Oh sweet memories. I was born in 1967, so I'm older than the author, but the memories are somehow the same. I started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone, called HC85, and with Basic as first language. I discovered the Mosaic browser in 1994 at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and understood that the future of research, publication, collaboration will be very different than the past. I'm a mathematician. I installed my first Linux in 1995. All in all in my life I bought exactly 0 bits of proprietary programs.
I had for a very short time a FB account, which I deleted. I deleted my Twitter account about two years ago. I was hooked by Google+ and I had a popular collection about artificial life (now is public again). But I deleted my g+account before they closed it.
All my family has smartphones, but I can't stand the limitations. When the smartphones will be liberated I'll have one.
My overall impression is that, some details excepted, now that everybody has a computer in the pocket, people pass through the same learning process as we nerds did some years ago. Today is harder, because less freedom. On the other side, the new thing is that today everybody is online.
Yes, like linux liberated the pc from windows. Now is much more complicated, because a liberated harware is needed as well. Sigh, this is too much, but at least as you say: a normal computer in the smartphone form factor, where I can install the anti-android OS, including the game where you replace the android logo with the ...? Of course the anti-android would allow me to access anything from the android world, but easier.
I upvoted this, but it is not accurate. If you're French then you may be misled by the combination of two signals: "Ecole Polytechnique (X)" (aka "social status") and birth date (aka "old"). This gives "boomer" hence the sarcasm.
Now that memories are mentioned, I'm not a grand-pere, nor French. Grand-peres are proud of their '69 youth. Yes, they stopped the social elevator and I share your opinion about them. "X" was relevant only for the availability of (mostly empty) rooms full of "unix workstations" and the friends I made in Paris. During this time, your grand-pere probably was vaguely proud about the minitel and a bit disturbed about the fact that people like me are allowed to study at X.
Same here. This "it was a dark and stormy night" style is bad writing. I read a lot, I like reading novels. This is just an empty structure. In this particular case the bad writing almost killed an interesting subject.
I don't quite understand this conflation of mathematics with category theory. This obsession of some programmers with mathematics, actually with a tiny part which is category theory, looks to me very strange. By chance, there is this recent comment of Scott Aaronson, a strong mathematician who is a rising star in quantum computing, which contains what is it probably the more balanced view.
I quote from the source [0] the relevant part: "With some things I don’t understand well (nuclear physics, representation theory), there are nevertheless short “certificates / NP witnesses of importance” that prove to me that the effort to understand them would be amply repaid. [...] And then, alas, there are bodies of thought for which I’ve found neither certificates or anti-certificates—like category theory, or programming language semantics [...] For those I simply wish the theorizers well, and wait around for someone who will show me why I can’t not study what they found."
> If you have ever owned a vinyl copy (or certain CD copies) of Magical Mystery Tour, you’ll know that it comes with a 28-page booklet containing song lyrics, drawings by cartoonist Bob Gibson, and scenes from the Magical Mystery Tour movie.
> [..]
> Yes, you looked at that correctly. That is John Lennon, dressed as an Italian waiter, literally shoveling buckets of spaghetti on this woman’s plate. You’re probably gonna want some context…
(Edit: and if I only scrolled further I see someone else already posted that link)
A scenario more interesting than boundless self-replication is Ackermann goo [0], [1]. Grey goo starts with a molecular machine able to replicate itself. You get exponentially more copies, hence goo. Imagine that we could build molecules like programs which execute themselves via chemical interactions with the environment. Then, for example, a Y combinator machine would appear as a linearly growing string [2]. No danger here. Take Ackermann(4,4) now. This is vastly more complex than a goo made of lots of small dumb copies.
Some numbers: There are 264 posts with animations, a bit more than 1/2 of the original collection, with the possibility to rerun in js the simulations.
Whenever possible there is a mol file attached to the animation. There are about 490 mol files. If they are too big to be used without stalling the js reduction, this is signaled by the message “mol too big” in the post. If there is no mol which matches, this is signaled as “mol unavailable”.
Of all 264 posts, 36 of them fall in the “mol too big” category, 46 in the “mol unavailable” and there are 6 posts which don’t have a chemlambda simulation inside. So this leaves 264-88=176 posts which have matching mol files to play with.
The original revived collection is here [1], but since 2 weeks the traffic is too big, or something strange happens [2], I made a copy with smaller images, to fit the github constraints.
There's a great book by Truesdell, named "An Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science". According to Truesdell, the initial meaning of the word "idiot" was one who does not have preconceived ideas.
Hmm I can't really see that sense here. But thanks, I shall check out that book, looks interesting!
idiot (n.)
early 14c., "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning;" also in Middle English "simple man, uneducated person, layman" (late 14c.), from Old French idiote "uneducated or ignorant person" (12c.), from Latin idiota "ordinary person, layman; outsider," in Late Latin "uneducated or ignorant person," from Greek idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill" (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman), literally "private person" (as opposed to one taking part in public affairs), used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own" (see idiom).
In plural, the Greek word could mean "one's own countrymen." In old English law, one who has been without reasoning or understanding from birth, as distinguished from a lunatic, who became that way.
Almost finished project, you can spend hours in there. https://chemlambda.github.io