>A group of friends and I used to do dramatic readings of the About the Author text from the Mathematica Book, which begins thusly:
>About the Author
>Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.
>The guy wrote that himself.
>Wait, while searching for that, I see he updated it slightly in later versions:
>About the Author
>Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and a well-known scientist. He is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today, as well as one of the world's most original research scientists.
>I guess the original didn't fully express the boundless expanse of his awesomeness.
>"Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?"
He may have the data to make the argument. I suppose if anyone wanted to measure such things which really shouldn’t be measured, I bet Wolfram has a compelling case.
Interesting how when it was top-voted comment it read more as the light-hearted poking of fun which I intended (I really have no problem with Wolfram, I think he's funny). But now it has been demoted to the bottom of the thread it has started getting lots of downvotes and somehow reads (even to me) as being mean and bitter.
Curious example of how the thread position/reaction of others really primes how we receive a comment.
un-self-aware self belief is a commodity to exploit for the people who pay dang, just like our continued engagement with this forum. There is commercial value in engineering the tone of the discussion, artificially or otherwise. Your perception is the desired outcome.
I thought your comment was funny too. But alas we have tons of experience with Wolfram threads collapsing into nothing more than "wolfram wolfram wolfram" in an outraged mirroring of the very thing they're criticizing.
It's just another black hole, and one of the most trivial. And since (Wolfram being Wolfram) there are also interesting things in the submission to discuss, that's what we should focus on.
I think there's great value in walking with no distractions and it is definitely still very productive if it lets you focus and gather your thoughts. Many great thinkers in history (Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Carl Jung, doubtless many others) had walking as important part of their routine. But, there's no accounting for taste, and whatever works for you is all that really matters.
When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.
I prefer using tabs because the space constraint forces you to actually choose what's important to read. When there is no space constraint everything just gets dumped into a pile and there's no real way to prioritize what you truly do and don't want to read. You just end up with a long list of stuff you don't care enough to actually read.
At least that was my experience with Pocket. Maybe it works for some. I do the same thing with physical books. I don't keep a list of books to read. I keep a bookshelf full of stuff I'm making my way through over the years. Spending the money forces me to choose what I actually feel is important I read vs what I think I want to read.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo... (TL;DR click the button when you can't see the favicons anymore because you have so many open. It'll save them to a single page that includes all the previous tabs you've saved so you can cmd+f it if you REALLY want to find That One Thing You Had Open That One Time)
If you use that many tabs then you're better off using FireFox with the Tree Style Tabs extension [1]. Unlike the Chrome extension, it integrates properly with the browser window and you can hide the original tab strip.
I pretty much do this daily for everything. If I don’t interact with it in a year, it’s fine to throw away next house cleaning. So if I walk by, it goes out. Often “going out” means sold on Craigs list or eBay, but still.
I kind of force myself to do it, because deep down I think we are all pack rats. It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why?
I do this but don't throw the documents away. Instead I put the "buffer" into longer term storage (read: jammed into a box in my shed that can at least be searched even if it takes ages).
It turns out that, for me, there are quite a lot of things you suddenly need a year or more later that felt unimportant at the time.. insurance documents, warranties, car related documents that are useful when selling the car, documents relating to house improvements. These should probably be filed better on day one, but this is life :-D
I started following this same system, and after realizing how much sense it made, and how similar this system is to typical digital data storage system design, I concluded I should always design physical storage systems using the same mindset as data storage.
Scan, OCR and shred. I have a scan pile and a shred pile. I collect documents in front of my scanner. Once a month I'll shred the previous month's documents in the shred pile, scan the current documents, and put them in the shred pile to be shredded next month.
I do this because sometimes it's easier just having the hard-copy around, but if I haven't used it in a month, it's rare I still need the hard-copy.
Cloud vendors have OCR built in now, Amazon announced a newer product at Ignite called Textract and the Rekognition service has some capabilities there. GCP Vision and Azure have options as well. Getting the mass scan/photo is the annoying part. Some scanners also have OCR built in, or you can look at pytesseract.
Initially they are just named with the date they are scanned. Once a quarter or so I'll organize the ones I care about and the rest stay in an "unorganized" folder.
I use DEVONthink Pro Office which embeds Abbyy for OCR, along with a Fuji SnapScan.
I use JS1’s exact process, software and hardware. That is just too eerie. I however only shred once I have a full banker’s box, which I take to a commercial shredder for a big toss for $100, once or twice a year.
Most inexpensive shredders have a very low duty cycle, so they'll cut out or overheat if you shred continuously for more than a couple of minutes. That's fine if you shred a couple of documents at a time, but it's infuriating if you have a big box of documents that need to be shredded. Heavy-duty shredders capable of continuous use are bulky and heavy, which is a significant issue if you live in a small apartment.
