stew-j

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The Flying Girl and Her Chum

1 pointsby stew-j4 года назад1 comments

The Flying Girl

5 pointsby stew-j4 года назад1 comments

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4 года назадdiscuss

> Does nothing well except generate heat.

Like the current GPUs running my application?

I wish you would directed that to my comment above. I would reassert that something like this, perhaps with the qualification of it being well engineered and efficient, is what I would like to run my graphics application on--a highly parallelizable algorithm but with need for a general ISA, recursion, and 64 bit floats--and the ability to get rid of CUDA and OpenCL. Given this, do you have any suggestions for something better? And why?

4 года назадdiscuss

> Look, you’re not wrong about anything

Nor you! I was just returning to thank you for posting your original idea to listen to this--I was only clarifying my thoughts before--Leary was human like any of us and I think a progressive, truth-seeking one. It is good to make up our own minds about history with direct sources like this. So, thanks for that and these new comments, which do make sense too.

4 года назадdiscuss

I agree that hallucinogens have therapeutic promise. Leary (and John Lilly, and others) was forward thinking in this respect. But they can be dangerous if misused, with the potential to cause chronic psychotic disorders, for example. I am hesitant to mention Charles Manson, but what if the wrong influence is there when your mind is so wide open?

Leary didn't say, "Due to regressive laws in the U.S., which I respect but we need to change, I cannot pursue my double-blind clinical trials of LSD-25 for treatment of depression in America. I have therefore moved my research to Mexico." Leary was infamous for popularizing LSD, and was part of the problem for authority's long road to accept it. I know sometimes civil disobedience is in order, but we are not talking about sarsaparilla root here.

He said (paraphrased), "People over 40 want to put me behind bars for helping people discover the cosmic candles of the night sky on the Mexican beaches...the fair-haired elven princess in the tree house...the verdant fields... Why are the mean rational adults picking on me?" which are outside of the generally accepted principles for the treatment of mental illness, I would think. It's way beyond therapeutic use and into snake oil territory when advertised as an aphrodisiac and spiritual guide. Yoga and Buddhist meditation also have therapeutic benefits and very safe--why not use those until (and after) the clinical trials of LSD are completed?

4 года назадdiscuss

Designs like this are what I like to see in my field of implicit modeling of geometry. We need processors with more general purpose ISA, recursion, and 64 bit floats due to the functional techniques we use. There's a fair amount of impedence mismatch for that using current triangle pushing GPUs, as sophisticated as they are getting. Thanks for posting!

4 года назадdiscuss

Respectfully, it's about what I expected.

A mostly earnest man addressing the real problems of the military/industrial dystopia, the world's break from reality, with a bit of wisdom and a lot of snake oil. Cannabinoid snake oil ("It's an aphrodesiac, but not like in Reefer Madness, it's more cosmic than that."), lysergic acid diethylamide snake oil. Back to the Garden of Eden lures, generational politics (one's age determines one's potential for spiritual advancement?), dulcet, lyrical, hypnotic sales pitches. It was "don't trust anyone over 30" until they turned thirty, then their mind expanding experiments led to "don't trust anyone under thirty and grab a big pile of money, depriving the subsequent generations of their livelihood". What did they learn during their acid trips?

By Leary's measure, at the time of this recording, Jack Kerouac (a pioneer himself in examining the modern world) would have been 44, past Leary's 40 year old age limit. In Leary's Cyberpunk I learned yesterday that he appealed to "silicon snake oil", the world's current obsession. Dropping out isn't a ticket to Eden, I know through personal experience. No Harvard endowment paid my or Kerouac's bills, nor did free software. "Tune in, turn on, and drop out" if you have to, but "pay attention to what you are doing and who you listen to, and what you are dropping in to" would be a corollary.

4 года назадdiscuss

In other words, like hallucinogens, computers and "cyber-enhanced" reality aren't necessarily bad medicine, but they are strong medicine. Playing them off as "cool" and enhancements worth trying without considering the drawbacks as well as benefits at hand is irresponsible.

The Greeks also gave us the example of Pandora's Box.

4 года назадdiscuss

Thank you for your comments and consideration of our time. I think it was Stanislaw Lem that said there is so much poor quality writing out there, reviewers should present the materials they find good in, rather than the bad--I know that's a bit different than what you are saying, but still relevant.

> think for themselves

That always interests me.

