This is the fridge that is used in the book and movie 'The Mosquito Coast'.

The infamous Worm Tub! It always bothered me that that character (nor the author) ever gave credit to Einstein.

And because of that omission, Einstein drifted into obscurity...

But would it have run Shufflepuck Cafe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128631

I am so proud to be an Australian technologist today.

Some more

- Cambridge Centre for Computing History - https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

- London Museum for Science - Babbage's Difference Engine https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/charles...

- National Museum of Computing (near Bletchley Park Museum) https://www.tnmoc.org/

- Bletchley Park Museum https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

- Manchester Museum (Manchester Baby) https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/meet-ba...

I visited these all last year in a single trip to the UK and it was incredible. I can recommend it to anyone who has spent some time thinking about the history of computing.

Bletchley is great! I need to go again

Second the Cambridge Centre for Computing History

I'd like to call out the work from Nada Amin in this area:

Dafny and verification-aware programming, including proof by induction to verify properties of programs (for example, that an optimizer preserves semantics). Dafny Sketcher (https://github.com/namin/dafny-sketcher)

Multi-stage programming, a principled approach to writing programs that write programs, and its incarnation in multi-stage relational programming for faster synthesis of programs with holes—with the theoretical insight that a staged interpreter is a compiler, and a staged relational interpreter for a functional language can turn functions into relations running backwards for synthesis. multi-stage miniKanren (https://github.com/namin/staged-miniKanren)

Monte Carlo Tree Search, specifically the VerMCTS variant, and when this exploration-exploitation sweet spot is a good match for synthesis problems. VerMCTS (https://github.com/namin/llm-verified-with-monte-carlo-tree-...), and Holey (https://github.com/namin/holey).

Nada is the best! Don't forget the mind bending https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3158140 (not quite on topic, but in the multi-stage rabbit hole)

Very Interesting; thanks for the pointer.

Nada Amin website - https://namin.seas.harvard.edu/

Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS

Thanks for your article. The references section was interesting.

I'll add to the discussion a 2018 Nature letter: "Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0102-6

and a 2024 Nature article "Modeling hippocampal spatial cells in rodents navigating in 3D environments" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-66755-x

And a simulation in Github from 2018 https://github.com/google-deepmind/grid-cells

People have been looking at spacial awareness in neurology for quite a while. (In terms of the timeframe of recent developments in LLMs).

> Anything more complex than a few lines, you can just copy it from lib\ folder of the CD-ROM. There's a component for everything. You want to left-pad a string?

This got me.

I checked and there's also lib\str\basic\pad\right - they really thought of everything!

They started with a different, more brilliant idea, of using human brains as a giant neural net, then backed away from that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832

oh wow that's cool. I do understand why they moved away from it. Battery is waaaayyyyy easier to understand for the layman and lay-kid (me).

“Zero success” seems a bit strong. People have been able to get 96% accuracy on MINST digits on their local machine. https://norse.github.io/notebooks/mnist_classifiers.html I think it may be more accurate to say “1970s level neural net performance”. The evidence suggests it is a nascent field of research.