I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist
>if they could not come to a consensus, would have to take it before the Master, Doug Lenat, who would think for a bit, maybe draw some diagrams on a whiteboard, and come up with the Right Representation
So looks like Cyc did have to fall back on a neural net after all (Lenat's).
I don't like working on killing machines either. But we shouldn't forget that the internet and basically all of computation originated out of defense research. That might be good or bad, but arguably the field was more innovative when that was the funding source than it is today.
> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT
Sorry, but I don't think this comparison really makes sense. Yes, duh, there's military research and a lot of things come out of it, especially because they have huge budgets for funding all sorts of research.
But the topic here is both about private companies, not some research fund and it's explicitly about creating products (not doing research) for military use.
Things like DARPA are even more complex, because in a way, intentionally or not it is used by the US to have essentially government funded research and infrastructure development while bypassing the whole "but that's communism!" discussion and also simply not having to publicly discuss it other than "let's raise military spending!".
So in other words what you say makes sense and I agree, but it might not necessarily apply here. Like your quote states this is about money for research coming from the US DoD, not about private capital investors wanting to make money by telling you to do R&D for the military.
The whole point of Emacs is that it is a radically customizable platform, and if you don't like the behavior of some feature you can modify it yourself with a few lines of Lisp. Forking the whole project over a change to one obscure feature makes zero sense.
Status: Emacs user since it was implemented as TECO macros (1981 or so), but I don't use registers.
One of the requirements for a radically customizable platform is that the platform itself must be extremely stable, otherwise everyone has to rewrite/fix every customization every time the platform changes.
What's the difference between "modify it yourself" and "fork"?
If this patch sticks, and someone wants it exactly the old way, they basically have to have a local repo of Emacs with the reverse patch applied, and then theirs.
Every time upstream Emacs changes, and they want to pick up the new changes, they have to rebase.
That's a private fork! Forever forked, forever rebasing.
Now you could play it fast and loose and try to monkey patch that; just load your file instead or after the shipped file to redefine the functions. That's still a kind of fork. You have to keep your materials somewhere as a project, and be prepared to adjust them if things change so that the monkey patching breaks in some way.
As far as I can tell this is simply not true. I don't think the change is a good idea but the hard fork also looks like a pure political play, not a technical one.
Also, as soon as someone talks about "settings" there is usually a profound misunderstanding of how Emacs works at play.
No, they didn't. It's Emacs. Every thing is dynamically scoped lisp. It's like if you could include arbitrary javascript in your vscode config and if you shadow any core function any code calling it will now use your function instead.
How is that not a fork? You have to maintain your function. Upstream can change in ways that your monkey patched function won't work; you have to maintain that going forward.
If you want to share your change with others, you have to ask them: which version of VSCode are you on, and give them the correct monkey patch which worked with that version.
You're doing everything fork-like except calling it a fork.
You know what? I was wrong, you're right. I thought this was a change to the core engine, but I looked again and see it's in the lisp. The user's ~/.emacs file can override this setting, so no hard fork is needed.
I founded the original unix-haters list that the book is based off of.
What I say these days: Unix went from the worst operating system around, to the best, without getting appreciably better.
Not entirely true. But the Unix model of computation has obviously won. The Lisp Machine model, well, nobody even understands what that means any more.
The list was great. I have the two partial archives that were once posted. Are there any real archives around? I know one of the concerns was redacting names (even with just initials and no mail paths it is obvious who most people are)
The Lisp Machine model is represented by Emacs these days (which still has a thriving community). It makes interacting with the Unix model bearable since it can subsume it.
If that wasn't possible and I had to make do with just Unix, I would have switched professions. There's only so much bullshit one can take.
Nice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature.
I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.
It was never really a mail order catalog in the sense that there was no single place to order the stuff (the Whole Earth store did open later, but it just a slice of what appeared in the WEC and CoEvolution Quarterly). It was, as others have noted, reviews of "good stuff" and info on how (maybe) to get it.
That came later, when they opened the store. It only applied to stuff they decided to carry, though given that they reviewed it in print that was likely because the reviews were almost all positive.
No problem! Lucky for us they uploaded all the issues of the catalog. : )
If you look on the Wikipedia page there were a few related physical stores over the years:
> the Whole Earth Catalog was preceded by the "Whole Earth Truck Store" which was a 1963 Dodge truck. In 1968, Brand, who was then 29, and his wife Lois embarked "on a commune road trip" with the truck, hoping to tour the country doing educational fairs. The truck was not only a store, but also an alternative lending library and a mobile microeducation service.
> In 1969, a store which was inspired by (but not financially connected with) The Whole Earth Catalog, called the Whole Earth Access opened in Berkeley, California. It closed in 1998. In 1970 a store called the "Whole Earth Provision Co.", inspired by the catalogue, opened in Austin, Texas.[27] It has six stores in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.
Right? I would say "utopia fallacy" is the perfect label for this meaning over "nirvana fallacy" because it can never be misconstrued as something associated with the musical band Nirvana.
