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Pretty summer day,
What brings you to October?
Have you run away?
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #heat #UnseasonablyWarmWeather
Remote
Kent Pitman
@kentpitman@climatejustice.social
mastodon 4.7.3-stable+ff1Philosopher/Technologist/Writer. Progressive independent focused on Climate, democracy, and social justice.
#Climate #Justice #Democracy #Politics #Society
#Technology #Ethics #Philosophy #Writing
#Programming #Lisp #Poetry #Haiku
946 Followers
70 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 11, 2022
Miscellanea:
he/him/his or e/em/eirs | ENG > ESP >> POR | ORCID 0000-0002-6157-007X | Erdős # 4
Website:
BlueSky:
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As the weather cools,
Climate's urgency feels less.
Too bad it isn't.
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #ClimateDenial #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #collapse #extinction #fall #autumn #weather
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This port of the CL condition system to Jolt looks interesting. Haven't been through it in detail, but the write-up on it, at a quick glance, looks thorough.
https://reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/1wr299y/cl_conditions_and_restarts_in_jolt/
(I don't know what Jolt is either, but I guess a Clojure library or DSL. since it's on their subreddit.)
EDIT: I see the Foralero package, which I did not look up because the name did not immediately suggest conditions, is probably the real source. I'm not a Clojure user so just stumbled into this by chance.
https://github.com/IGJoshua/farolero
#CommonLisp #lisp #ConditionHandling #ErrorHandling #ErrorSystem #clojure
I posted a new essay, Taking Rights for Granite, on my blog this morning.
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2026/09/taking-rights-for-granite.html
#politics #rights #laws #meaning #dictionaries #words #battlefields #vigilance
I just published another essay on my blog, 'Metaphor Matters.' It talks about the ways metaphors go beyond helping us visualize a topic to influencing how we think about that topic.
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2026/09/metaphor-matters.html
#language #metaphor #philosophy
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While it was only a matter of time, this is still a very bad development.
«An internet troll on the Pentagon’s payroll has made a database to track Americans based on their political affiliation. …
The release of the evidently government-funded DSA Explorer comes amid a broader effort to label left-wing activists and organizers as domestic terrorists.
In a lengthy disclaimer on the database website, Pounds warned that her data may not be 100 percent accurate. … “Do not rely on this material without independent verification.”»
Source: https://www.rsn.org/001/a-hegseth-employee-created-a-database-to-track-americans-based-on-their-political-affiliation.html
I'm just not sure a disclaimer and request to be careful is going to hold back people who are determined to make an inference that itself is bogus on its face and is likely in search of any flimsy justification.
#fascism #surveillance #SurveillanceSociety #USElections #USPolitics #DSA #DSAExplorer #privacy #democracy #Constitution #BillOfRights
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I just posted an essay to my blog titled "Compliance is not Ethics". The title says it all, really. But somehow I always find reason for additional text.
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2026/09/compliance-is-not-ethics.html
#compliance #ethics #philosophy #BusinessEthics #ChocolateBunny
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your flame lights my world
I'd battle dragons for you
though some will be you
#haiku #senryu #poem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #ShortPoem #love #acceptance #dragons #commitment #FridgeMagnet #FridgeMagnetPoetry #FridgePoetry #poetry
New fridge. Repopulating it. Same old fridge magnets, but they cried out for fresh poetry.
Replying to
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io @simon_brooke@mastodon.scot @sigue@universeodon.com @Ardubal@mastodon.xyz @vnikolov@ieji.de @screwlisp@gamerplus.org
They do date back to Maclisp, as does the grammar complaint. Blame Quux[1] (Guy Steele), I suspect.
There is also a third that happens when you assign another 'pure' (what we call readonly now) quantity. I was afraid I would not remember correctly (though, oddly, I did), so I looked it up in "COMMON;LINS >" on an ITS emulator:
VERITAS AETERNA -- DON'T SETQ T.
PURITAS NECESSE EST -- DON'T DO RANDOM BINDINGS.
NIHIL EX NIHIL -- DON'T SETQ NIL.