[edit]

I just read this paper in detail. Adding to coincidence here, I kept thinking back to Lem's Pirx the Pilot series and The Cyberiad. It makes me want to read more about the Lindbergh family. Also, it touches on another topic I was thinking about tonight, the thread on HN about Finnish as a universal language when Leary writes:

> French philosophy, for example, has recently stressed the importance of language and semiotics in determining human behavior and social structures.

this also extends to computer languages, IMO. Pointy haired bosses and their languages of choice is the modern equivalent of the mutation of the "pilot" to the "steerer" in his Greek to Roman example. I found this paper thought provoking, but like his LSD campaign, misguided in its exuberance of the benefits of the "Cyborg" experience. There are drawbacks. Who's to say the computer as rudder won't become the steerer, among other "bad things"?

4 года назадdiscuss

Is it too late to nominate Nadsat?

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

or Newspeak?

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

both expressive languages developed by forward thinkers for our modern era.

4 года назадdiscuss

> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme

I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).

Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.

4 года назадdiscuss

I got to thinking about silent movies, like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I don't think I ever saw another treatment of home ownership quite so apropos as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film)

It expertly treated its subject matter with great humor--sans verbal language (interstitials aside).

4 года назадdiscuss

OK in Firefox desktop Linux.

4 года назадdiscuss

Anything interesting in it? Would you recommend it and why?

4 года назадdiscuss

It's interesting to draw a parallel between the popularization of acid by Leary and the popularization of the Internet by many. John Lilly experimented with hallucinogens, but knew that a lot of preparation was in order.

    sed 's/acid/Internet/'

in Duke's quote. People just flock to the Internet and are immersing themselves in it as their reality, without a full understanding of the long term consequences.

Alternate reality is alternate reality, man.

4 года назадdiscuss

Nice writeup, thanks.

> It depends.

I hardly ever give up a computer, we still have a '98 Windows laptop doing recipe duty in the kitchen. (It's getting harder to find a small 32 bit Linux distro these days, though.) Energy efficiency is another concern, one machine I took to be "recycled" (I know--maybe or maybe not) was a Mac G4 which was good as a space heater in the winter, but that's about it--and I didn't feel like moving it 1500 miles with our latest relocation.

I started with electronics many years ago, and would balk at replacing a surface mount chip, but people could learn basic electronic repair literacy for things that commonly break like cords which would help a lot. I also don't tend to buy products like smart phones which are glued together and difficult to repair.

As for RISC-V, it is hard to find even a dev board with the chip shortages (I bought a HiFive Inventor kit to experiment with as a first project):

https://www.hifiveinventor.com/

4 года назадdiscuss

It might have been more interesting to watch Aki Kaurismäki's movies, including the Proletariat Trilogy if I understood Finnish. I'd like to know a very different language from my native English like Japanese, too. (Akira Kurosawa?) You just never know what you miss in translation.

4 года назадdiscuss

I like Couturat et al.'s Ido even better. I can't "think" in it yet, but it is very regular and easy to learn. The main (irrational, personal) issue I have with it is the monotony of endings, -o is always a singular noun, etc. Plus it is Eurocentric. It does have pan-gender words like lu, saving having to say he/she/it. Tradeoffs.

4 года назадdiscuss

We need you here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32430592

4 года назадdiscuss

As I finished the code for straight-line coil geometry tonight, I thought of an abbreviation for the above story. Take the year it happened, 2014 and subtract 30--(re)read this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

then add a little of this for good measure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm (being a free software developer)

I think a section of the redacted text on the police report was "Neighbor heard him telling her 'I love you, Julia.'"

It was like living a hyper-realistic version of 1984. "My name is Winston Smith." Except, although I'm sure I can be broken, they didn't accomplish it that time. Our English class read the book 1984 in the year 1984. I read Slave New World, er Brave New World when I was 12--I guess I should have seen this all coming with my advance study of it. Hmm...

    ; __*\*____________
    ; ___/\/\achinate__
    ; -----------------
    ; "The Machiavellian Scheme"

    mash> (= (+ 2 2) 5)
    #f

Well at least that still works. ;)

4 года назадdiscuss

A Kubrick-directed LHOTP would have been a different series, too, I imagine. I don't think NBC had a Kubrick level budget either.

On a side note, there was a rumor that the Capricorn One movie was filmed on location too:

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

4 года назадdiscuss

My father taught me how to chop wood in the early seventies at the age of 8 in the remote territory of suburban Connecticut. More dangerous was the wasps whose nest I disturbed near the wood-pile, and my face swelled up like a balloon. We didn't call an apiary to humanely remove them back then, my dad used kerosene to burn the nest.