priesthood, you can make it look like magic.
alpha go, alphafold2, gpt-3, image recognition benchmarks etc?
i work in ML as well* and while its certainly overhyped and often sold prematurelt, a lot of the stuff is real and works very very well.
* i build stuff for cities to more efficiently monitor their citizens (no tracking or personal identification, just aggregate numbers)
I like this as a descriptive phrase. ML won't be "intelligence" per se, but it can do repetitive tasks that otherwise required thought.
"I'm only up to age 25 and already there are such conspicuous patterns. Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn't require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn't require the students to learn anything."
IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.
Your art work is beautiful by the way.
The most pure people I find are in quant finance, engaging the market at the abstract "number" level purifies everything, even if money corrupts at the individual level.
Or put another way, it would be a bit strange to say that everyone who works at a corporation is an unsuspecting loser.
From what I’ve seen, academia is both worse and better. So don’t feel like you’re missing out on something.
Just do what makes you happy.
I wish I could find the link to the essay that directly states this but I'm having trouble finding it now (and my Google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough to locate it).
This essay gets linked to a lot on here, but you might be interested in Rao's "Sociopaths/clueless/losers" taxonomy: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
You play to win the game.
Love the artwork!
Whether or not it's meaningful, solve some problems and enjoy it. Joy is not the same as meaning and it's less of a gamble to land on it
Would love to see some landscapes, along the lines of japanese / chinese landscapes - as that the feeling I get from your style.
More insects though. :)
I loved the ending. The essay was primarily for him. It seems that some of the best writing, similarly to the best products, is when you yourself are the recipient.
But more options are open than ever before, and his life's work continues . . .
You might be able to reinterpret this through the lens of the old saying about how, during a gold rush, the people who "made shovels" made most of the money while a few miners got all the press.
We don't usually hear about the folks making provisions or shovels. If you dig into Seattle history, you may learn about how early Seattle was financed in part by providing raw materials after San Francisco's fires (apparently parts of downtown Seattle are fill dirt used as ballast for empty lumber barges traveling back from SF), but things got really interesting after the Seattle Fire. The reconstruction was financed in part from being a jumping off point for the Yukon Goldrush. Most colorfully, by a particularly successful Madame (as in brothel). If you're not a local, you'd never hear and probably never care about such things.
The supply of people who want to go on an adventure is far more reliable than the supply of profitable outcomes for those adventures. Most salesmanship is already about selling a story, not a product, and there are few stories sexier than an adventure you haven't taken yet.
The checks clear whether the customer is batshit insane or on to something great (in which case, you played a small part in that and might benefit from having done so).
Regardless of whether or not you're a local, the Underground Seattle tour is definitely a must-do if you ever find yourself there.
AWS -> cloud platform shovel
Google -> web advertising shovel
Maybe these are bad examples? To a certain degree these created/heavily-defined the market they serve, whereas the "shovel" concept might require selling a solution to an existing market.
I often feel burned out and uninspired these days, even after past successes. It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.
Thank you pg.
He seems to have been guided by a deep trust into himself and his abilities.
It's a good feeling that after "retirement" this all still lies ahead of you if you still want it.
I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it mentioned in any community which are actively working on programming language design (e.g. Rust, Zig, TypeScript). Maybe he's happy with the result regardless of how useful people have found it, but surely it must be somewhat disappointing to see it go unnoticed by?
This is not unlike a doctoral dissertation. Invest years of your life and effort, produce nice results, have people cheer for you after you successfully defend it and then nobody cares for the results anymore.
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If anything, Viaweb is the odd thing out, since it was pursued with the explicit intent of making money (though I expect the whole affair was fascinating from the inside anyway).
Not everything has to be evaluated in terms of its popularity, "success" or "impact".
I’m not sure anyone else has studied it intensively, but perhaps there are one or two.
It changed the way I code, at least. I also snagged a few of the library functions for my own lisp.
If you weren’t persuaded by the existing 100+ dialects of Lisp that have been created over the years, Bel from Paul Graham should change your mind and lure you aware from the dark and tedious arts of C and Java.
After you’ve saved bigly in development time on your next project, you can thank me!
Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just needs to be "sold" a bit better.
Bel will most likely not gain traction; but the fact that Mr pg spent four years and enjoyed his time developing it, makes it to me a highly successful outcome for himself:) outward Success is not a requirement for a successful project, the only thing matters is whether we achieved our internal goals on it.
