Gordon Bell, a pioneering computer engineer and key figure in the development of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) influential minicomputers, passed away at age 89.
Bell was instrumental in creating the VAX minicomputer line and co-founded the first major computer museum, which evolved into the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
He contributed to Microsoft Research, was the subject of the MyLifeBits life-logging project, and received numerous accolades, including the National Medal of Technology and the IEEE's John von Neumann medal.
Gordon Bell, a pioneering computer engineer and investor, has passed away, leaving a significant impact on the tech industry and those he mentored.
Bell was known for his "lifelogging" project, MyLifeBits, and his contributions to computing, including work on the PDP-8 and founding the Computer History Museum.
Despite his connections at DEC and MIT, the ASCII bell character (CTRL-G) predates Bell and was not named after him; Bob Bemer of IBM played a key role in developing ASCII.
OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, is under scrutiny after Scarlett Johansson accused the company of using a voice in its GPT-4o model that closely mimicked hers without her consent.
Johansson had declined an offer to voice the system and has since hired lawyers, leading OpenAI to pause the use of the voice.
This incident, coupled with internal turmoil and legal challenges over data usage, raises questions about Altman's transparency and leadership, contrasting with his public stance on responsible AI development.
The article critiques Sam Altman for allegedly using a voice actor resembling Scarlett Johansson without consent, raising ethical and legal concerns about power concentration among the wealthy and the need for better regulations.
The discussion delves into the ethical implications of voice cloning, referencing legal cases like Midler v. Ford and Waits v. Frito Lay, and debates the legality and morality of using celebrity likenesses without permission.
It also touches on AI's rapid expansion, the impact on voice acting jobs, and the broader implications of AI technologies, highlighting the tension between legal constraints and ethical considerations.
Breck Yunits introduces a method to store tabular knowledge in a single plain text file using spaces and newlines, offering advantages over binary formats.
The system, called ScrollSets, is human-readable, editable with git, and compatible with traditional software and AI, and powers the open-source website PLDB.io.
Key features include measures, concepts, measurements, and comments, with enhancements like splitting data into multiple files, using a parser language called Grammar, and adding attributes such as sortIndex and types.
The article by Breck discusses storing knowledge in a single long plain text file, with critiques on concepts like nested parsers and the reinvention of semantic data concepts.
Tools such as Edna and Heynote are mentioned for note-taking, highlighting features like quick access shortcuts, local storage, and potential enhancements like image support and OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
The discussion emphasizes the importance of referencing prior work to avoid redundancy, the practicality of organizing data in files, and reflections on the simplicity of plain text files for data storage, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The "right to roam" movement in England seeks to reclaim public access to both private and public lands, as currently only 8% of the land is accessible to citizens.
Activist Jon Moses highlights the history of land ownership in England and the need to reestablish the "freedom to roam" to reconnect people with nature and repair landscapes.
The movement organizes events like group walks on private land to demonstrate the benefits of public access and addresses the historical suppression of common rights.
The "right to roam" movement seeks public access to private lands for recreation and education, inspired by Scotland's model, which limits motorized activities, hunting, and long-term camping.
Critics in the USA worry about liability, lawsuits, and homeless encampments, while supporters believe these issues can be managed with proper enforcement and systemic changes.
The debate highlights economic inequality, mental illness, drug abuse, and crime, discussing the role of social communities, property rights, and the need for legal reforms to balance public access and private property rights.
A scandal has surfaced at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) 2024, involving Krish Pai, a 17-year-old winner in the environmental engineering division.
Pai is accused of cheating by using falsified images and plagiarized data in his project on microorganisms that biodegrade plastic, with an anonymous dossier providing detailed evidence.
The incident underscores significant oversight failures by ISEF, and there are calls for revoking Pai's award to maintain fairness, with anticipated mainstream media coverage.
The discussion critiques the fairness of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), noting disparities between independently designed projects and those with significant mentorship or lab affiliations, often favoring students with university connections.
Broader societal trends, such as increased parental involvement and excessive digital media use among youth, are discussed, highlighting their impact on children's independence, self-esteem, and time management.
Concerns about the competitive nature of science fairs, prevalence of plagiarism, and research misconduct are raised, along with the ethics of cheating and the role of organizers in preventing fraud.
The blog post "A Road to Common Lisp" offers a comprehensive guide on learning Common Lisp, covering its historical context, practical steps, and recommended tools and libraries.
It emphasizes Common Lisp's stability, backwards compatibility, and extensibility, contrasting it with modern languages that often require significant maintenance for outdated libraries.
The post provides practical advice on minimizing dependencies, using stable libraries, setting up a development environment, and engaging with the community, along with advanced learning resources and debugging practices.
The discussion highlights the challenges of using text editors for Common Lisp (CL) development, noting the superior plugin support in Emacs with SLIME compared to Vim.
Alternatives like Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, Conjure for Neovim, Atom, VSCode, and Jupyter notebooks are suggested for better CL development experiences.
The conversation emphasizes Lisp's REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) for real-time interaction, its dynamic coding capabilities, and the complexities of CL macros, while also addressing the limited adoption of Lisp due to its unfamiliar syntax and historical context.
Wikimedia Enterprise offers enterprise-grade APIs designed to enhance search engines, large language models (LLMs), and deep learning applications by improving search results and answers.
The APIs provide real-time access to data from Wikimedia projects in any language, with tools to detect vandalism and updates, supporting applications like voice assistants and AI training models.
