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Phiwise_ commented on Alexei Navalny's Prison Diaries   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/_____k
Phiwise_ · a year ago
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward realpolitik.
Phiwise_ commented on Google’s AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon   edwardbenson.com/2024/10/... · Posted by u/gwintrob
SkyPuncher · a year ago
My kids and I are having a blast using Suno to make stupid songs. With your attitude, we wouldn't even attempt it because (1) I'm not musically inclined (2) I don't have the time or desire to learn the actual composition (3) the kids don't have the focus beyond having the bot write something silly.
Phiwise_ · a year ago
But why have fun with your kids when you could spread the good word of open source instead?
Phiwise_ commented on Being Raised by the Internet   jimmyhmiller.github.io/ra... · Posted by u/DamonHD
fragmede · a year ago
dyscalclia sucks
Phiwise_ · a year ago
Just subtracted off one too many fives!
Phiwise_ commented on Being Raised by the Internet   jimmyhmiller.github.io/ra... · Posted by u/DamonHD
kragen · a year ago
2004 was yesterday

i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing

Phiwise_ · a year ago
1992 was 7 years before 2004, which was 20 years before today.
Phiwise_ commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998)   wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher
thom · a year ago
Microservices today have all the same problems as OOP, but vastly amplified. My kingdom for some more functional approach to architecture, with services as more or less pure functional transforms, and some sort of extremely well-typed data mesh underneath.
Phiwise_ · a year ago
Smalltalk is a partially-functional language (first-class functions in 1976, inspired by lisp) and also got static typing extensions many years ago.
Phiwise_ commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998)   wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher
mpweiher · a year ago
But he's not describing Smalltalk. He is describing what he wanted Smalltalk to evolve into. Which he didn't know how to do, because otherwise we would have it by now.

This quip by him from OOPSLA '97 is well-known:

I made up the term object oriented. And I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind..

A little less well-known are the words that immediately follow:

So, the important thing here is: I have many of the same feelings about Smalltalk

https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=634

Phiwise_ · a year ago
Why would you a hypothetical quote of Kay for cutting off the full context that he also has criticisms of Smalltalk, and then cut yourself before he specifies that what he's not committed to is the syntax and library system, while the message-passing execution model is the important thing he's trying to promote? That just muddies the waters more. This email was sent a year after OOPSLA 97, so clearly he can't have been talking about messaging as Smalltalk's problem.

As for where he wants Smalltalk to go, that's what Squeak was for. He talked about it on plenty of occasions, at least one of which was also before OOPSLA, and actually did get a research team together to develop it out in the late 2000s: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Papers_from_Viewpoints_Re...

Phiwise_ commented on Ask HN: Why does current interest in retro computing focus on the early 80s?    · Posted by u/amichail
Phiwise_ · a year ago
It's because the IBM PC was released in 1981, and over the next several years, as prices came down, steadily overran pretty much every other competing platform and took all the variety out of the market from a historical perspective. If you're interested in 40-year-old computers you could have a collection with a z80 machine, a 68k, a 6502, a tms9918a, or an 8088, and that's just variety in CPU architecture, and just some of the popular ones. Everything else was the wild west, too. Go backward too many years from there, though and the home and small business computer manufacturing industry just isn't as big, and specimens become an order of magnitude harder to find that aren't just glorified calculators. You have to put up a lot of cash comparatively to get the fun part of the hobby of owning and using them yourself over just reading about them, which you can do for any machine in any era, plus they're harder to service. If you're collecting 20 years later, though, things had gotten so much more standardized and developed that it feels almost like a different hobby. Most all of what you'll buy will be some variant of the HP versus Emachines dichotony: either an expensive IBM PC Compatible using all the common standards, with a high-tier x86 that mostly does what they all do but faster, and maybe an add-in specialty card, or a cheap IBM PC Compatible with some of the common standards, some things shaved off for cost, a low-tier x86 processor that's just more frustrating than your fast one, and a motherboard covered in cheap components that you have to solder in replacements for before it even works again.

I've painted a bit of a skewed picture here, but not by much. You can still collect later computers, and people do, but it's understandable that most people are drawn to the "cambrian explosion" of the whole line of history, no? Variety is the spice of life, and plenty its staple food to be spiced.

Phiwise_ commented on Critical Mass and Tipping Points   fs.blog/critical-mass/... · Posted by u/rzk
tristanMatthias · a year ago
Curious what conclusion you draw from this. Care to elaborate?
Phiwise_ · a year ago
My guess is it's a reference to this document [0], arguing that interdisciplinary research is indistinguishable from it. Not sure I agree, honestly.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...

Phiwise_ commented on Hachette vs. Internet Archive: We're Still Fighting for Fair Use   libraryfutures.net/post/w... · Posted by u/MrVandemar
Dylan16807 · a year ago
> repeating my argument back to me

So I'm not missing anything. You had exactly one criticism, and I explained over and over that it's not what I meant. You can't change what I meant no matter what you say; that criticism is flat-out invalid. And you have no replacement criticisms, despite implying you had some.

Cool, that means I'm clear of all accusations!

Phiwise_ · a year ago
"I'm clear of all accusations" lmao dude we're not in court
Phiwise_ commented on Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?    · Posted by u/IgorPartola
bentt · a year ago
Been a pro gamedev for 20+ years.

You have a born game designer on your hands. It is important to not assume this means they are super interested in programming. They may be, but game design is its own thing. HN will skew you towards programming first, naturally.

Check these out:

- Adventure Game Studio (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/)

- Twine (https://twinery.org/)

And these have more visual ways of programming which could let them express their ideas with less friction

- Dreams (Playstation)

- Unity (with Playmaker or Bolt visual scripting)

- Godot

And the other suggestions of Scratch are good, but I find Scratch to feel like a way to learn programming more than expressing game design.

Lastly, explore card and tabletop games with them. It’s a whole thing!

Phiwise_ · a year ago
Plus, if you are looking to teach a child interested in programming specifically, you might consider Snap/Build Your Own Blocks [0], an extension of Scratch made partially by an instructor of SICP at Berkeley to support things like anonymous functions, prototypes, and metaprogramming. It seems robust enough a child given it now could get right up to undergraduate introductory CS as the genuine article! I would have been amazed if any of the systems to enable kids to make games of my childhood (which I did get a pretty unrepresentatively bad batch of besides) had that kind of potential to them. Imagine a high schooler today reading, say, a blog post about their favorite game's scripting system for its quest designers and implementing its high level beat for beat themselves. Sure it'll run disappointingly slow but the education potential is immense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language)

u/Phiwise_

KarmaCake day423April 27, 2021View Original