[1] https://speechcode.com/jargon/jargon.info.Quux.html
Replying to
Note that an article in the Cornell Chronicle puts the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers confirming human-caused climate change at 99.9%.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-change
But this isn't an isolated claim. Here's one from the non-profit Institute of Physics saying over 99%.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
It's not hard to find more.
So I was curious how people quantify "beyond a reasonable doubt" when asked to do it numerically. Estimates seem to vary in the 90-95% range, as far as I can tell. The first reference I found anticipated why I was asking and said 95% for the purpose of comparing to Climate Change specifically:
https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/legal-standards-by-the-numbers/
But let's go past that one since someone might argue (probably falsely, but we'll be generous) that the numbers were inflated to make a point. Here's one that says 98 or 99% is what most people would say:
https://courts.uslegal.com/burden-of-proof/beyond-a-reasonable-doubt/
Here's one that says 90, 95, or even 99%:
https://www.scribd.com/document/510535115/Preponderance-of-the-Evidence-vs-Beyond-a-Reasonable-Doubt-LegalMatch
My point, I guess, is that the present numbers for scientific peer-review are within range of what most people would accept as meaning "beyond a reasonable doubt".
At what point will media stop treating this as a controversy?
(Don't tell me, I probably know the answer: When they're not funded by wealthy billionaires with investments in oil. Sigh.)
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This week's Climate thought
arrived before its deadline.
But will your response?
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #Climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateDenial #LispyGopherClimate
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de @pascal_costanza@functional.cafe @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @SDF@mastodon.sdf.org
VN> present for the equinox.
I thought "gee, it must be early" and did some research. Apparently the equinox is not until the 23rd, but it is not just a day but a time, and it can (I'm thinking probably 'must') therefore be on different days in different time zones.
Anyway, it's OK with me if you open your present early.
Also, I corrected some broken links in the above. Something (probably not me, since it was done too precisely in two different places) had broken the links across lines. So they are now suitable for bookmarking when they weren't originally. Sorry about that.
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de @pascal_costanza@functional.cafe @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @SDF@mastodon.sdf.org
There's some really useful conceptual detail, more than I quoted, if you pull up that pdf from the archives and see pages 621-624.
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de @pascal_costanza@functional.cafe @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @SDF@mastodon.sdf.org
(This returns to the topic of defwhopper semantics. Brewster and IA removed, as they probably don't care about this thread beyond my last message.)
Here is the example from the links I offered in the previous message:
==========
Examples of Whoppers
The following whopper adds code around the execution of the method that performs the generic function print-integer on instances of the foo flavor. Specifically, the whopper binds the value of the special variable base to 3 around the execution of the method. This function takes one argument, n:
(defwhopper (print-integer foo) (n)
(let ((base 3))
(continue-whopper n)))
The following whopper sets up a catch around the execution of the compute-height method of flavor giant, regardless of what arguments this methods accepts:
(defwhopper (compute-height giant) (&rest args)
(catch ’too-high
(lexpr-continue-whopper args)))
==========
And this information may be helpful as well:
==========
Summary of Functions Related to Wrappers and Whoppers
defwrapper (generic-function flavor) (arglist &rest combined-method-body) &body body
Defines a wrapper.
defwhopper (generic-function flavor) arglist &body body
Defines a whopper.
continue-whopper &rest args
Calls the methods for the generic function that was intercepted by the whopper. This is intended for use in defwhopper forms.
lexpr-continue-whopper &rest args
Like continue-whopper, but the last argument should be a list of arguments to be passed. This is useful when the arguments to the intercepted generic function include an &rest argument.
defwhopper-subst (generic-function flavor) arglist &body body
Defines a wrapper by combining the convenient syntax of defwhopper with the efficiency of defwrapper.
==========
EDIT: I should have said the source of this and related concept information is: https://web.archive.org/web/20191013221848/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/software/genera_8/Symbolics_Common_Lisp_Programming_Constructs.pdf (pages 621-624)
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de @pascal_costanza@functional.cafe @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @SDF@mastodon.sdf.org
The history archive I'm building on github is willing to hold files that are not well-stored elsewhere but I don't want to weigh it down with things that are already safely stored. But safely stored is blurrier than I would have expected because sometimes they're stored in ways that are poorly indexed. The Internet Archive and MIT's DSpace are examples of things not well-indexed, but I suspect most archival storage is really not intelligible. I have had an LLM helping me navigate painful indexes, but it's slow-going sometimes.
