One of the only good things I got from MtG is Card Forge (https://card-forge.github.io/forge/), an open-source unofficial rule engine that also contains a desktop and a mobile app.
They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar from Microprose, in which you wander around a world dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat the big bosses.
It's one of the best ways to play the game: single-player, offline, and unofficial. Therefore you can have almost any card in existence without having to gamble with real-world money. It lets you enjoy the strategic part of the game and its meta, including deck building. The only downside is that the single-player game robs you of part of the charm, that is playing with other people.
> Now do breadth-first traversal. With the iterative approach, you just replace the stack with a queue. With the recursive approach, you have to make radical changes.
The reason is that no programming language that is in widespread use has first-class support for co-recursion. In a (fictional) programming language that has this support, this is just a change from a recursive call to a co-recursive call.
There's a great 1986 book "Designing and Programming Personal Expert Systems" by Feucht and Townsend that implements expert systems in Forth (and in the process, much of the capability of Prolog and Lisp).
It's interesting just how much of the debate in modern logic boils down to aesthetic preferences. On the other hand, I guess that if there were overwhelming practical advantages, there wouldn't be much to debate...
BTW, here's a "discussion paper" by Paulson and Leslie Lamport about typing in specification laguages from 1999: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/papers/Reports/lamport-paulso.... Paulson represents the "pro-type" view, but note that since that paper was written, there have been developments in mechanised theorem proving of untyped formalisms, including in Lamport's own (TLA+).
The post by James Somers that this article references at the top inspired me to buy the David Goodsell book The Machinery of Life. I would seriously recommend that to anyone who doesn't have a background in biology (like me). The phrase is a bit of a cliché, but it genuinely blew my mind, to the extent that I had to read it slowly because there's so much fascinating stuff packed into such a small book. It's obvious to me now, but the fact that so much of this stuff is about physical shapes locking into each other, and doing it at an almost unimaginable speed, was absolutely enthralling.
In this context it's important to know that there are two museums at Bletchley and they aren't entirely co-operative with each other. There's The National Museum of Computing https://www.tnmoc.org/ and there's also Bletchley Park's museum https://bletchleypark.org.uk/ these are both on the same physical site, in the grounds of the Bletchley Park stately home because that's where Ultra happened in WW2
Both museums do have some kid-friendly activities, but their focuses are very different. You might wish to visit one, or both, and you should figure that out before going as they aren't even necessarily open at the same time.
TNMOC is about Computers generally, but has some exhibits about Enigma including a Bombe reconstruction and then of course Colossus - to break the Lorenz cipher, only exists due to the war and would have been at Bletchley. If you don't much care about Computers that's not too interesting, maybe worth a half hour if you've time.
The main Bletchley Park museum is about Codebreaking and particularly Ultra, the secret project to break German codes, most famously Enigma but also Lorenz and others, at Bletchley Park in WW2. It has some exhibits about spycraft, and a lot more about the practical undertaking of this codebreaking. Who are these people, what are they all doing here, what was their life like? If you care about the people you will want to visit this museum, but it has relatively little about the technical nuances of what was done.
John Conway was amazing. Such a loss that he died of COVID.
As well as the game of life, surreal numbers and other famous things, he also produced one of my favourite lesser-known proofs ever - the proof that 91 is the smallest number that looks prime, but isn’t https://youtu.be/S75VTAGKQpk?si=IW791RaeCsXSOrrK “This is an important theorem and a discovery that I’m very proud of”.
When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers).
Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go through with it. Investors will encourage Bluesky to kick that can down the road until people forgot they ever promised it in the first place.
That said, we will have a good amount of time with Bluesky as a more positive site before these changes kick in. But my hunch is that it'll be shorter than previous cycles. The rate of profit has fallen and investors don't have as much grace for companies that grow without revenue as they did 10-15 years ago.
Of all the sites that emerged out of the internet renaissance starting in the late 90's, it seems the only one that has hung on and still provides a good value, despite all it's issues, is Wikipedia. And that has to be because it's a non-profit powered by volunteer labor with no need to optimize revenue or make a profit.
I often dream of recreating the classic web using a very low cost subscription model (since cheap is better than free, because free is never truly free) and apps that are bootstrapped or crowdfunded instead of vc funded. Decentralization in that circumstance is much more achievable and way less of a threat, although it still comes with a ton of technical and political considerations.
The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims on the relative expressive power of programming languages, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences. As a first step in this direction, we develop a formal notion of expressiveness and investigate its properties. To validate the theory, we analyze some widely held beliefs about the expressive power of several extensions of functional languages. Based on these results, we believe that our system correctly captures many of the informal ideas on expressiveness, and that it constitutes a foundation for further research in this direction.
I think such attempts are not widely disseminated / taught to young physicists because older / more experienced ones believe that quantum gravity will re-write the situation anyway. { QG itself seems necessary since in General Relativity you "solve for the metric aka solve for time" self-consistently with mass-energy and that very same "time" is the background for QFT (which is what "makes" mass-energy). So, we don't really understand this model element we call "time" - so elemental to all our ideas of dynamics - without QG. Of course, the most direct quantum gravitational phenomena are, at present, at a subtle experimental scale due to the size of 'G'. This need not remain the case -- once we know what to look for - e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines were beginning to reveal atomic quantum physics in 1802 almost a full century before Planck's black body work and barely after Benjamin Franklin-ian electrostatics and long before Maxwellian electrodynamics. }
I'm mostly just trying to strike a less hopeless note for jiggawatts and provide some reading material which might be accessible (if, as noted, is probably necessarily preliminary - EDIT and some might say this of all "Science" at all times, of course).
