Ron Garret

> There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was Here are some data points I collected at the time: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.html In retrospect Snow Leopard deserves the love it eventually got, but at the time it was not entirely clear. > Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. Amen to that.

I saw it expressed by multiple people whose language of choice was Lisp but the only one that I specifically remember is Ron Garret’s recent post called Lisping at JPL Revisited[1]: All this is a reflection of the so-called Lisp curse, the fundamental problem with Lisp -- its great strength is simultaneously its great weakness. It is super-simple to customize Lisp to suit your personal tastes, and so everyone does, and so you end up with a fragmented ecosystem of little sub-languages, not all of which (to put it mildly) are particularly well designed. He doesn’t specifically say here though that this makes Lisp a solo tool. I can’t find a source for that right now unfortunately. [1] http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited.html

He followed up here: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/wealth-production-mechanisms-follo… > Producing, storing, converting, and transporting energy is what I had in mind as the missing top-level category.

I was curious, so I looked it up: the missing category is energy. https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/wealth-production-mechanisms-follo… > Producing, storing, converting, and transporting energy is what I had in mind as the missing top-level category.

There's a followup: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/wealth-production-mechanisms-follo… - in reply to the first time this was posted on HN!

For once my slightly obsessive bookmarking habits come in handy! http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/catalog-of-wealth-creation-mechanis… From this comment tree on the original discussion of pg's "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687080 The whole tree is definitely interesting in addition to the blog post linked. Also, a follow-up post a few days later: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/wealth-production-mechanisms-follow…

Wonderful piece by Ron Garret. See also his Wealth-production mechanisms: a followup post: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/wealth-production-mechanisms-follow…

Encountering it now, I think your followup article "Does it matter if the sum of all integers is -1/12?" makes an excellent case for why it does in fact matter a lot: The fact that the unsound reasoning in this particular case led to a conclusion that superficially resembles a conclusion that can also be arrived at by sound reasoning just makes it that much worse. It encourages people to think: because this mode of reasoning led to a "correct" conclusion in that case, then it will probably lead to correct conclusions in other cases. If the problem were confined to mathematics I might not make such a big deal out of it, but it's not. The problem of people uncritically accepting conclusions drawn by unsound methods of reasoning pervades our society and causes real damage. http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/01/does-it-matter-if-sum-of-all-intege…

> That depends entirely on whether or not real numbers can be physically represented in our universe. That is unknown. At least some real numbers can be. Take the construction of reals from Cauchy sequences of rationals. We can easily write a computer program that produces a sequence of rationals that converges to e. To produce later terms it would have to run for a long time on a large computer, but the program still represents e. The existence of numbers other than those which are representable as a computation on a computer is a question for philosophical debate. That is what I was referring to with: > > The existence of those real numbers depends on philosophical debates about what "existence" means. > > Yes, I address that here: > > https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html Except that you don't address that point there. You don't say anything relevant to it other than the trivial statement that existence is not a pithy value. Again, you are showing a complete lack of awareness of literally decades of historical debate within mathematics. > That is an earlier essay which is not a part of this series. The upshot is that the question is not whether or not the reals exist, but rather what ontological category the belong in. That is an open question. Of course it is open. The answer depends, among other things, on your beliefs about God. However the best that can be proven is that we have a collection of axioms which involve statements about…

Every now and then (like right now) I visit today's HN, but usually I like to follow it 48-72 hours behind (using the _past_ link). After a couple of days, the dust has settled, and you don't have to check back to see how a conversation evolved. This also keeps me from wasting time trying to get karma. I have a small list of blogs I follow. * https://www.scottaaronson.com * https://blog.plover.com * https://blog.rongarret.info * https://drewdevault.com * https://thezvi.wordpress.com * https://acoup.blog Like a barbarian, I check them every day instead of using RSS or even paying attention to their update schedules. In aggregate, I get about one new post to read every day. When I'm in the mood to know what's going on in the world, I check: * https://text.npr.org * https://lite.cnn.io I also follow the alternative weekly for a reality check on what I read here on HN. Edit: formatting

He wrote a followup to that post on his site: http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.… Main quote addressing your question: "One thing that many people found unsatisfying about my how-I-lost-my-faith posting is that I never really got around to explaining why I lost my faith other than saying that I saw people being productive in other languages. Sorry to disappoint, but that was basically it. What I think needs clarification is exactly what faith I lost. I did not lose faith in Lisp in the sense that it stopped being my favorite programming language. It didn't (notwithstanding that I switched to Python for certain things -- more on that in a moment). What I lost faith in was that Lisp was the best programming language for everyone (and everything), and that the only reason that people didn't use Lisp is that they were basically ignorant. My faith was that once people discovered Lisp then they would flock to it. Some people (hi Kenny!) still believe that. I don't."

No, I didn't follow the chain of references back to there, nor, now that I'm looking for it, do I see any such references. The reference that I did see was to here: http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/09/are-parallel-universes-real.html And that page has what I would regard as an appropriate level of skepticism for it's own position. It says things like "IMO". It says what it thinks is correct, but it recognizes that it could be wrong. (Reasonable enough, when you're saying that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is wrong. That may in fact be correct, but dogmatism is not warranted yet, and may never be.) The links you present show a paper that puts forward a theory. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong, and it seems to make some things easier to understand. But where's the experiment that tests a prediction of this paper, which other interpretations of QM can't explain? Without that, it's just a nice theory. There are lots of those.

>Huh??? When? In the blog post you linked above: >No, it isn't because it can't account for the Born rule. See: >https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html >What you cannot demonstrate experimentally, not even in principle I provided 3 ways to demonstrate it experimentally, even in principle, not sure what problem you have.