For example, I have some documents that it turned out were already in the Internet Archive, just badly positioned.
Like there is a thing called the Lagout Museum that was on the web for a while and held a lot of interesting Symbolics documents. They are still there in the Internet Archive, but you don't look under Symbolics, you have to find them under this museum. It's not an easy thing. I only ran into it because there was a live-web pointer to a 404 of the Lagout Museum live on the web, and I traced into whether the IA had a archival copy, which it did.
But if you go to https://web.archive.org/web/20251010122927/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/ you can see a lot of Symbolics documents that are hard to find elsewhere. People should bookmark this and link it from more prominent sites.
Each page, incidentally, asks you to donate, but the museum site is gone. I guess not enough people donated. There is a sad irony in the donate button popping up in the archive.
But, relevant to this thread, this file has information and a very small code sample for defwhopper. It also mentions defwhopper-subst, which it says is really just syntactic sugar for a defwrapper. The relevant file is software/genera_8/Symbolics_Common_Lisp_Programming_Constructs.pdf which you can find in the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20191013221848/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/software/genera_8/Symbolics_Common_Lisp_Programming_Constructs.pdf
Last time this Lagout Museumcame up for discussion, I think @brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org had asked @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org
to get them better placement, but I don't know if they did. The relevant task, in my opinion, is just to make a symbolic link, or whatever the Internet Archive equivalent of same is, so that there's a Symbolics documentation area that's more easily findable and just points to https://web.archive.org/web/20251010122927/https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/symbolics/ which is much harder to find.
In general, it would be nice if someone had a curated map of old manuals that was by device type, including links so that if some devices shared documentation, you could find the doc under any applicable. It's probably work to do that, but maybe if it was set up right, volunteers would help organize, as happens at Wikipedia either by having a set of trusted curators (perhaps partitioned by area of expertise) or some way for the public to vote on suggested changes. But right now it's just an unintelligible sea of undifferentiated duplicates in some of the areas, and I find that a real impediment to knowing whether documents I possess are already properly archived.
#KentsHistoryProject #InternetArchive #Symbolics #SymbolicsDocumentation #Documentation #RetroComputing
Replying to
For anyone who's curious, the screenshot accompanying the haiku upthread was from a DuckDuckGo news summary yesterday. The original article from the World Meteorological Organization used a superscript "0" instead of a degree-sign, and it got reformatted without the superscript in the news summary.
The thing is, we're all going to look at it and say "Phew, all is well, the 380 was a typo." But 38C (104F) is already bad enough!
All is, in fact, not well.
https://public.wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-recognizes-new-arctic-temperature-record-of-380c
Hush, Climate Science.
Tell better researched stories.
Like those Big Oil tells.
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #narrative #stories #StoryTelling #statistics #denial #ClimateDenial #ClimateDelay #ClimateScience #science
https://veganism.social/@Dragofix/116961289450079689
RE: https://bne.social/@travis_nice/116915720209889228
You seek Climate proof?
If such spiky graph's aren't it,
maybe a flatline?
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #extinction #ElNiño #ElNino #heat #OceanWarming #RecordHeat #RecordTemperatures
Quoting
“… Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.”
#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateBreakdown #ElNino #ENSO
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-graph-that-should-be-front-page-news
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unlike ostriches,
we DO hide our heads in sand,
baking hopes and dreams.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-silence-on-climate-change-is-totally-unacceptable
(About the ostrich myth, see https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/animals/ostriches-really-bury-heads-sand)
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #denial #ClimateDenial #ClimateDelay #ClimatePolitics #ClimateSilence #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ostriches
I'm sitting here absolutely bawling, tears flowing down my face, as I watch The Kings Affection in background. It's a Netflix k-drama, for those that don't know it. Korea is lately putting out some brilliant works.
