#lispyGopherClimate Sunday morning in Europe with #lisp # live @kentpitman
Going over proto #emacs, #cref, #lispm #computerScience #softwareEngineering #GUI history ! Ask questions in #lisp on #irc now please !
https://toobnix.org/w/gXLXQqxf5MYg1NDF2Ua6oA 15 minutes to live.
Finally, an updated #introduction: Hello! From #Shanghai to #Montreal, now in #NewYorkCity. Master #student in #ComputerScience at #NYU Tandon, still struggling to figure out what I gonna do next. Gained notoriety for making Barinsta, now I hang out in #Matrix and ActivityPub circles and code stuff once in a while. Am a #FediAdmin. Fervent user of #PublicTransport. Knows too little of too many things. Posts are #SliceOfLife + minor commentaries. Happy to have an IRL #meetup with y'all!
Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon will be hiring adjuncts to teach Data Structures (in Python) (fall '25) and CS0 (spring '26). You must be in person and have a Master's degree.
If you happen to be interested, DM me.
#ComputerScienceEducation #CSEd #hiring #ComputerScience #education #pdx #portland
Though too many clearly still suffer too much, a large proportion of people live free from fear of starvation or lack of shelter
The US has deindustralized, meaning hard physical labor is not the reality for a lot of people. For a lot of people labor is emotional or symbolic (“knowledge work”)
In other words, for lots of people the economic promise has been fulfilled
It is not coincidental that “Gas Town”’s announcement post mentioned Towers of Hanoi, an undergraduate CS student homework problem that for most students requires thinking hard. It’s designed to encourage a kind of “eureka” moment where recursion as a computer programming technique becomes more clear. GT claims to fulfill the promise of not having to think hard like this anymore: the LLMs will do that thinking for you
It is not coincidental that Gas Town is described as being very expensive. Economic power in the form of asset accumulation is what earns you freedom in this way of conceiving things. If you want the freedom from having to think hard, you’d better accumulate assets
Since the promise is greater collective freedom, endeavoring to accumulate assets is, in this view, a collective good
This differs from effective altruism and other “do good by doing well” conceptions. Rather, the very mechanism of economics produces collective wealth, so the story goes, which means the more active one is as an economic agent, the more collective good one produces (“wealth” and “good” being conflated)
Accumulation of assets is the scorecard, so to speak, of such enhanced economic activity, and the individual reward can then be freedom from having to think hard
Lotka’s maximum power principle (supposedly) dictates that those entities that transform the most power into useful organization are most fit from an evolutionary standpoint
Ernst Juenger’s notion of “total mobilization” brings this principle to politics/political economy/geopolitics: those nations that “totally” mobilize their national resources are the ones that will dominate geopolitically
See, for instance, the RAND Corporation’s Commission on the National Defense Strategy: “The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat. It needs to do a better job of incorporating new technology at scale; field more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions; and deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better.” (emphasis mine). In summary: the US is about to be outcompeted (lacks fitness); in response, it should go big (“at scale”, “more”) in an organized way (“deploy innovative operational concepts”, “employ them together better”)
The rhetoric around LLM-based AI includes similar language, exemplified in the GT post: burn through as much infrastructural resources as possible to produce organized outputs “at scale”, while avoiding having human beings think too hard to produce those outputs, an indication that the power was burned to produce useful organization
LLM-based AI plays a prominent role in US federal government strategy, particularly military strategy, with language about dominance serving to justify its use
It is not coincidental that Gas Town uses many orders of magnitude more resources to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem (“Burn All The Gas” Town). This rhetoric dovetails perfectly with the “total mobilization” concept
Perhaps the most (in)famous and illustrious American computer scientist and acknowledged principal pioneer of the discipline now known as artificial intelligence (AI), Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’ It is significant that the English language distinguishes between ‘‘flesh’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘meat’’ on the other. The latter is dead and may be eaten, thrown in the garbage, fed to pigs, and so on. Flesh, on the other hand, is living matter and, as such, deserves the respect and dignity for life of which, among others, Albert Schweitzer spoke eloquently. The word ‘‘merely’’ in Minsky’s sentence means essentially ‘‘nothing but,’’ that is, also not deserving unusual respect. His statement is a clear reflection of a profound contempt for life that, as I see it, is shared explicitly by important sectors of the AI community, the artificial intelligentsia, as well as many scientists, engineers, and ordinary people. Daniel C. Dennett, an important American philosopher, once said that we must give up our awe of life if we are to make further progress in AI.
Computer theorists thus form a neo-mechanistic school of philosophy. Their tenacious defense of some grossly exaggerated claims of what computers can and will do is more understandable if we realize that they represent a school of metaphysics.
The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks
It's a race against time (and magnetic decay) to preserve decades of cultural history stored on obsolete hardware.
by Mack DeGeurin
FWIW and for sharing the joy: I have just successfully defended my #dissertation. 🥰 It is titled:
”Societal IT systems development. Towards a discursive process-oriented multi-perspective approach to co-designing, -operating, -assessing, and -regulating societally relevant IT systems” 😅
So many wonderful people were supporting me all along the way, it's always teamwork, thank you so much. 🙏
The #summary can be found here: https://rainer-rehak.eu/files/dissertation-summary/ and after some revisions, corrections, editing etc. it will of course be freely available. #CCBY #OA #computerscience @tuberlin @Weizenbaum_Institut
