Readit Newscjohansson commented on The Philosophy of Computer Science plato.stanford.edu/entrie... · Posted by u/lucidguppy
First of all "this, then that" does not imply causality.
The way that I heard it, it was the fact that Lisp environments on Sun workstations were able to outperform Lisp machines at a much better price point. And just like that, a significant AI specific industry collapsed, and its other promises came into question.
That said, all three versions are consistent. The fact that researchers thought that they were closer than they were caused them to overpromise and underdeliver. Then when the visible bleeding edge of their efforts publicly lost to a far cheaper architecture, their failure became very visible.
Which we call cause versus effect almost doesn't matter. All of these things happened, and lead to an AI winter. And we continued to get incremental progress until the unexpected success of Google Translate. Whose success was not welcomed by people who had been trying to get rule-based AI systems to work.
Google Translate got a lot worse after the AI version was introduced, maybe not for english-centric translations but all other. The previous deductive translator was be much better. Same with Siri and Google Assistant, they are really bad at other languages except English
The cool thing I think is that we watch both, running and race cars.
Yes but humans are required (as runners or drivers) to make it interesting to watch. Humans are human-centered by nature (of course)
cjohansson commented on 72-year-old Congressman pursues a Master's in AI washingtonpost.com/dc-md-... · Posted by u/HillRat
The reality is that most people's mental abilities have started to decline by this age, particularly the capacity to learn new things. That makes this story all the more remarkable. Part of that I think is certainly as you suggest, that the brain is a muscle, you need to use it to keep it fit. But you can't escape nature either. To keep the muscle analogy, you won’t compete as an athlete at 72 no matter how fit you remain.
This is not true, it varies by personality, some personalities have high neuropasticity even when they get older. It depends on individual differences in the dopaminergic system
cjohansson commented on Emacs: Feature/tree-sitter merged into master lists.gnu.org/archive/htm... · Posted by u/signa11
The main innovation of tree-sitter, even more than incremental parsing, as I see it is that it provides a uniform api for traversing a parse tree, which makes it relatively straightforward to onboard a new language to a tool with tree-sitter support. The problem though is that the tree-sitter grammar is nearly always going to be an approximation to the actual language grammar, unless the language compiler/interpreter uses tree-sitter for parsing. To me, this is problematic for tooling because it is always possible for a tree-sitter based tool to be flat out wrong relative to the actual language. For syntax highlighting, this is generally not a huge deal (and tree-sitter does generally work well, though there are exceptions), but I'd be more cautious with security tools based on tree-sitter.
If all languages changed their reference parsers to tree-sitter, this would be moot, but that seems unlikely. Language parsers are often optimized beyond what is possible in a general purpose parser generator like tree-sitter and/or have ambiguities that cannot be resolved with the tree-sitter dsl.
What feels perhaps likely in the future is that a standard parse tree api emerges, analogous to lsp, and then language parsers could emit trees traversable by this api. Maybe it's just the tree-sitter c api with an alternate front end? Hard to say, but I suspect either something better than (but likely at least partially inspired by) tree-sitter will emerge or we will get stuck in a local minimum with tooling based on slightly incorrect language parsers.
tree-sitter is a bit better than regexp but it is not an actual parser of grammars, a fast actual parser of all languages for syntax coloring is the future I think, tree-sitter is a pragmatic middle-ground while we wait for the prime solution
cjohansson commented on The German School of Lisp (2011) blog.fogus.me/2011/05/03/... · Posted by u/tosh
Is there a Lisp that supports references and pointers, perhaps pointer aritmethics too?
cjohansson commented on iPhones and action discoverability alexanderell.is/posts/iph... · Posted by u/otras
I would say most people don't know 90% of how to use the iOS interface but ppl are in general not interested in learning it and wouldn't read a manual if the box included one or even watch videos of it. People just what Apple to read their minds, to get their stuff done in as little effort as possible and people are willing to pay a lot of money for that experience
cjohansson commented on Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring clivethompson.medium.com/... · Posted by u/tonystubblebine
I will never buy a Apple laptop again because Apple stops supporting it after a while and you can't install new version of the OS on it and new software. This is a deal breaker for me, completely a waste of perfectly fine hardware. Installing Ununtu on it solved all problems fortunately. Same thing with Apple AirPort TimeCapsule, such a waste to buy it when Apple stops supporting it after a couple of years. You might as well buy products from Apple and get the delivered directly to the garbage dump
cjohansson commented on An Intuition for Lisp Syntax (2020) stopa.io/post/265... · Posted by u/cercatrova
Lisp is inspiring at first glance, but when you need to solve complex problems like references, pointers, macros, byte-compilation and native compilation it just is not expressive enough like C, C++, or Rust. Neither is Javascript. Lisp could not replace all other languages
I would say most modern editors (Helix, Neovim) do TreeSitter and LSP better than Emacs today and probably for many years to come