I'm only about 3/4 through and won't spoil anything by going onto detail. I see homages to Twelfth Night and Roshomon. It's nicely structured.
It's a good love story, but also a recurring theme of some of these Korean dramas is such an honor and dignity and hope through real adversity. It's like the kind of television I watched and plays I worked on even, like Camelot and especially A Man for All Seasons, which was very formative for me.
Things that understand the struggle between Good and Evil is important to see and engage, even where nuance makes the lines between them blurred. These Korean works seem to be targeting an intelligent audience who wants to think. I love the genre, and this one is a good example.
I think at some point the US decided that cynicism sells better than promise, and we have done well in exposing the many ways that society fails people, yet in the process we have somehow managed to deliver a sense of hopelessness and fatalism that is itself a cancer, suggesting the individual might as well just go for what's theirs. I love that these writers are still portraying another path.
#TheKingsAffecton #kdrama #kdramas #love #hope #optimism #adversity #TwelfthNight #Roshomon #honor #society #philosophy #television #netflix
Replying to
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social
Ignoring for the moment your very reasonable observation about doubling complexity, why only protect the IP address from the sponsor, and not from other sites that have not at least been financially helpful? I must be missing something.
This maybe relates (or maybe doesn't) to my ongoing irritation that privacy is the only US right that expires as you get older. You have it as a child and then they take it away from you, when plainly having it more broadly would be useful. Anyone who cares can see fuller rant at https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2021/05/children-of-information-era.html
I couldn't find a copy of the memo named "Loop Iteration Macro" by Glenn Burke and David Moon, January 1981 (MIT/LCS/TM-169) at MIT's dSpace site, or anywhere else. So I scanned in my copy and have uploaded it to my web site.
NOTE WELL: This document was written prior to CLTL and describes a facility that was available in MACLISP and the Lisp Machine's Zetalisp. Common Lisp drew design ideas from this, but the syntax, semantics, and associated functions/macros described in this are NOT the same as what Common Lisp offers.
For example, my recollection from long ago (which I did not re-check before making this post) is that there are other differences in syntax because this earlier version of Loop was underconstrained in the ordering of the keywords in a way that let you write some expressions that the committee felt might confuse people with their results.
But also, for reasons that slip my mind, Common Lisp did not adopt the define-loop-path macro that is described starting on page 19.
http://nhplace.com/kent/History/maclisp/MIT-LCS-TM-169-Loop-Iteration-Macro.pdf
#lisp #maclisp #loop #iteration #ComputerHistory #KentsHistoryProject #lisp #LispM #Zetalisp #CommonLisp
So hot we might die?
Relax. If it was THAT bad,
Someone would warn us.
#haiku #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #ClimateChange #ClimateDenial #heat #RecordHeat #collapse #extinction #Cassandra #ClimateWarning #ClimateReporting #ClimateLogic
Replying to
I guess the issue of time use, focus, and mental state are on my mind this week as I think of the mechanics of addressing Climate Change. It's just so much work getting through a hot day that one feels a moral right to just do something, anything, that is not heat-related when one comes out of the helpless state that these oppressive heat can cause. One feels almost morally entitled to better, having paid the "hard cost" of survival.
And yet these are the easy times. It will only get worse. And we ought to do something right now, while the pain and injustice and frustration and exasperation are front-of-mind. Not later, when we blend it into the background we are comfortable with, the "that's just life" thing where we can normalize almost anything.
Because that is not our new life, not a new normal. It is an escalating thing, so it is a point along a more horrible path. These heated times that we barely got through are tomorrow's good times we will look back on and wish for. And the points of relief will be fewer. This is our time to act, not later. Relaxing and going on to non-heat-related things will not help.
As part of my history project, I was looking for a document I wrote that offered specific advice on converting Maclisp and Zetalisp to Common Lisp.
I had to laugh when I found it. It's already published as part of the Sunday Morning Edition of the Pitmanual (the webbed version of the Revised Maclisp Manual, the printed version of which was the Saturday Evening Edition).
