Good boys! Good boys.

Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.

Heck yeah! Thanks. It's bad-tasting medicine, but Tantacrul makes me laugh, so I don't mind thinking about what this manipulation can do to me. Hopefully, I'll also pick up some resistance.

Current self-driving systems also require periodic manual intervention from remote operators https://www.reuters.com/technology/waymo-defends-use-remote-... , for that matter.

But an appropriate level of caution about change is necessary. Change isn't always good https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... , and it doesn't always deliver what it promises or arrive on schedule.

That's not obviously so. The adoption of JS wasn't particularly hindered by the fact that users have to match their brackets and generally avoid syntax errors.

I assume it’s in part a consequence of Blow’s newer self-definition as a game-programming iron man: after all the work on the custom engine you probably feel the need to get as much mileage as you can out of it. But as others have said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115215 , presumably they could have applied some razzle-dazzle like staged releases in “seasons” to make the large amount of content feel more like ongoing fun than a huge homework assignment.

There's also Backus' "Programming in America in the 1950s – Some Personal Impressions" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EylBknGtkqA at the 1976 First International Research Conference on the History of Computing. The conference paper is pp. 125-135 https://archive.org/details/historyofcomputi0000inte/page/12... in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980, Metropolis, Howlett and Rota eds., ISBN 0-12-491650-3 ). Naturally it also got a session at the first History of Programming Languages conference in 1978 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/960118.808379 at which Backus spoke again https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025#sec2 . And of course it's one of the stars of Jean Sammet's 1969 Programming languages: history and fundamentals book (ISBN 0137299885) where the FORTRAN section begins on p. 143 https://archive.org/details/programminglangu00unse/page/143/... .

And Fortran doesn’t just predate Lisp, it’s a direct ancestor. McCarthy was talking about LISP as a FORTRAN extension for quite a while during LISP’s development. The original Fortran is effectively LISP 0.

My conclusion from all this is that Douglas Adams joined the writing team some time ago and has been responsible for the whole LLM arc.

Indeed the hardware-inefficiency of local inference is in principle good, not bad, for hardware vendors. But until the manufacturing capacity exists to ship local-inference systems with enough VRAM to enough customers then inference is going to keep taking place at (more-)efficient centralised providers and nVidia will have to keep trying to sell what it makes to them to remain an AI player.