He wrote very clear comments on lambda-the-ultimate and did great things with Guile. If anyone has references to work he published please leave a pointer to them.
Brutal reminder to contact people sooner rather than later.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1])
Death is inevitable maybe, but whether it's necessary is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.
As for the necessity of death... Plenty of sibling and nephew/niece comments say it's essentially unavoidable and necessary, others say some set of human beings could do something brilliant that would pull us out of it one day. I'd actually say both perspectives capture something important. The pragmatic knowledge of our unavoidable expiration is worth living with, and the hope to overturn death and despair is worth living for.
One metaphor for how this life feels might be that we find ourselves in a testing chamber, being asked questions about the test we're writing, for which we could not study. The good news is, it's an open book test, and we've got many years to write our answers! ...But, then the textbooks contradict each other almost as often as they agree on some important point. Every once in a while it seems as if an invigilator calls someone off, and invites another person into their seat. Also, occasionally, fistfights break out over which textbook you ought to be reading from.
Hopefully we’ll fix it one day.
User tomlord seems to exist but no comments.
It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control
Not particularly popular though; that probably had something to do with Tom's dogmatism.
He was an interesting and entertaining writer though! I had various interactions with him on irc #arch and related mailing lists.
https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...
* a c library called hackerlab
* a Scheme implementation called Pika Scheme
* a regular expression library called rx (may have been renamed to rgx)
* an embeddable VM called Furth
* a graph reduction engine/functional language runtime of some sort
hackerlab is also part of tla distributions (since the latter uses the former extensively)
hackerlab contains (some version of) rx.
I remember him pitching me on Guile in a hot tub at a conference in the early 90s.
This question motivates a different follow-up question: how should we pay attention? Our senses can be deceived, so we should also use reason and conceptual understandings to literally enrich (de-noise perhaps) our raw senses?
But some philosophies (e.g. Buddhism, or at least some variants of it) emphasizes that ‘conceptual’ understandings can distract us from reality, which is always changing.
Almost every philosophy has paradoxes — some of which have convincing resolutions. I’m hoping to hear more points of view…
I mean it's obviously sensible. In the context of binary information in a computer, for instance, we (generally) don't care about exact voltages, we group it all together as 0 or 1. And talking about genetic information, we don't (usually) care about, say, if a slightly unusual isotope has snuck in in one of the usual nucleic acids, since that "information" isn't copied in the usual way.
It's very obvious, but it's also more profound than it looks. Even for something as seemingly purely mathematical as information, there's actually teleology, assumptions about what matters, baked in every time we apply it.
Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels,[1] and opposing changes that would help move things in the right direction climate-wise, such as building more in-fill housing in Berkeley, because some other action (say, convincing people to massively reduce their energy usage) was an even better strategy in his eyes. Tom was not convinced for example that Berkeley needed any more housing.
The source of this post is a good clue; Berkeley Daily Planet mostly publishes posts from NIMBY's who don't care about the climate and don't want anything that could possibly increase the number of people who live in Berkeley (Zelda Bronstein and Toni Mester are good examples).
Having interacted with Tom on Twitter, and reading through the comments here, I'm surprised to learn that he was a valued member of an open source community and published software that people used at one point.
[1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior
But he had a lot of skill to back it up with, too. I remember when QuickCheck first appeared, someone used it to test the correctness of various regexp libraries, and Tom Lord's was one of the very few which passed.
He wasn't without controversy, even at a time when the free software culture was even less interested than today in being nice when you could be right[tm] instead.
But let's leave it at that here.
Coddling the egos of these "authorities" should be low priority considering the dire nature of the situation. If they drive us off a cliff because the constituents weren't "nice", it's still their fault.
He was also removed from occasionally appearing on Berkeley Zoning and Advisory Board because he couldn't get along with the elected official for his district.
That is not a source. That is a personal opinion reported. Politics. Bullshit. Together forever
Leaving it unspecified so you can't reliably is the issue that does not exist here.
