https://github.com/smarr/RoarVM is the main thing that comes up when trying to learn about this, and it hasn't been touched in over 10 years. I have also seen people working on spawning child VMs to handle parallelism, though unfortunately I don't have links to those discussions immediately at hand. It seems like perhaps an unnecessarily heavyweight approach, too, not a canonical solution that you would want to use in production.

I assume that step 1 towards parallelism, at least on the image side, would be going through the class library and making sure everything is thread-safe. I'd love to know where one would even get started with that effort. The Roar project claims to support Pharo 1.2, which doesn't seem to be very far after they forked from Squeak, but obviously a lot has changed since then. And the challenge is that Pharo is still rapidly developing all the overhauled classes that distinguish it from Smalltalk-80.

Meanwhile, if I want to play with parallel image/REPL-based programming, I can go over to Common Lisp and, while lacking an equally coherent GUI, be able to load up bordeaux-threads and off I go.

My initial burst of enthusiasm was dampened by the big gap between the entry-level introductions (ProfStef tutorial, the introductory MOOC) and the sheer complexity of everything the image includes. I'm not a big-time Java developer, I certainly appreciate the elegance of the language and dev environment compared to, say, Python, but that huge list of packages and their Baselines in the left pane of the system browser makes it really difficult to tell where to get started. I attended an online Smalltalk meetup recently, and one of the veteran Smalltalkers there was preferentially rebasing his code on Cuis because he felt Pharo had become too heavyweight.

I also fear that leaning so heavily on a closed, corporate platform like Discord as the community hub may lead to tears in a few years. If you're leaning into the idea that "the community is the documentation," you're at Discord's mercy for community sustainment, on top of the already hairy problem of surfacing solutions from within the depths of a long-running discussion forum. Sure, running everything off of mailing lists + IRC like older open source projects do would be a clear step backwards, but being stuck with Discord has been a mild turn-off for me.

Finally, it's worth noting that development is spearheaded by folks in France and Latin America for whom English may not be their primary language. That doesn't affect their ability to do good work! It's totally worth reflecting on how something attempting to approximate natural-language programming in English ended up forked outside the Anglosphere! But I also feel like it'd be worth having an editor take a cleanup pass at future versions of the main ebooks. I've got both the books that Alexandre Bergel published through Apress, and they're both solid, but if the first-resort resources were up to the same standard, I think perhaps fewer people would come away with an unfavorable impression. Of course, that's over and above simply keeping them up to date as development progresses - I believe Pharo by Example is still on version 9?

> and one of the veteran Smalltalkers there was preferentially rebasing his code on Cuis because he felt Pharo had become too heavyweight.

Pharo has Iceberg integration. I always used the the functionality of Iceberg that said to load the repository from the .git folder itself as opposed to the repository living in the image. That way, I could do git from the command-line, which is especially important for rebasing as Iceberg doesn't have that feature yet.

I've noticed when it comes to Pharo, you need a hacker mentality. Because it lives in a VM, there are a lot of system programming concepts floating around. It's handy if you have that type of background.

Discord isn't the only part of the community. In Europe, the real backbone of the Pharo community is the academic world and the conferences they organize.

Start with the Finder and the Examples-category if you want to know how to do something, don't browse the full package list in the hope you'll stumble over something useful.

There are small communities outside the Discord having meetups and whatnot. Would probably be nice to have a Discourse-instance for a more documentation-like meeting place, but that requires money and volunteers doing moderation.

I enjoy that some docs and other resources aren't expressed in US:ian advertising lingo. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

No, sorry, I don't buy this assertion when it comes up. Everything I've seen, even from the most advanced image generators, has struck me as a logical follow-on from the "big data" trends of the 2010s. If you've ingested literally everything of a certain data type available on the internet, or even a significant fraction of it, it follows that you'd eventually be able to mix it all together and produce randomized outputs that seem novel.

It also elides the significant encoding of human feedback, a contribution that AI firms have typically been none-too-eager to highlight.