The printed version does not contain the conversion guide. It was an "extra" I through in as part of the webbing. But it's perhaps hard to find, so I thought I'd say it out loud. It's several pages that begin here:
https://maclisp.info/pitmanual/cl-conv-01-intr.html
#Lisp #Maclisp #Zetalisp #CommonLisp #KentsHistoryProject #Lisp #ComputerHistory
cc @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @larsbrinkhoff@mastodon.sdf.org @eswenson@c.im
Replying to
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @screwlisp@gamerplus.org
Not yet. I'm putting together some files to put probably on github. I'll announce it when I do. It's what I'm doing all day every day lately.
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end of a hot day
we pause to rest overnight
though climate change won't
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #ClimateChange #relentless #ClimateDenial #ClimateUrgency
just scorpions we.
atop a blue marble frog
oil finds its purchase
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #collapse #extinction #anthropogenic #oil #FossilFuels #LateStageCapitalism
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@primonatura/116753774676038889
This news is days old.
News or not, Climate matters.
New's the wrong question.
#haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateNews #news
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As Climate ratchets,
skeptics scoff, still asking proof.
Cartoon Physics shield.
When none remain to agree,
will that be finally Proof?
#tanka #haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #Climate #ClimateDenial #denial #CartoonPhysics #physics #extinction
«France’s maize harvest is the lowest in 50 years; across Europe, nine million tons of grain have been lost. Such losses are of particular concern for the U.K., which imports much of its food.»
People often say improvements in technology will let us support a much larger population. because we can feed more people per acre. But the flip side of that is that if we lose one of those acres, we put a lot more people at risk.
https://pouet.chapril.org/@dallo/117018756728357617
Replying to
@screwlisp@gamerplus.org @yantar92@fosstodon.org
I'm not sure I entirely get your point. I must be missing something. All I'm saying is that until the things that pre-existed data centers have been greened, the fact that your greening some data centers is not what It seems. I don't really care what the status of solar versus fossil is in an isolated situation, only globally as a whole. Even for as much solar as there is it's having trouble keeping pace with the rate of increase in total use. I've heard there are places where it's gotten ahead but I'm not sure even globally whether it has or whether it has by very much.
I don't know if you have progressive taxation where you are, but here in the US for our federal tax, the first few dollars are taxed at one rate and then greater dollars are taxed at another rate. In essence, the first few dollars are acknowledged to be things that you need to live on and so not as much is asked of those dollars. If you make extra money, we speak in terms of the marginal rate, which is the highest because you're adding it on top of the other ones. And it creates an ordering where all money is not the same. There is necessity money and there is luxury money.
Similarly for energy, there is necessity energy and there is luxury energy and I am putting data centers squarely in the luxury camp. Their impact on the world's resources occurs at the margins, at the upper edge. Until necessity energy is all green, the original task that climate change asks of us, I personally refuse to recognize even the concept of luxury green. When necessity is green, then we may add luxuries at whatever rate we can keep them green.
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2024/10/green-ai.html
Replying to
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @screwlisp@gamerplus.org
OK, well, I did just make a repo public but it's not the one we're discussing here and is in fact of no interesting value at all (which I suppose I can't say without risking some people will rush to check anyway, but really...not worth your time).. I'm just dusting of my github space a little.
The repo that IS relevant to here (not yet public) has working title for now of "netsettlement", just so you'll recognize it when it does appear.
Replying to
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz
But I am https://github.com/netsettler if you're a fan of following people who have no visible contributions "just in case". Ha.
I have a number of private repos that might at some point go public, so that isn't impossible. But some of them are kind of "as I have time for them" things going on in background over a long period. I wouldn't hold your breath. :)
cc @screwlisp@gamerplus.org
Replying to
@screwlisp@gamerplus.org @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz
In my experience, what matters about a text editor is the editing substrate, not the display. While there is room to do a lot of interesting stuff with display, for the most part Emacs works (at least in the era I was familiar with, and also in Zmacs) by presuming that display will mostly take care of itself, and that it's merely important to update the buffer structures.
