Notices by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) (dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz)

@screwtape
Etymology doesn't necessarily prove anything, but it *is* pretty weird that "CAR" was the mnemonic for "Contents of A Register" and "CDR" for "Contents of D Register" -- literal machine registers, not originally an abstraction at all.

BTW

> CDR coding was only really used on the Lisp Machine

That's 100% false.

@amszmidt
@ksaj

@screwtape @riley
As a historical note:

> There isn't a lot of cost (well, one cons to nil)

Back in the days when RAM was measured in kilobytes / kilowords, some implementations did in fact have space-optimized representations for short lists represented as small arrays.

See cdr-coding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDR_coding

That might still be in some implementations today, since its savings might be significant in large structures or in aiding cache locality.
 
The first paper may well have been L. Peter Deutsch: A LISP Machine with Very Compact Programs. IJCAI 1973, Pages 697 - 703

This is covered in 7.13 in the classic "Anatomy of Lisp", John Allen (1937-2022), 1978 (long out of print, and the author once replied to my query saying he didn't think it was worthwhile updating it for more modern times).

Has a lot on implemention, but tends to talk about abstractions in terms of M-Expressions, which is no longer in style.

ACM has it online:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/542865

Glowing review of "Anatomy" on goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1537412.Anatomy_of_LISP

"John Allen (1937-2022) and Anatomy of LISP" by Paul McJones
https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/

@northernlights

Sorry, I just meant @ screwtape. You go ahead and be you.

@screwtape @kentpitman @SDF @nosrednayduj @sacha @hairylarry @pkw @rat @pizzapal

@northernlights @screwtape @kentpitman @SDF @nosrednayduj @sacha @hairylarry @pkw @rat @pizzapal
But, as usual, *everyone* should avoid mentioning which editor is their favorite. We don't want bloodshed! It's hard to clean up.

@prahou
Appearing to be pathetically ignorant is my superpower!

Somehow.

@screwtape @mdhughes @nosrednayduj @hairylarry @pkw @sacha @shizamura @rat @SDF @kentpitman

@screwtape
That's a relief; everyone was frantically searching for you in every nook and cranny.

You've been promising to finish Snow Crash for a while -- it's fun, go for it!

(Lunar new year is Wednesday but ok, gung hey fat choi)

@josephholsten @screwtape
Yeah I've done genetic and neural programming.

I get why you say that; the problem is that everyone has something different in mind for what constitutes "AGI" or similar.

@screwtape
That's fine, and thanks.

From my point of view you're only revealing the tip of an iceberg, and that tip sounds fairly standard for today's technology.

No doubt if your thoughts were ready for prime time there would be surprising things in the full reveal.

But I can't find open access for "On the Design of Software Individuals"; do you have a recommendation?

@screwtape
Yeah, I understand the latter.

As to the former, if I accidentally wandered into a cognitive dimension you wish to explore, that's fine, go ahead.

I just feel more comfortable if I feel like I know what we're talking about, is all.

@screwtape
I feel like I came in on the middle of something here.

Is this still bot related, or is this something else?

@screwtape
It's traditional (generally...not sure about Lambda in particular) to have a bot running around, nominally as a HELP system, but quotidianly as a mascot / mildly comic relief.

Are you planning to have one? Is Lmsys suitable for that, or something else?

@screwtape
I suppose.

I can't remember if I told you my take on LLMs (which wasn't clear a few years ago): they're much better with language than previous AI, but they *still* don't think.

The problem is that humans have confused language and thinking since prehistory.

But they are different. I think that vast majority of people who have studied both cognitive science *and* modern linguistics would concur.

@screwtape
What would that look like?

@glitzersachen @pthenq1 @taschenorakel @nixCraft
Yep. In the actual psychology research literature, since 1943 there's been research on "Fluid and crystallized intelligence":

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

According to that, the young use "fluid intelligence", they do reasoning "that depend only minimally on prior learning".

As person ages, naturally they are capable of using more and more learning in their reasoning; they are able to use more "Crystallized intelligence".

'It reflects the effects of experience and acculturation. Horn notes that crystallized ability is a "precipitate out of experience,"'

Both kinds have advantages. More modern research shows that use of Fluid intelligence by the young is much faster, by milliseconds, than Crystallized intelligence.

But Crystallized intelligence is more often accurate.

There are simply tradeoffs, not that age makes either group inherently better or worse than the other. It depends on the task at hand.

@screwtape @kentpitman @ksaj @TheGibson @mdhughes @baruchel @nosrednayduj @ratxue @hairylarry
Although you weren't talking to *me*, for the record, I enjoyed today's episode, and wouldn't call it a disaster, even though it wasn't up to your own high standards.

(I thought I posted something along those lines hours ago, but apparently I sent it to the bit bucket in sky somehow)

@screwtape @Screwtapello
I never got around to playing with Inform 7, but it always seemed interesting.

My college roommate co-authored Rogue while I was busy doing a DSL for writing adventure games (never finished).

Very long term interests.

@Screwtapello
By an amazing coincidence, those same words appear in the movie Alice's Restaurant.

😉

@screwtape @mdhughes
So asdf has gotten to the point where all the cool kids use it now? :)

Also how about a shortcut for (asdf:load-system :arrokoth)
ಠ_ಠ

Does anyone know what happened to the interesting site "Lambda the Ultimate"?

I used to sometimes browse it for the sometimes highly intelligent discussions, but it went down some years ago, and Hacker News says that it went permanently down about a year ago -- but I can't find any comments about why it died.

It was the kind of site where *someone* should have revived it, and it *was* kind of sort of popular.

@AmenZwa @kentpitman @screwtape
@mdhughes
@interlisp
@masinter

@screwtape @webhat
Vaughn Pratt was himself a Lisp programmer, and implemented CGOL as a Maclisp reader.

He was at Stanford and MIT, and Berkeley pre-Unix, so there's no reason to think he was aware of the 'dc' RPN arithmetic tool, and the paper you reference is earlier than HP's RPN handheld calculators, which had a very loyal following.

But was there a specific question?

P.S. "Polish notation" is the most common name (after 'postfix') for operators following operands, just as Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) is the most common name (after 'prefix') for operators preceding operands.

'The description "Polish" refers to the nationality of logician Jan Łukasiewicz' but people in the early 20th century had a tough time with Polish names so they used a nickname.

He was famous for multiple things, though, for instance continuous (real-) valued logic, which in a hypothetical infinitely precise analog computer would allow hypercomputation -- computation beyond what is possible for Turing machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%81ukasiewicz

@mdhughes