infinite8s (u/infinite8s)

infinite8s commented on Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon oregonlive.com/silicon-fo... · Posted by u/cbzbc

jandrewrogers · a month ago

Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.

I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.

infinite8s · a month ago

Did you study chemical engineering knowing it's applicability to software engineering?

Your observation is interesting because early ideas in object oriented design were likewise inspired by biological robustness in the face of a non-zero background error rate (see any of Alan Kay's early writings, and his Turing lecture). I wonder if half of a CS degree shouldn't also involve basic chemeng and bioeng.

infinite8s commented on What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024) dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/... · Posted by u/prathyvsh

rtkwe · 2 months ago

The difficulty with that is there's no code or instructions to build your own so despite being "more open than open source" you're stuck implementing it from scratch if you want to make your own. Even if you can make the trek out the the current instance you can't take it home because there's still the core interpreter you need to run on a regular system to read the cameras, recognize the feducial marks, run the interpreter, and output that to the projectors that isn't immediately replicable.

I love the project but it's nearly a decade old and still lives in one location or places Bret's directly collaborated with like the biolab. [0]

[0] https://dynamicland.org/2023/Improvising_cellular_playground...

infinite8s · 2 months ago

Folk.computer (https://folk.computer) is an open source version of DL-like system, and even though the code uses TCL it's pretty easy to reimplement any bits you see in the DynamicLand archives (I've done this). For example, the code in the video here https://dynamicland.org/archive/2022/Knobs can be 1-1 translated into TCL and it works the same.

If you really wanted to play around with similar ideas it doesn't take a needing to do a full reimplemention of the reactive engine.

infinite8s commented on OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/ColinWright

catlifeonmars · 3 months ago

You’re not wrong about the downsides. However you’re wrong about the costs being prohibitive on general. I’ve personally worked on quite a few applications that do this and the additional cost has never been an issue.

Obviously context matters and there are some applications where the cost does not outweigh the benefit

infinite8s · 3 months ago

I think you and the GP are probably talking about different scale orders of magnitude.

infinite8s commented on Inventing the Adventure Game (1984) warrenrobinett.com/invent... · Posted by u/CaesarA

DonHopkins · 4 months ago

Recursively a thread from 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21896227

Including:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897355

dang on Dec 28, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Robot Odyssey (1984)

A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17421175

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7118649

DonHopkins on Dec 28, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Robot Odyssey (1984)

Dag nabbit dang, you beat me to it! That 2018 thread about Robot Odyssey Online had a link to a Slate article mentioned some stuff about Alan Kay's high regard for Robot Odyssey, who somebody quoted, then he posted a correction to the article himself, and I posted some other discussions about it with him as well (and some links to other papers about related stuff by Chaim Gingold, Kurt Schmucker, and Dan Ingalls). Robot Odyssey was brilliant and waaaay before its time, and as Alan Kay said: Warren Robinette is a very special designer! He was the creator of one of the first known easter eggs in a video game: Atari Adventure, released in 1979 on the Atari 2600.

(I happen to be wearing my Factorio t-shirt right now! That's another robophilic game too, notoriously known as "programmer crack".)

>nlawalker on June 29, 2018 [-]

>From the Slate article: "When Teri Perl described the project to legendary computer scientist Alan Kay, he said, “You’re wasting your time. It can’t be done.” That is, the basic idea was simply too complex to run on an Apple home computer. When Robot Odyssey shipped, the company gave Wallace a plaque that said, “It can’t be done. —Alan Kay.”"

>That's an awesome story.

>alankay1 on June 29, 2018 [-]

>An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too many "awesome stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by niawalker). To summarize here, I said I love "Rocky's Boots", and I love the basic idea of "Robot Odyssey", but for end-users, using simple logic gates to program multiple robots in a cooperative strategy game blows up too much complexity for very little utility. A much better way to do this would be to make a "next Logo" that would allow game players to make the AI brains needed by the robots. So what I actually said, is that doing it the way you are doing it will wind up with a game that is not successful or very playable.

>Just why they misunderstood what I said is a bit of a mystery, because I spelled out what could be really good for the game (and way ahead of what other games were doing). And of course it would work on an Apple II and other 8 bit micros (Logo ran nicely on them, etc.)

>From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore

>Hi SJ --

>Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming systems.

>This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys design.

>Cheers,

>Alan

>From: Alan Kay Subject: Robot Odyssey

>I actually argued with him [Will Wright] and Maxis for not making SimCity very educational. E.g. the kids can't open the hood to see the assumptions made by SimCity (crime can be countered by more police stations) and try other assumptions (raise standard of living to counter crime) etc. I've never thought of it as a particularly good design for educational purposes.

>However, I have exactly the opposite opinion of Robot Odyssey, which I thought was a brilliant concept when the TLC people brought it to me at Atari in the early 80s. (Rocky's Boots is pretty much my all time favorite for a great game that really teaches and also has a terrific intro to itself done in itself, etc. Warren Robinette is a very special designer.).

>The big problem with Robot Odyssey (as I tried to explain to them) was that the circuits-programming didn't scale to the game. They really needed to move to something like an object-oriented event-driven Logo with symbolic scripting to allow the kids to really get into the wonderful possibilities for strategies and tactics. (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to do Robot Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of funding problems but we now have funding and are really going to do it this year. Want to help design and build it?)

>From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

>Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.

>I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".

>Cheers

>Alan

>------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).

>From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

>I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions!

>But there’s a great demo on youtube!

https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s

>That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo (with PacMan following roads and eating traffic):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

>I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)

>Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago.

>-Don

>Squeak-dev:

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...

>Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago

>Folks,

>I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses tile programming like Etoys.Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,

>Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil

>Alan Kay 6 years ago

>This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system.

>The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.

>We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better).

>Cheers,

>Alan

Warren Robinett:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Robinett

Rocky's Boots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots

Robot Odyssey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey

Here's The Programming Game You Never Asked For:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-programming-game-you...

The Hardest Computer Game of All Time: It was called Robot Odyssey, it took me 13 years to finish it, and it sealed my fate as a programmer.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/rob...

Chaim Gingold's Gadget Background Survey:

http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...

A Taxonomy of Simulation Software:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf

The Fabrik Programming Environment:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/Fabrik%20PE%20paper.pdf

infinite8s · 4 months ago

Hi Don, do you know if this ever happened (I think it's from the 2007 email - but tough to say for sure given above formatting)?

> (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to do Robot Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of funding problems but we now have funding and are really going to do it this year. Want to help design and build it?)

infinite8s commented on You can't git clone a team virtualize.sh/blog/you-ca... · Posted by u/plam503711

jandrewrogers · 4 months ago

I work in high-end data infrastructure, not games, but almost identical incentives and dynamics are at play. The state-of-the-art research isn’t coming out of academia for the most part. The R&D being done in private industry is slathered in NDAs that only slowly leaks out a decade or more after it was put into production. Many people don’t stay with it long enough to really master it.

There are some elegant and sophisticated techniques related to database kernels that have been passed around for a decade or two over beers that still don’t have a single reference in literature that I can find. The original researchers probably stayed quiet because it was under strict NDA but also likely retired years ago. No one writes it down because it sort of feels wrong to claim second-hand knowledge of unknown origin as your own, or to even lead people to assume as much. You show people, and they think it is amazing, but when they ask you for references or sources you have no idea where it came from.

There is a real gap here and it is getting worse.

infinite8s · 4 months ago

From a purely humanity-improving perspective this lack of dissemination is quite sad.

> No one writes it down because it sort of feels wrong to claim second-hand knowledge of unknown origin as your own, or to even lead people to assume as much.

Wouldn't it be possible to publish informally (say in a blog post) while fully disclaiming first-authorship or invention?

infinite8s commented on Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences theretowhere.com/... · Posted by u/WiggleGuy

DonHopkins · 7 months ago

The two-ended Min/Max sliders of the Dynamic HomeFinder and the SimCity Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Filter allow you to effectively invert selections by dragging the Max end all the way to the right, and then adjusting the Min end, since the filter passes everything between Min and Max. Or you can drag the whole slider range by the middle to adjust Min and Max at once, exploring a fixed width interval of the values.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978733

https://youtu.be/_fVl4dGwUrA?t=3m35s

A useful feature (not implemented in that video of X11 SimCity from 1992, but it would be easy to implement now with better graphics and faster computers) is to display a histogram in each of the sliders, where the x-axis is the parameter value, and the y-axis is the number of items of that slider's value (given that all other sliders are at their current value), so you can easily spot clusters and peaks and sparse areas, and you can include or exclude them from the filter by sliding the Min and Max edges across the histogram. So as you adjust one slider, the histograms in the other sliders change to reflect the current "slice" of multi dimensional space with respect to the filter you're adjusting.

Showing a histogram for every filter parameter on each slider gives you a multi-dimensional view of the distribution density of the data, that you can tweak and explore in real time, which helps you figure out how to adjust the filters to find interesting and ignore uninteresting items, and focus in on just the items you want.

infinite8s · 6 months ago

I love histogram sliders! I think they were originally developed by Chris Ahlberg in Ben Shneiderman's group, and were later commercialized in Spotfire (I have yet to see them in any other infoviz system except Panopticon - https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=965). Jeff Heer did some work a few decades to generalize into 'scented widget' (http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/scented-widgets). With systems like DuckDB it's now even easier to implement them into various visual analytic systems.

infinite8s commented on Advanced Civilizations Could Be Indistinguishable from Nature universetoday.com/169993/... · Posted by u/joe_the_user

euroderf · 8 months ago

> Drexler, the early nanotechnology guy, back when nanotechnology meant pushing atoms around by mechanical means, rather than surface chemistry.

I bought his book Engines of Creation when it came out and his thesis had the air of inevitability - how could it not materialize some day ? It seemed so self-evident.

infinite8s · 8 months ago

Pushing atoms around by mechanical means only seems plausible if you've never really studied molecular chemistry - see the Drexler/Smalley debate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate...

infinite8s commented on The tooth, the whole tooth and the jawbone too thequackdoctor.substack.c... · Posted by u/Hooke

thangngoc89 · 8 months ago

(I’m a dentist)

To further expand on your comment, the alveolar bone is porous so we use pilers on the tooth to compress the alveolar bone, making a big enough hole for the whole tooth to come out in one piece.

Molars have 2-3 roots so it is a lot of efforts. In difficult case, I would divide the tooth into sections to pull each root out.

infinite8s · 8 months ago

What's the current state of the art in terms of being able to regrow teeth/regenerate alveolar bone?

infinite8s commented on In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse lithub.com/in-praise-of-p... · Posted by u/bertman

nataliste · 9 months ago

>The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.

infinite8s · 9 months ago

This quote is great! Where is it from?

infinite8s commented on Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/amichail

tourmalinetaco · 9 months ago

Then the premise is lackluster. If the Chinese government couldn’t contain the US-paid coronavirus, then how could (or more accurately, why would) the US if they were in the region?

infinite8s · 9 months ago

Do tell - what is the US-paid coronavirus?