In fact, TECO-based Emacs commands did worry heavily about telling the caller what part of the buffer changed, so that it could optimize the redisplay to what would have affected only what in modern window systems would be the clipped region of a window/viewport, but in those days was a tiny rectangle of screen allocated more directly (at least for TECO-based Emacs).
Even the Lisp Machine focused pretty heavily on data structures that were linked line structures so that if the buffer was long, only the region in view the links between the start line and the end line would need to be considered, thus making it possible to edit long files (as long as they had frequent newlines) without substantial O(n) cost.
I'll talk to you privately about whether we can find a time.
But I should add that NEX was built on Emacs as just a set of customizations. It was packaged in a finished way as a full editor. But it was not a separated effort in the way some other command sets for Emacs were. Though the way Emacs was built, like the way the modern one is, it was still possible to load all that support into others' editors, and just not run the command that would make it set itself up as dominant. So it's hard to tell if that difference matters.
Replying to
@alderson@mastodon.sdf.org
Ha. i recall that conversation about the Y2K bug, but I don't have easy access to old email and had forgotten who it was with. Thanks for telling that story. :)
It's funny that from time to time I still get periodic messages from people asking me to help debug Lisp code I or others wrote the 1970's or 1980's. TECO inquiries are FAR more rare. Yours may be the only one in the last 2-3 decades.
Replying to
@petergleick@fediscience.org
I like to come at this problem differently.
It seems like some don't deny the problem, but think we didn't make it. They are somehow comforted by this. Even if you accepted their beliefs, they should not be comforted.
It's like being in an airplane where the pilot has died and you're a passenger saying "hey, I didn't cause the problem." As the ground rushes up in your plummet toward a crash, who caused it is in many ways not as important as how to fix it.
The reason why human-caused matters isn't blame, it's part of the process of assessing whether there are any knobs that can be twisted to control the event.
To say that humans did not cause the problem he's also to say we have no capacity to do anything that might fix it. If all the gasoline we've burned in the world didn't make an effect, then what in the world would we do to make an effect. Things just happen, and that's it.
Maybe somebody thinks it's comforting that we have no available tools for understanding or affecting the world around us. For figuring out what a fix would look like. But I find it FAR more comforting if there IS something we possibly did, something we need to do less of or more of.
So when they say it's not human caused, I always answer back "I hope you know that only makes the problem worse and more urgent. Because not only do we need to implement a solution, but we have to start figuring out what one might look like, since nothing humans have ever done has any effect on such things... according to you."
Sudhakar Velamoor wrote a very brief but thoughtful analysis of why "agentic search" will be different than the kind of search we've been using. I'd quote it here, but it's so short—just one paragraph, maybe twice as long as this one you're reading—that it would be unfairly stealing his thunder. If you're the sort that is trying to find ways to get a foothold on the changes "AI" is heaping upon us, this is a useful piece of that puzzle. Check it out.
https://sapienloop.substack.com/p/agentic-search
#AI #LLMs #LLM #AgenticSearch #Search #technology #attention #AttentionEconomy
Replying to
@PaulaToThePeople@climatejustice.social oh, weird. Ok. Do you want me to take it down? It's not offered for its information value, just as an artifact to say that it happened.
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de @screwlisp@gamerplus.org
Well, speaking of primary sources, one of those curious oddities is that I just went back in time to an ITS emulator and was rummaging my personal directory from so many decades before, since many of my files are preserved as part of the emulator. In the file KMP;AR1:LOOP LOSSAG I had collected some issues with LOOP of the time, and one of them was this:
=====
(LOOP FOR X FROM 3 TO 5 COLLECT X)
(3 4 5)
(LOOP COLLECT X FOR X FROM 3 TO 5)
(3 4 5 6)
=====
But there's always a freshness date on these things, I guess, because I went to a Lisp on the emulator and tested it interactively and saw a different behavior, so I guess later versions (hard to say when) even of that LOOP macro were made to make rules against that because many felt it would be unintuitive to have those differ.