BTW I really enjoyed your recent open letter https://blog.rongarret.info/2025/01/an-open-letter-to-democratic-candi…

> Nice write-up, Thank you. > ... I wish you had expanded a bit more on this: >> "We can show that using the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory we cannot prove the product of an infinite collection of non-empty sets to be non-empty. That seems daft..." > Indeed, and it's exactly the sort of thing that you should not simply proclaim to be true with no explanation or reference. I'll see if I can hunt out an accessible reference. Problem is, I think it uses Cohen's forcing, and that's pretty tough going in any kind of detail. I might add a note ... thanks for the suggestion. > BTW, you might find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/an-intuitive-counterexample-to-axi… I've bookmarked that for when I have a coffee, biscuit, and 30 minutes. Thank you.

It reminds me of the ISIS puzzle orb, an expensive 3D puzzle that seemed to exist just to collect the personal information of people willing to spend lots of money on luxury goods. http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/12/worst-puzzle-ever.html

and cooks Once upon a time, Google treated such contributors well: https://blog.rongarret.info/2011/11/in-defense-of-google-chef.html

I hadn't seen your first post on parallel universes, [1] so I'm glad I found this one and could read both. I've often wondered how many times I've returned to a state before entanglements have occurred ('traveled back in time'), but remain oblivious because I did not retain the information gained from those entanglements. I really enjoyed reading both posts. You helped me better understand and fill in a lot of gaps I was missing even in my own theories. Thank you very much. [1] http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/09/are-parallel-universes-real.html

He used to keep a blog on what it's like to work at Google from 2005-2007. In lieu of his response, it might suffice. The archive is available below: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/12/xooglers-rises-from-ashes.html http://www.flownet.com/ron/xooglers.html

>This is particularly unfortunate since US cards also happen to have pretty poor security... I remember reading about someone (or some startup) trying to address this issue by using public key crypto to address the short-comings of credit cards in the states. The fees were supposed to be substantially lower and the major sources of fraud eliminated. But they kept hitting an invisible wall with every financial institution that was pitched the idea. It was a fascinating read (be sure to read all the parts). http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fr… Seriously: Why doesn't the US implement chip-and-pin?

Why do you want zero friction along the major axis? Linear speed of pipe movement through the bearing would be very low: not more than couple hundred feet per day. And what do you mean by zero slop? By the way, if you want to continue speculating on Hyperloop thermal expansion issue, you can join my speculations - I wrote a few comments under this blog post: http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about.h…

Part of the NSA's surveillance program was already found to be illegal and the executive branch classified the court's ruling: http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/06/court-finds-nsa-surveillance.html How screwed up is that?

More relevant than you might think... In defense of the Google chef (2011) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223595 http://blog.rongarret.info/2011/11/in-defense-of-google-chef.html

Very similar to this categorization: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/10/catalog-of-wealth-creation-mechanis…

I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion, however none of the new versions of "standard" libraries got any traction to my knowledge. Usually it's used only by the author who created it which makes their code unique in some sense, like a recent post from Ron Garret [0]. The spec is really valued by cl community and I guess I'll tell an unpopular opinion now, but I think there could be a place for an ecosystem built around one of the compilers like sbcl with all the old cruft removed and a really good all purpose standard library (similar in capabilities to the one of go for example). What that will achieve is that it will allow new developers to write the code without reading on why the things were designed is a certain way 40 years ago because of now forgotten os or hardware limitation. Similar to what was done with neovim project [0]: http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited.html

I happened to be at the 40th LISP anniversary conference 1998, with John McCarthy. Erann's JPL talk about the Remote Agent was by far the most interesting talk there, and I still consider it one of the best conference talks ever. I'd really like to see the slides being published. I also attended this famous "dinner with eric" at the same conference, actually sitting next to Eric and Erann was sitting on the other side: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/06/my-dinner-with-erik.html I liked Eric a lot, and really enjoyed his troll interactions with Xah Lee, one of the most famous trolls ever. Unfortunately he didn't know exactly who to pick a fight with. Erann was clearly the wrong target. Erann hated it. But as outsiders who stayed out of those silly fights we learned a lot, what boils in a LISPer. XML especially. Or Windows. Or special variables: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/WRQkT572RQ0/OvN9X… A very good CLL thread btw. Most of the people agreed with Eric, even if Erann's proposal was very good. (I used his old name to be able to look things up. The name change happened much later, when Erann got married and choose a better name, Ron Garret.) PS: Eric said 99 in his lugm blog post, but I'm pretty sure it was 98. http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html PPS: I found some old RA material here: https://web.archive.org/web/19991014000627/http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov… but mostly for ESL (the control language), not the actual RA simulation and…

JPL uses an organizational structure called matrix management. There are two orthogonal management structures, one organized according to expertise (the "line management") and another, almost completely independent one organized according to task (the "program office"). The program office's job was to win contracts, and the line management's job was to provide the people to work on the resulting projects. Through most of JPL's history, its contracts were large NASA missions with budgets in the billions of dollars, and so this management structure made a certain amount of sense. A vast amount of paperwork had to be generated to win even a single contract. For most of my career I worked on contracts that had already been awarded, so the inner workings of the program office were completely opaque to me (and still are to this day). By the time I got involved in a project the contract had already been awarded according to a proposal that had been generated by some mysterious process that I never fully understood, and which I never actually saw. All I knew was that my line management gave me a set of account numbers, and I wrote those account numbers down on my time card, and I got paid every other week. And this was true of most of the rank-and-file engineers that I worked with. The result of this opacity was that the incentives and reward structure for individual employees was often in direct conflict with the goals of the Lab and NASA. For example, one of the factors that…