The service includes over 850 datasets, 100M+ project pages, and 20M+ monthly edits, delivering frequent, reliable, and well-documented data, including metadata on article edits and a Probability of Revert feature.
Wikimedia Enterprise is exploring new funding streams, such as APIs for large language models (LLMs) and AI training, sparking debate over potential conflicts of interest and risks to free offerings.
Critics argue existing funds should suffice, while supporters cite high operational costs and legal challenges, highlighting the tension between open-source commitments and financial sustainability.
The debate includes whether Wikipedia should charge LLM trainers to address information economy and IP issues, with opinions varying on the legitimacy of Wikimedia's funding needs and the impact on free services.
In 2015, Derek Sivers introduced the concept of a /now page on his website to share his current activities, inspired by the absence of such information on a friend's site.
The idea gained traction, leading Sivers to establish nownownow.com, a directory featuring over 2300 /now pages globally.
Sivers encourages others to create their own /now pages and provides instructions for various platforms, offering to add them to the directory upon request.
The concept of "/now" pages, popularized by Derek Sivers, involves individuals sharing their current activities on personal websites.
While some find "/now" pages useful, others note they can become outdated quickly, suggesting alternatives like /about pages, reminders, and easier content management systems (CMS).
The discussion highlights the potential of "/now" pages to revive personal web pages and blogs, contributing to diverse and original content on the internet.
A vulnerability (CVE-2024-4323) in the Fluent Bit project has led to urgent patching efforts by site reliability engineers and systems administrators.
The flaw, originating from HTTP parsing code in C, permits heap corruption and arbitrary code execution through a specific HTTP GET request.
This incident underscores the persistent issue of memory safety vulnerabilities in C, which has been responsible for 90% of such problems over the past 50 years, despite the importance of robust coding practices.
The discussion critiques U.S. school shootings and ineffective responses, using a satirical format to address buffer overflows in C programming, and compares U.S. gun regulation with other countries, highlighting NRA influence and public support for universal background checks.
It contrasts U.S. and Swiss gun laws, critiques C/C++ in favor of modern languages like Rust and Golang, and discusses programming paradigms, emphasizing Rust's memory safety and community dynamics.
The conversation critiques the tech industry's focus on tools over skilled developers and good management, emphasizing the need for clear, maintainable code and the challenges of transitioning from C to safer languages like Rust.
Bill Gates commends Sal Khan's new book, "Brave New Words," for its exploration of AI's transformative potential in education.
Gates emphasizes the capabilities of OpenAI's GPT-4o, noting its lifelike interactions and potential as a personal tutor for students.
Sal Khan argues that AI can enhance student outcomes and teacher experiences through personalized learning, with Gates recommending the book for its insightful predictions and practical applications in the classroom.
Khan Academy, founded by Sal Khan, offers free educational resources that have significantly impacted lives, including a high school dropout who pursued a career in AI.
The discussion covers AI's potential and risks in education, highlighting concerns about misinformation, societal impacts, and the balance between AI benefits and drawbacks.
AI tools like Khanmigo are examined for their cost and accessibility, with debates on AI's effectiveness versus traditional teaching, emphasizing the importance of motivation and human interaction in education.
The blog post contrasts two hypothetical startups from MIT and Stanford, focusing on their differing strategies: MIT's emphasis on technical superiority and Stanford's focus on rapid market entry and customer acquisition.
Investors tend to prefer the Stanford model due to its market traction and understandable consumer model, highlighting the importance of balancing technology development with market strategies for startup success.
The discussion underscores the dichotomy between technology development and market development in startup strategies, with mixed reactions from readers.
The article contrasts the startup cultures of Stanford and MIT, highlighting Stanford's aggressive, VC-funded growth model versus MIT's conservative, sustainability-focused approach.
Stanford's influence is shifting East Coast practices towards more aggressive business models, impacting professional dynamics and entrepreneurial morale.
The tech economy's growth has led to wealth but also societal issues like environmental degradation and economic inequality, prompting a critique of profit-focused models and advocating for integrated business and technical training in universities.
The article from Engineer’s Codex argues that "clever" code, known for its complexity, is the worst type of code to write, advocating instead for clear and readable code.
The author shares personal experiences, highlighting that achieving clear code often requires extensive refactoring and documentation, despite it being undervalued in performance reviews.
Emphasizing the importance of coding style and continuous learning, the article recommends resources and courses for software engineers to enhance their skills.
The discussion stresses the importance of clarity and simplicity in coding, advising against overly "clever" code that complicates maintenance.
It highlights how perceptions of code complexity evolve with experience, noting that junior developers often write complex code due to inexperience, while senior developers prioritize simplicity and maintainability.
The conversation also explores motivations behind writing complex code, such as job security and experimentation, and debates the balance between readability and conciseness.
Alacritty is a high-performance, cross-platform terminal emulator that uses OpenGL, supporting BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows.
It is currently in beta, with some missing features and bugs, and emphasizes integration with other applications rather than reimplementing their functionality.
Alacritty is open-source under the Apache License 2.0, with precompiled binaries available on GitHub and installation possible via various package managers.
The discussion compares terminal emulators, focusing on features, performance, and user preferences.
Alacritty is praised for speed and GPU acceleration but lacks features like scrollbars and sixel support; WezTerm is noted for Lua configuration and documentation; Kitty is modern but lacks native Windows support.
Users debate the reliability of distribution packages versus developer binaries, with key concerns being security, performance, rendering speed, configuration flexibility, and compatibility with tools like tmux and NeoVim.