mikelevins

11 ms·

1.
by mikelevins 3mo ago
Probably, if I could contact them. But all the links I turned up lead me back to the captcha black hole, and the only email address I've found elicits a reply telling me that nobody is reading it. Perhaps something is reachable through
2.
by mikelevins 3mo ago
I was interested in the Steam machine, but I might not get one because I cannot log in to my Steam account, for no reason that I know. Steam's web-based process for resetting my password always gets stuck after successful completion of
3.
by mikelevins 4mo ago
In the early 1990s I worked on a couple of different projects at Apple that were done mainly in Common Lisp. When I was working on one of those, another of them hired a guy named Dave Vronay a young skater and assembly-language game-machine
4.
by mikelevins 6mo ago
It's going pretty well, though it took at least six months to get there. I'm helped by knowing the domain reasonably well, and working with a principal investigator who knows it well and who uses LLMs with caution. At this stage I
5.
by mikelevins 6mo ago
Yes, I successfully fixed it. The fix was about ten years of regular practice of Chen style Taijiquan with good instruction. It’s not a quick, cheap, or easy fix, and it’s pretty hard to find good instruction, but it solved my problem. It a
6.
by mikelevins 7mo ago
I'm finding that in several kinds of projects ranging from spare-time amusements to serious work, LLMs have become useful to me by (1) engaging me in a conversation that elicits thoughts and ideas from me more quickly than I come up wi
7.
by mikelevins 8mo ago
I've been experimenting with that from a slightly different angle: teaching Claude how to play and referee a pencil-and-paper RPG that I developed over about 20 years starting in the mid 1970s. Claude can't quite do it yet for rea
8.
by mikelevins 11mo ago
Besides programming, my hobbies are writing stories, writing and recording songs, drawing, and painting. None of them needs to cost anywhere near $3000. Any of them can cost as much as you want. Take the music hobby as an example. I have
9.
by mikelevins 11mo ago
I think the decline in UI quality is real, but I don't think the web takes all of the blame. The blame that it does take is due to a sort of mixed bag of advantages and disadvantages: web technologies make it quicker and easier to get
10.
by mikelevins 11mo ago
It's called aging. Just wait until the first time you head back down the hall from the living room to the bedroom to get the thing you forgot to bring with you, get distracted for a moment by a pet or family member, and then can't
11.
by mikelevins 1y ago
The essence of Common Lisp (and other Lisps) is the metacircular evaluator from John McCarthy's Lisp 1.5 Manual: https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Li... This is the half
12.
by mikelevins 1y ago
And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability. When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple wo
13.
by mikelevins 1y ago
At some moments there has to be a singular decision taken, such as which of two possible options to take. In such a moment some particular consciousness makes the decision, if it’s a decision made by a consciousness (though consciousness ta
14.
by mikelevins 1y ago
How do you know there aren't several different consciousnesses that all think they are Peter? How do you know they aren't just constructing whatever narrative they prefer to construct from the common pool of memory, ending up with
15.
by mikelevins 1y ago
What makes you think a singular consciousness controls the body?
16.
by mikelevins 1y ago
Or perhaps they all leave traces, but all write to the same log? And when reconstructing memory from the log, each constructed consciousness experiences itself as singular?
17.
by mikelevins 1y ago
I was mikel@apple.com for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I personally know of is Mikel Bancroft, who works at Franz,
18.
by mikelevins 1y ago
Of course the dialects are not so densely distributed in North America, and English has only been evolving in the Americas for a few hundred years, but there are a bunch of dialects, and I find them super interesting. My paternal grandparen
19.
by mikelevins 1y ago
It is, but they borrowed it from Hegel. I’m not particularly a Hegelian myself (it seems to me more like a cute trope than a law of nature), but being a Hegelian doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re also a Marxist.
20.
by mikelevins 1y ago
As a person with a graduate education in psychology who makes his living by being considered technical, who has made his living around 35% of my 37-year career as a technical writer, and whose technical writing has been described in glowing
21.
by mikelevins 1y ago
To be clear, the construction I’m endorsing is: "were available only in Lisp until recently", which is the construction that my editors typically proposed for similarly ambiguous deployments of "only". The ambiguity in t
22.
by mikelevins 1y ago
He says Lisp, rather than Common Lisp. Sure, given the context he's writing in now, maybe he means Common Lisp, but Joe Marshall was a Lisp programmer before Common Lisp existed, so he may not mean Common Lisp specifically.
23.
by mikelevins 1y ago
We need art, too. We may not know what we need it for, but we evidently need it for something. We've been making art for a really long time. We've been smearing colors onto surfaces for at least tens of thousands of years, and car
24.
by mikelevins 1y ago
It's perfectly good and idiomatic English, but it's an ambiguous formation and your suggested edit does clarify it.
25.
by mikelevins 1y ago
The author of the referenced post is one of them, though.
26.
by mikelevins 1y ago
Honestly, the short lifespan is the main disadvantage. It's made worse by how intelligent and sweet they are. My daughter's rats hurled themselves at the sides of their cage when she woke up each morning, sticking their tiny hands
27.
by mikelevins 2y ago
I had a couple of hobbies (lucid dreaming and shamanic trance drumming) that enabled me to experience big disconnects between the subjective experience of time passing and objective measurable wall-clock time. Some dreams and trances subjec
28.
by mikelevins 2y ago
You bet.
29.
by mikelevins 2y ago
I feel like use of the term "homoiconic" is misguided. It seems like an attempt to turn an incidental attribute of some Lisps into a sort of Platonic ideal. I don't think that's helpful. I think the property being discus
30.
by mikelevins 2y ago
The discussion has various conflations, omissions, and errors. It's been a long time since Dylan on the Newton was what I worked on every day, and my memory is no doubt faulty, but I'll do my best to correct a few things. "Ap

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