I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shouldn’t be disturbed – and Go fit perfectly. We started playing, and it was fun. One of the great things about Go is its elegant handicap system, which makes it possible for players at very different levels to still enjoy a fair, challenging game.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
That anime is one of my favorites. The main characters are pretty anime-ish, all anime protagonists from that time look more or less the same, but the older adults (apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan) are drawn in a more naturalistic style with a lot of character.
> in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
Definitively not in online Go. I ran into some people who clearly thought racist trash-talk was a way to reduce the competition.
>apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan
Yes. Part of the reason Yumi Hotta's manga (which the anime was based on) was written was to get younger people into the game, and it is credited in part for reviving the popularity of the game in Japan. Traditional board games like Go and Shogi have faced a lot of competition from video games over the past few decades.
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event.
I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
The event’s currency are Łosie, which you get by taking part in classes and winning tournament games. By the end of each week there’s an auction where you bid for prizes. You can use your Łosie from previous years, but Tasuki implements an inflationary monetary policy to keep old-timers from becoming too rich (every year Łosie rewards get doubled).
Some people have been coming from abroad for many years, and at some point just figured out it makes sense to learn Polish (not the easiest of languages).
Apparently in manga and anime regular characters are often drawn as if they were European-ish (so, some of them are going to have blue eyes or blond hair, not common in Japan). This convention is in part historical (matching American comic books that inspired manga), and in part to make the characters more characteristic and easier to distinguish from each other. But in HnG this applies only to Japanese characters – people from abroad are drawn in a more naturalistic and stereotypical way. Koreans and Chinese will look actually like Asians, and Americans and Europeans will be an even more exaggerated version of themselves. I guess it’s a very different sensitivity than what’s common in the US right now.
IIRC that was mostly the adults, or older teenagers, who don't get a lot of screen time so their designs are simplified?
It kind of follows a general trope in manga/anime where characters' eyes are smaller or thinner to indicate age/seriousness/maturity/intellectualism. The Korean kids tended to have the same kinds of eyes as the Japanese kids, like Hikaru's main Korean rival (forget his name) having almost exactly the same trapezoidal design as Akira. Hikaru's eyes also change into this later in the series, changing from his original carefree wide-eyed design.
One consideration that that is missing: how familiar are LLMs with this technology? And from this point of view the app has sailed, I’m afraid we are stuck with the frameworks that are available today for eternity, for better or worse. And maybe that is not such a bad thing. I don’t do full stack programming in my day job, but I have this crazy idea that if I ever have a startup idea, I want to be able to code an MVP. So, every two years I do a deep dive and write a toy web app. I’m always learning something new on the frontend (fun!), while on the backend I just use Django, so it just works as it used to, except it usually gets more convenient in many small ways (boring). Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much fun.
Evil people claim the technology has been promoted entirely for the sake of clearing the ways for LLMs, as it makes more sense from the "perspective" of an ANN than from the perspective of any given human developer.
In a biased Turing test like that, of course the LLM is going to be more proficient than a junior. The junior is slowed down by their vestigial expectation that these very popular tools by very large groups of very smart people actually make sense.
I started at a hybrid company a few months all, after working remotely for a long time (way before Covid). I was initially very skeptical, but then I noticed that coming to the office positively affects my psychological wellbeing. I actually enjoy hanging out with my colleagues.
I really liked the dream of working from wherever, but now I would prefer not to go back to remote work. Granted, this very much depends on your coworkers.
The main downside of hybrid work (or office work) is that you're limited to the job offers in your city. If I want to work for a software company that has HQ in Paris but I live in Lyon, well I need to move to Paris. That sucks.
When you were remote, did you ever work from coffee shops or coworking spaces? In your hybrid role, are you actively working with others in-person?
I’ve definitely found that having other people around during some of my work week has a positive psychological impact for me, and solve it this way. At the coffee shops and spaces I frequent, I often see and cowork with folks I know from my various hobbies and clubs in town.