=====
lisp↑K
LISP 2156
Alloc? n
*
(LOOP FOR X FROM 3 TO 5 COLLECT X)
;Loading LOOP 819
;Loading DEFMAX 98
(3 4 5)
(LOOP COLLECT X FOR X FROM 3 TO 5)
;(FOR X FROM 3) Iteration is not allowed to follow body code
;BKPT *RSET-TRAP
=====
Not really related, but for anyone trying to understand a filename like "KMP;AR1:LOOP LOSSAG" the way to read ITS filenames is in four parts. The directory name, if present, is semicolon-terminated so can appear anywhere among the name tokens. The device name is colon-terminated and likewise can appear anywhere among the name tokens. The other two tokens are two parts of a filename, often called fn1 and fn2. The fn2 is separated by a space, but usually would default, and often to ">", which you can read as "newest version" because an FN2 is either the version or the file type, but isn't both. So "FOO BAR" is a file FOO with type BAR, but "FOO 2" is file FOO with no type but a version 2. And this file in question you could sort of read as /dev/ar1/kmp/loop.lossage except that the device, such as it is, is within my directory, not global to the file system. It's there because I have a file called "AR1 LSPDOC", which is an archive file (I guess kind of like a tar file) that can be accessed as an additional directory level since otherwise all filenames on ITS are at toplevel (and there can be only 512 of those, shared among all users). It was an odd file system, and for Common Lisp users this may help you underestand why the pathname system is so complicated. In fact, the conventional naming for this in lisp was '((ar1 kmp) loop lossage) to work around the syntax, and to be portable to the TOPS-20 operating system, which also ran on a PDP-10 class machine, but which would have named that file as AR2:FOO.LOSSAGE;0 or some such version, since it had both names and versions.
Replying to
@Aphelion@mastodon.sdf.org
Loving your wild fire,
I dare not try contain it,
lest it starve of air
#haiku #senryu #poem #love
Written with my own wildly independent primary in mind, though she's seen your beautiful books of poetry on prominent display here and I'm confident she wouldn't begrudge you the sharing of this poem's focus.
Replying to
@screwlisp@gamerplus.org did a great job interviewing @bagder@mastodon.social about curl, I thought. A quite interesting hour. Thanks for having me along (in spite of the tech difficulties on my end).
cc @prahou@merveilles.town#curl
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de
Well one of the strengths of LLMs is the ability to change formats,.. is that really the thing you worry about?
cc @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @bagder@mastodon.social
Replying to
@vnikolov@ieji.de @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @bagder@mastodon.social @albinowax@infosec.exchange
It seems not an individual program question but almost a question about the entire structure of the applied math field, like asking accountants their posture on spreadsheets and their use in forecasting back when they were a new tech.
Replying to
@mattblaze @wordshaper @farbel
Plus his brave face is an essential part of this complex posturing, so isn't a reliable indicator. It cannot reasonably be read as saying how scared he actually is, nor how scared any of us should be if this case succeeds in setting either a legal precedent or practical norm.
Replying to
@PaulaToThePeople@climatejustice.social
Yeah I got what you're saying. But I'll make a neutral analogy.
For a long time I did not have my pictures online. I care a lot about personal privacy. But I could not stop other people from posting pictures of me and of themselves and after a while the only person I was hurting was myself because the world was going on in the way that it was going on, and the only person who did not frame pictures of me was me, so all pictures had someone else's editorial touch.
I still think there are serious problems with the way in which people freely post pictures of each other but the solution to that has to realistically be in keeping with what's actually happening because the idea that people are going to stop a world full of cameras from having pictures of them is just not practical, however oppressive all those cameras really are. And they are.
There's almost nothing in the world technologically that I feel like we absolutely need. And almost every use of technology flows money to somebody who's doing something that I wish that they were not. So the best compromise I can come up with is to use the access that I have to lobby sometimes against the people who benefit from that technology, and even in some cases provide it. Or sometimes instead I just lobby for ethics. But that's an uphill battle.
Replying to
@PaulaToThePeople@climatejustice.social
This recent essay by me sort of helps explain what might seem like a sellout kind of behavior on my part. I don't think that it is, although ethics are complicated, trying to balance a lot of things. That's why I expose my reasoning, so you can see not only what I think but how I got there.
https://climatejustice.social/@kentpitman/116828579977840510