Like all good paintings it goes unnoticed in its time.
It might become a classic in the future, it might be forgotten.
[0] https://lobste.rs/s/jec21l/thought_leaders_chicken_sexers
Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all.
If they do something, this is more to please me, as they are good kids, but they would spend all day playing Roblox and watching Youtube.
Not sure if you have some insights that can help me be better parent and support them better.
If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's done poorly these days. I suggest you start with the essays and writing of John Taylor Gatto; his writings were ludicrously inspirational to me. Here is the first article I ever read that made me realize that I was a deficient learner and had never truly engaged in learning: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Consider that Roblox and Youtube are essentially slot machines for dopamine. If you want to engage with your children as creative, disciplined learning machines, they must be weaned off of addictive superstimulus-coded platforms, which is damn near impossible given the tech demands of modern school. I don't have any advice for you on that front, except that the more time you can spend with them the better. Perhaps you can start by playing Roblox and watching YouTube videos with them (taking care to only offer them positive and genuinely interested feedback on what they choose to do), and after they've built you into their habits, begin steering them towards more productive activities.
Even having a peer hold me accountable like he describes in the article would be amazing, let alone a teacher.
Reading that article made me sad that I've never had someone else challenge me like that. I've always had to do it myself.
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I know it's a truism but I think it's worth appreciating how rebellious kids can be. At least that's how I was. Tell me I can't do something, I will be obsessed with doing it. Tell me I have to do something or I should do something, I lose all interest in it.
Or they're simply not interested in computers.
Or you can try inspiring wonder and fascination and fun around computers.
Now, as an adult, I have more computers than I could reasonably use (I originally wrote "more than I could want" but that isn't true). I still use computers all the time and I'm pretty much always online. I love it and I expect to continue to going forward and, hopefully, expand my connection to computers and the internet, as technology permits.
My kids are too young to have an opinion on computers, and part of me is kind of concerned they won't have an interest in tinkering with computers or programming as I do. My father is an amateur radio enthusiast and I never really connected to that hobby. Maybe my dad trying to pressure me into studying the books (or maybe the requirement to study books) kept me from getting into it. Maybe I just had different natural proclivities. If my children show an interest in computers I won't restrict their access (except for not allowing them to use Windows). If they're into something else, I'll enable them (provided it's a healthy interest). We'll see.
I've tried to introduce them to Squeak, robots, and various such things on offer nowadays as gateways for children to get into tech, but the curiosity isn't there just yet. This is fine. They are into other things that I wasn't into at all.. like dancing, sports, or just being kids! :-)
I'm not a parent so I can't give concrete advise, just sharing my thoughts.
Nowadays I let my 2yo play with my some old laptop that is 100,000x more powerful than the first machine I had.
The pandemic has made this a little harder to do though.
You just gotta find a gate-way drug activity, as well as a gate-way programming language because going straight to Lisp is like going straight to heroin.
I've found the "drug" for foreign languages , by letting them watch certain cartoons when home goals are met (good behavior etc), with the caveat they can only watch with audio that is a specific foreign language.
The next step is the hardest one. Once they read, I can probably migrate to a 4th language, and leverage RPGs for that purpose. Or I can branch out to programming like you say, but that may be much more difficult.
You need to have a partner that is supportive of this. If you don't present a united front, any (learning) policy will soon be forgotten.
Not a teacher, but some thoughts.
Direct "telling" of motivation, i.e. a rational explanation, doesn't necessarily achieve intuitive motivation, which is excitement, that knack for learning or doing something great; but I'm certain it's a good step. Talk to them: why should they learn things in the computer? You can make games, you can change the world (it's complicated, but it's true enough to be valid to tell children!), you can understand how nature works (when building models and simulations); you might use (increasing chance) it in most jobs you can get in the future, from a writer to financial analyst to lawyer. And motivation ought to be about taste as well -- show, and tell, how it is awesome what you can build, how it is awesome how everything works, develop their internal (intuitive) motivation and sense of beauty.
Try to get them to do it, however simple: make a tiny simple game using perhaps pygame or scratch, or draw some lines using p5.js. Let them have fun. Teach them about science and philosophy. Things will develop from there I'm sure.
Good luck!
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