I remember that, even when I was in-office full-time (pre-2020), sitting in the same cube/desk area as my teammates… we mostly communicated over Slack about work. Only very occasionally would we come look at one another’s screens - less than I screen share over Zoom or Slack Huddle with them these days. (Slack Huddles are especially more efficient than anything that could be done in-person, as you can both view one another’s screens.)
I definitely did enjoy hanging with my colleagues in those days - really, socialization was the majority of our in-person interaction (well, and meetings, which I might argue are better conducted over Zoom, as some people being physically imposing, reducing helpful input from others, was always a thing).
I’d also say all our in-person hanging made us more of a monoculture - half my team would hit the gym downstairs and be spotting each other on bench press during lunch breaks. Whereas in my current remote role, I work with folks who never go to the gym, but are into dance, cooking, theater - all sorts of more varied things! I think the variety of life perspectives may make us more productive as well, though obviously there are too many variables at play to really compare these work scenarios with any sort of objective metric.
It depends on coworkers, it depends on the office environment more generally, and it also depends on the type of work you're doing.
I'm not a particularly social person, but in general I'd rather work in an office near my coworkers than remotely. But, I'd rather work remotely than work in a large open office space. A cubicle might be okay, depending on how many people are sharing the same room.
Another big factor is your commute. Spending an hour or more on a daily commute is very taxing, especially if you're raising a family.
Yeah independent of commuting, I'd not want to work for my company if I had to spend a lot of time with my coworkers in person. You want people to gel like that in person and I'd need really different demographics. Online it's fine.
I prefer working in a good office, in a nice area, to wfh.
That describes only some offices, and also I definitely don’t prefer it to the tune of thousands of dollars and a couple hundred hours per year and a bunch more micromorts.
This is simply… incredibly impressive. I wasn’t expecting they would build a computer all the way up from a CPU and memory to an assembler to a compiler, all in the game of life.
It reminds me of people building computers in Minecraft, but for Game of Life they had to go another abstraction level lower and build the basics like wires and transistors out of GoL constructs.
I was actually a tiny bit disappointed - I was hoping for a closer coupling of tetris-logic to life-logic :-) Per https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Universal_computer the first turing-machine-in-Life goes back to 2000, and "building a CPU to run code" is at this point the "obvious" way to do it. See https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2020/intro-to-circuits-... for a tutorial with a (circular) "final goal of designing an Intel 4004 and using it to simulate the game of life."
Right, they made the odd choice to use Life to simulate a different cellular automaton and then built logic gates in that automaton. But you can in fact build logic gates directly with gliders in the Game of Life itself. The extra level of abstraction multiplies the area of the final result by about 20000.
I was the founding site lead of a Polish office of U.S. tech company, with an initial target of a hundred developers. After looking at… many resumes I realized I strongly disliked custom resumes. As much as I wanted to appreciate uniqueness and creativity, it got in the way. What I really wanted was something as standard and easy to read as possible. Ideally a LinkedIn profile.
Don’t get me started about cute resumes that were written as code, etc. I hated them and hated myself for how much I hated them.
It's an implementation of an ISO-standardised Lisp, pretty much a cleaned up and streamlined ISO alternative to ANSI Common Lisp and the Scheme:s. Aims to be industrially relevant rather than academic, the object system is somewhat simpler than CLOS. More here: http://islisp.org/
The GraalVM is a tool used, among other things, to produce native binaries, and Truffle a programming language for implementing programming languages on Graal.
One could expect pretty good performance, possibly at the price of somewhat slow compilation.
"In ISLisp, language specifications are separated from processor specifications. ISLisp forms after macro expansion and other pre-processing are called "prepared form" and ISLisp does not define preparation procedures."
The text you're quoting implies the language has a macro expander. There are arrays and vectors, so you could implement hashmaps, and I think some of the implementations of the language already does.