> If you've ingested literally everything of a certain data type available on the internet, or even a significant fraction of it, it follows that you'd eventually be able to mix it all together and produce randomized outputs that seem novel.

That's a ludicrous "it follows". Search engines have been collecting everything from the internet since the beginning but you can't just magically rearrange it and pass the Turing test. We're way past the point where you could say everything ChatGPT says is copy pasted from somewhere.

So you disagree with and think you know better than the 14 people at Microsoft Research that had access to the unrestricted early GPT-4 model and wrote the white paper outlining the results of experiments with it that concluded the model showed "sparks of artificial general intelligence".

That's their informed, direct conclusion after hands on with the unrestricted model. I wonder what your conclusion is based on.

Could you link me this paper? It sounds very interesting.

I could easily see him, or any other insider, setting themselves up administrating a recipient entity for contributions out of those “capped profits” the parent non-profit is supposed to distribute. (If, of course, the company ever becomes profitable at the scale where the cap kicks in.)

Seems like it would be a great way to eventually maintain control over your own little empire while also obfuscating its structure and dodging some of the scrutiny that SV executives have attracted during the past decade. Originally meant as a magnanimous PR gesture, but will probably end up being taught as a particularly messy example of corporate governance in business schools.

That would be a form of obfuscated profit-sharing, not equity ownership. Equity is something you can sell to someone else.

Regardless the lack of equity is often cited as some proof he has no incentive to enshittify and the point is that’s probably not true

Yeah, I agree that the whole legal structure is basically duplicitous, and any attempt to cite it as some evidence of virtue is more emblematic of the opposite...

It's a bit sad that calculus remains the stereotypical example of difficulty in most curriculums. Throughout childhood, I remember it seeming like some sort of complex, inscrutable, untouchable phantom hanging in the distance at the far end of the high school math course progression.

If somebody had told me that calculus is how you transition between dimensions, or that techniques of integration would enable me to generate 3D shapes from 2D lines, I think I would have been much more motivated to progress rapidly in math, and much less discouraged when I hit the "hard parts." Those are the answers I tend to give today when somebody asks me, "why take calculus?" Demystifying it doesn't even have to be a wholly practical explanation, like deriving acceleration from velocity.

Segregating out the "hard stuff" doesn't even necessarily lead to great learning outcomes, either. At my high school, and it seems many others, the honors kids were put on the track leading to calculus while everyone else ended up in a dedicated statistics class. The honors kids were expected to pick up statistics through supplementary assignments in their laboratory science classes, and this same approach carried over into lower-division undergrad. As an adult, I feel like that approach has only given me cause to go back and seek out a firmer grounding in statistics.

Motivating topics for students is so important and underrated. It's also super hard I think. For one thing, everyone responds to different motivation. Some people are motivated to learn basic algebra more by the possibility of extending it into applied math so they can get a good job as an engineer. Others don't have any interest in that, but rather would be motivated by the beauty of pure math. And students themselves have no idea what they like.

But yeah, I can think of so many examples of things that I would have been way more into in school if I understood how they mapped onto the adult world. Statistics is probably at the top of that list though.

Because the "AGI" pursuit is at least as much a faith movement as it is a rational engineering program. If you examine it more deeply, the faith object isn't even the conjectured inevitable AGI, it's exponential growth curves. (That is of course true for startup culture more generally, from which the current AI boom is an outgrowth.) For my money, The Singularity is Near still counts as the ur-text that the true believers will never let go, even though Kurzweil was summarizing earlier belief trends.

It's just a pity that the creepy doomer weirdos so thoroughly squatted the term "rationalist." It would be interesting to see the perspective on these people 100 years hence, or even 50. I don't doubt there will still be remnant believers who end up moderating and sanitizing their beliefs, much like the Seventh Day Adventists or the Mormons.

you don't need to believe in exponential growth per se, all you really need to believe is that humans aren't that capable relative to what could be in principle built - it's entirely possible logistic growth may be more than enough to get us very far past human ability once the right paradigm is discovered.