I finished Infinite Jest without taking notes. I definitely missed a lot of stuff but I loved the experience and it ended up being one of my favorite books.
I think Infinite Jest is a great example for this sort of thing because I later realized that I had completely missed the entire main plot. By the author:
> There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.
Nothing converged for me at all and yet I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I’m still not quite sure what to think of that.
Aaron Swartz (yep, that Aaron Swartz) wrote a great essay that explains the ending and main plot in clear language:
But I don’t think I got any part of that plot by reading the book. It’s all hidden and disjointed, and there’s so much interesting stuff at the surface that you almost don’t even care to go deeper.
I coined an AI koan that goes something like this:
A novice travelled to the East to learn at the feet of Sussman. As Sussman lectured on writing device drivers with low-level Lisp code, the novice interrupted: "But Master, is Lisp not a high-level language?" To which Sussman replied: "There was once a fisherman who spotted an eagle on the shore. 'Brother Eagle,' said the fisherman, 'how impossibly distant is the sky!' The eagle said nothing, and flew off." With that, the novice was enlightened.
It's fictional, but it's based on a real-life Sussman encounter I had. A hacker (it may have been Dimitris Vyzovitis) was telling me about things he'd done in "low-level languages like C and Lisp". Then I said "But Lisp is high-level!" at which point the hacker paused and said "Let me get Jerry." "Jerry" turned out to be Gerald Sussman, who explained to me, in the most nerdy-enthusiastic Sussman-like way, that Lisp was the low-level language of a virtual machine which he had actually implemented in hardware[0]. And it was profoundly enlightening.
[0] See Steele, G.L. and Sussman, G.J., AI Memo 514, "Design of LISP-based Processors, or SCHEME: A Dielectric LISP, or Finite Memories Considered Harmful, or LAMBDA: The Ultimate Opcode", https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5731
"one of the myths concerning LISP that people think up or invent for themselves becomes apparent, and that is that LISP is somehow a realization of the lambda calculus, or that was the intention. The truth is that I didn't understand the lambda calculus, really" - John McCarthy
So there are a two issues here, 1) whether or not it was McCarthy's intention to realize the Lambda Calculus in LISP, and 2) whether or not LISP is such a realization. Or at least some kind of close realization.
The answer to 1 is clearly no. This doesn't imply an answer to 2 one way or another.
If 2 isn't true, what explains the widespread belief? Is it really just that he, McCarthy, borrowed some notation?
Little schemer is good, some people hate it some people love it. But it is a fairly light read the slowly teaches some syntax at a time, questions you about assumptions then revels the information as it goes on. It would be the least dry read. There is also sketchy scheme for a more thorough text, or even the rs7s standard, which are both pretty dry but short.
What made me appreciate scheme was watching some of the SICP lectures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PL8FE88AA54...) and the little schemer to learn more. I also read some of the SICP along with it, though I put it down due to not having the time to work through it.
Scheme is interesting and toying with recursion is fun, but the path a mentioned above is only really enjoyable if you are looking to toy around with CS concepts and recursion. You can do a lot more in modern scheme as well, and you can build anything out of CL. But learning the basics of scheme/lisp is can be pretty dry if you are just looking to build something right away like you already can in a traditional imperative language. But it is interesting if you are interested in a different perspective. But even RS7S scheme is still far from the batteries included you get with CL.
I personal found the most enjoyment using Kawa scheme, which is jvm based and using it for scripting with java programs as it has great interop. I used it some for a game back end in the event system to be able to emit events while developing and script behaviors, I've also used it for configurations as well with a graphical terminal app, I used hooks into the ascii display/table libraries then kawa to configure the tables/outputs and how to format the data.
I’m writing a book about RuneScape, Why We Play, and this project is the most exciting thing I’ve seen toward this end in awhile. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it!
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_... after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
If you are interested in Library Genesis (and shadow libraries in general) I can recommend this book by Joe Karaganis: https://boook.link/Shadow-Libraries
I don't want to speak for GP, but I doubt it's coincidental. Many if not most people's first exposure to "rationalism" was via Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic. There's a pretty decent rundown of rationalism's history in Extropia's Children [1].
For anyone interested in learning Sumerian, there is really nice introduction "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian"[0] by J. Bowen and M. Lewis, which gives you rough ability to understand some grammar and also read cuneiform. It's extremely niche topic and I can guarantee that you'll have absolutely no use for this knowledge[1], but if you're into learning exotic languages, this can be fun. At least it was for me.
I am quite obsessed with keeping a personal wiki, like some of these people described in the article. However, I simply cannot imagine doing that in an application that isn't controlled by me or doesn't work completely offline.
I dont want my life to be organized around an application that charges a subscription and my workflow is at the whim of a corporation.
I went from Zim to Dokuwiki to Bookstack (where I've been for the past 3 years). The former is an offline app and the latter two are self hosted. All three are FOSS.
Anyways, I did try Notion once, it was super slow (feels sluggish) and the search was bad.
Edit: after reading some other comments, one thing I really appreciate about Bookstack is that its opinionated and batteries included -> no falling into the "waste all your time customizing and perfecting your workflow" trap.
To be fair, it is a free tool, looking for donations
> Jumble is free. Secure daily journaling will always be free. In the future we hope to introduce some premium features on top of the free tier. We could not continue to build and improve this product were it not for the generous donations from our users (donation link at the bottom of page).
They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar from Microprose, in which you wander around a world dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat the big bosses.
It's one of the best ways to play the game: single-player, offline, and unofficial. Therefore you can have almost any card in existence without having to gamble with real-world money. It lets you enjoy the strategic part of the game and its meta, including deck building. The only downside is that the single-player game robs you of part of the charm, that is playing with other people.