That exact text is not found in the spec; it's from the ISLisp page. ISLisp does have the concept of "prepared form" it refers to, but you have to look at the spec to understand what that means.
It looks to me that this "prepared form" is the same as in other traditional Lisps: that the source code of the program is defined in terms of nested lists, but may undergo a transformation into an undocumented form (for instance ARM machine language) in preparation for execution. E.g. in Steel Bank Common Lisp, everything you type into the REPL is first transformed into machine code and then run. Common Lisp doesn't define the details of such a thing, but does have a lot to say about compilation.
The actual ISLisp says:
An object is prepared for execution; this might include transformation or compilation,
including macro expansion. The method of preparation for execution and its result are not
defined in this document (with exception of the violations to be detected). After successful
preparation for execution the result is ready for execution.
Obviously, the macro expansion parts are defined at least to some extent because it interacts with user macro definitions. (Perhaps even when it comes to macro expansion, ISLisp doesn't nail down the exact semantics, like when exactly is it done. It's possible for a pure Lisp interpreter to work with unexpanded code and continuously re-expand any macro call that it encounters, in the latest dynamic environment. That allows for macros to be fixed on-the-fly.)
Judging by the name, the exciting part is the framework it was written on. As a habit, I do not use software that relies on code association in the name as a selling point. A lot of new coders use this naming convention, as they've become excited cheerleaders for their platform of choice (especially if it is a recent language or framework). But how much do actual users care about the underlying technicals? Why make the software sound like it is part of the language or framework when it isn't?
Imagine if there was an InlineAsmGrub to compete against that other GRUB. It's just that silly a practice.
I see where you're coming from, and the naming was quite unimaginative, indeed. I saw that "truffle ruby" called itself that and copied it.
However, the fact it's based on truffle is the selling point -- truffle enables interop between languages on the framework. So, for example, you can take truffle JS implementation, import express library or whatever, and then as part of the implementation do
````
let fn = Polyglot.eval('islisp', '(lambda (x) (+ x 1))');
fn(1);
````
(toy example. But this interop can happen in all directions, it's not limited to js but can be used from truffle python, ruby, java, etc; and it also isn't limited to just primitive values, you can pass around functions as well).
If you aren't looking for a specifically a truffle lisp, it would make more sense to use one of the established common lisp implementations.
I think the name is good. It took me a whole second to figure out its selling point, especially since there is a new "lisp" being made every day. Fancy names are exciting for like a millisecond. Good luck with the project! Im a Common Lisp user but this seems like a plausible alternative to Clojure and even ABCL
When building an alternative implementation of a language you're a bit hamstrung by the name. You could come up with something completely novel, but no one is ever going to discover or use your software. So, it's quite common to integrate the language name into your software name somewhere. The next question then is how to differentiate. Oftentimes the underlying framework is really the selling point. JRuby is Ruby on Java. TruffleRuby is Ruby on Truffle+Graal. It's easy for people to quickly identify and understand the difference. Instead of calling it TruffleRuby, I suppose we could call it PartialEvaluationRuby or SuperFastRuby, but those naming conventions have their own flaws.
Do you have a suggested naming convention to follow? There's a rich history of alternative language implementations following the convention you dislike, but I think those involved would be open to an alternative.
I see your male walking with fluffy dog, and raise you a male with a fluffy dog picking up the poop after the dog. I’m tall, dress in black, and have a black beard (so potentially scary), and after such a maneuver it seems I become the first choice to ask for help.
There is a quote from LOTR that has always stuck with me:
“I thought Fangorn was dangerous.
'Dangerous!' cried Gandalf. 'And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Glóin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion. Certainly the forest of Fangorn is perilous — not least to those that are too ready with their axes; and Fangorn himself, he is perilous too; yet he is wise and kindly nonetheless.”
The children correctly assess you as "dangerous". They then assess whether you are wise and kindly, and find you so, making a good ally or friend. Merely wise and kindly people do not make as good of an ally or friend.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).