Exactly. All that is needed for AGI to eventually be developed, is that humans do NOT have some magical or divine essence that set us apart from the material world.

Now the _timeline_ of AGI could be anything from the a few years to millennia, at least if evaluated 40 years ago. Now, though, it really doesnt seem very distant.

That's going to be the key principle of the new religion invented by AI: that humans are just like machines, and AI is the supreme machine.

Well, assuming superintelligence emerges AND we don't find any evidence of anything supernatural inside human brains, what does "machine" even mean at that point?

Anyway, when/if AIs start to create the narrative to the extent they can author our religion, they already have full control. At least if some AI decides to become a God with us as worshippers, at least we stay around a bit longer.

Probably a better outcome than if it decides that it has better uses for the atoms in our bodies.

In fact, this may even be a solution to the alignment problem. An all-powerful but relatively harmless (non-mutating, non-evolving, non-reproducing) single AI that creates and enforces a religion that prevents us from creating dangerous AI's, weapons of mass destruction, gray goo or destroy the planet, while promoting pro-social behaviour while otherwise leaving us free to do mostly what we want to do.

Rings a bell: "Thou Shalt Not Travel Into Thine Own Past Lightcone", unfortunately the search results are now overwhelming "NovelAI" and actual physics, so I can't find the name of the story I'm thinking of (and have yet to actually read).

I'm not aware of any evidence that human brains involve any quantum computing. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's enough noise in the brain that almost instant wavefunction collapse/decoherence is guaranteed.

Anyway, a combination of noisy data entering from the outside world and chaos theory/mathmatics in the equations of most computer systems, I don't see any risk that AI's should get stuck in an infinitely repeating pattern.

It absolutely has become a new faith. A lot of the cryptocurrency faith healers moved into the space as that grift began to collapse and moved from copying the prosperity gospel to apocalyptic "the end is nigh, repent for the second coming of Christ is at hand" type preachers. LLMs that these people envision are not about intelligence. They're about creating a God you can pray to and it answers back, wrapped in a veil of scientism. It's a slightly more advanced version of 4chan users worshiping Inglip.

I can agree on one point: if I want 3D acceleration to Just Work on Linux and I'm muting my inner Stallman, the Nvidia binary drivers have always enabled thtat for me. But on the gaming side, I definitely get the feeling that a bit of Microsoft syndrome is starting to set in at Nvidia: we're by far the market leader, so you'll take what we give you. DLSS is constantly pumped in their marketing (and by reviewers, who are sometimes adjunct marketers) as a no-brainer upscaling solution that you don't need to ever turn off. But I've had two games (Death Stranding and Marvel's Midnight Suns) crash repeatedly and unpredictably with DLSS enabled, then run happily stable once DLSS was turned off. I only even became aware of the Marvel game because it was advertised in their Game Ready! driver update, but both the drivers and the game clearly weren't ready. In that particular case, it was also primed to devolve into a circular firing squad between Nvidia, Epic providing Unreal Engine, and the game developer as to who implemented what wrong... something I think we'll probably continue to see.

As far as overpricing goes, I think the pushback (and AMD's pricing advantage) will definitely come on VRAM. I was only able to get a 3080 10GB close to MSRP when the GPU shortage started to abate, and people are already reporting that it's maxing out that amount on Diablo 4 at 1440p ultrawide max settings. Yes, there's been inflation, Moore's Law isn't what it used to be, and it had been years since I had bought a discrete GPU, but that doesn't change the fact that I've paid a premium price and I'm not future-proof for 4K or ultrawide, either of the two popular monitor upgrade paths. The bulk of this can be attributed squarely to Nvidia's desire to maintain market segmentation and profit margins. If AMD really can close the yawning CUDA gap on the software side and start to force more commoditization in the GPU market, it can only be a good thing.

Certainly don't take my post as argument that they are the best company I can imagine. I'm fairly convinced this area is far harder than most internet commentary allows.

I say this as someone still driving a pre-emissions-control diesel VW: Volkswagen had long been positioning themselves as the market leader for diesel passenger cars in the US. Nobody else was doing as much to offer diesels across their lineup, or push them as the "green"/economical option. And they have been the biggest manufacturer in Europe for a long time, so it makes sense that the EU came down on them like a ton of bricks too.

There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where their diesels, along with Mercedes, got pushed out of California and CARB-compliant states. The opinion among diesel enthusiasts was that this was intentional on the part of CARB not just over NOx concerns, but also to help the market for hybrids grow. Otherwise, given the TDI's at-the-time superior highway mileage and the then-prevailing diesel prices, the VW diesel would have presented as the superior option to the Prius for a lot of people.

During this period, there was still a lot of pent-up demand for the VW and Mercedes diesels in California. Any car coming from out of state with at least 8,500 miles on the odometer was considered a "used car" and could be registered no matter the powerplant, so there was quite a cottage industry of putting that much mileage on brand-new out-of-state diesels and then turning them around on LA or SF Craigslist. The market here was primed to buy VW, but VW cheated to get in a position to sell new "CARB-compliant" diesels again. I'm not surprised that the prosecutors went after them disproportionately.

Yeah, I think this can only be a criticism of "democracy" in an extremely narrow sense. Much of the situation is still determined through litigation, not legislation, whether in court or in front of the state water resources board. My mom worked for a water attorney, and I lived and worked in ag in an irrigation district that had an active case in front of the water board. In both cases, the billable hours were endless, and in the latter case, winning a defense in front of the water board was enough to get the lead attorney a promotion to senior staff lawyer at another irrigation district.

Plus sheer cashflow, not votes, is what's driving a lot of the more water-intensive ag in the dry southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The Resnicks (Wonderful pomegranate juice/almonds/pistachios, Cutie citrus, billionaire LA residents) are essentially agribusiness investors rather than hands-on farmers, and most emphatically DO NOT have senior water rights for most of their operations, but they DO have the cashflow to buy water off of more senior rights holders, and they have the nationwide distribution on the other end to keep that cashflow going. Whether that continues to be sustainable, or their heirs want to keep it up... we shall see. In the meantime, it is a perfectly reasonable business decision as a senior rights holder to fallow your land or otherwise curtail your use, and sell your allotment down the aqueduct. Fresno State has the California Water Institute which publishes a great deal of informative studies and policy papers: http://www.californiawater.org/publications/ They've noted in the past that transactions like this essentially carry no tax or infrastructure maintenance fees. That's one policy change that could easily be voted into place.

Even setting aside the financial cost considerations other commenters have expressed, getting voters behind a wholesale change is a big project. The water situation simply hasn't started to bite hard enough for the bulk of the state's urban population. I'm often skeptical of ballot initiatives and the necessarily shallow marketing campaigns that accompany them, and a ballot initiative to reform the pre-/post-1914 water rights system would need an absolutely huge, multi-year educational push and likely multiple failures and retries at the ballot box. That's not to say it's impossible, as things are noticeably changing. These days, I live over the hill from Coalinga, which almost ran the hell out of water last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/coalinga-california-faces-th...

I don't know how anyone can drink that POM stuff, its like pancreatic cancer in a bottle

I find that the main reason I come here is for information/background chatter about various open source projects and the trends behind them. In other words, fairly granular technical news interspersed with general interest science and math stories. Slashdot used to fill this need for me, but it seems like it fell off in editorial quality and comprehensiveness after changing hands so many times. Plus the commentariat over there seems to have thinned out, as well as skewed older and more bitter, the last few times I’ve visited.

I do appreciate a site where I can learn just as much from the commenters as I can from the stories, and this place definitely still provides that. But I also agree that the YCombinator/VC connection means that too much of the content here uncritically rides industry hype waves (crypto, AI… what’s next? Some kind of applied biotech? Asteroid mining?).

What are some good alternatives? Phys.org is great for general science but there isn’t always a lot of CS crossover.