Domestic burning of household waste is illegal where I live, I would have thought it would be illegal most places in the Western world by now. Burn paper = CO2; shred paper = more paper.
> These should probably be filed better on day one
Maybe, maybe not! I've optimized aggressively for writes (common) over reads (rare) - I don't want to even waste time deciding if I can throw something away or not, so I also keep everything that isn't super obviously recyclable immediately (mass mail, autopaid bills for less 'important' things like internet/utilities, most receipts since I don't itemize my deductions, etc.)
Anything sent to me goes into either a yearly "keep long term" (10+ years - tax docs, house/car stuff, etc.) or yearly "keep short term" (2+ years - insurance receipts etc.) folder in a filing cabinet where it can be forgotten about. Even that's over-complicated IMO - I haven't gotten rid of any folders from either category. If I need my hard copy of something, I probably need it for a specific year anyways. Sorting into more categories doesn't help much - I'd still have to remember which category my 401k documents went in (tax documents? did I have a financial folder? was my system still the same in 2012?)
Hand written notes are slightly more complicated - I actually read my notes enough to optimize reads a little by scanning them in to save me the hassle of opening up my filing cabinet. Still extremely streamlined - I symlinked the default location to a single dumping folder where I actually want them (I:\home\scans\) without needing to select anything. I keep the default sequential numbering naming scheme. I got a sheet fed scanner so I don't have to keep lifting the lid of a bed scanner. I setup a shortcut on the scanner so I press the scanner touchscreen twice ("Shortcuts", "Scan to File"), and a file appears. I don't bother with OCR - my handwriting is terrible, a computer probably can't read it, I probably can't read it.
Car documents - glovebox. I don’t even attempt to organize them anymore. Buy oil to do a change myself? Put receipt directly in glovebox, writing mileage and date on it if I am diligent. Occasionally I’ll throw away the old insurance / registration papers in the stack.
I had previously tried setting up some sort of Apple Script or folder action to do this in macOS for someone. The other day I noticed they added a, "Remove items from the Trash after 30 days" in macOS Sierra.
I do something similar and thought it was a cool reference to find another does it as well.
I don’t throw the second pail away and just put it in a storage bin, forever (so far). About once a year, I fish out a document. To me, it seems cheaper than the time I spent trying to think about how to sort or keep stuff.
How cow, this guy is the world's most organized person. I operate in the exact opposite way. The more disorganized, temporary, inconvenient, and cluttered my workspace is, the more I can ignore the outside world and focus on the abstract problem at hand.
My desk has to have exactly, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, 1 A4 5mm graph paper pad and that's it.
I used to struggle to work on a slightly cluttered desk but these days it has to be basically empty.
In terms of paperwork, it goes behind me on shelves sorted by "Important, will need soon, Important, will need later, Not important" everything else goes in the bin.
Periodically I rip the pads apart and put them through the bypass scanner on the MFP in the main office and store the resulting PDF's.
First time my partner saw my office at work she was positively shocked because at home (other than my work space) I'm a messy, "leave it where I had it last" type.
Younger I loved having all my shit around me on my desk. It was hyper natural and hyper efficient. Nowadays ... nope. It feels a bit like reading your own undocumented one night epic project .. with age you just love a bit of structure and cleanliness
Maybe that's me being in denial but I don't consider it to be shrinkage. In the recent years, it seems that motivation went from small to broad. I'm not less capable intellectually [1]. I'd say it's a decrease of energy and blind passion and more things to handle that divide attention and care. There's also a bit of energy saving dimension.. as a programmer we oughta know that a well maintained structure avoid worst-case complexity.. same goes for your drawers :)
[1] I'm actually a lot smarter than my college self, I tested few years ago when wildly sick trying to do proofs from scratch on stuff I knew nothing prior (theorems on fibonacci series). And after a bit of sweating and pencil twisting I managed to have insights and solutions. So it's not a linear decrease in brain power, it's more like a rotation or shapeshift.
Bypass tray is the auto feeder on the top of the big copiers, ours can also scam to mailbox via that so it chews through 50 pages and emails it before I walk back to my office.
I pile stuff up neatly left to right and periodically (usually last hour on friday when brain is done, go through it and either move or bin it).
The goal isn't to have everything meticulously organised (that becomes a task that takes more time than you save, it's yak shaving for me at least) but to be able to find it quickly (few minutes) if I need to and crucially out of my sight line, at my desk it's completely out of view.
That reminds me of when I attended a "Getting Things Done" ((C) (R) (TM)) seminar, sponsored by work. The speaker spent hours explaining how to organise the to-do-lists and calendars and how to label tasks (can be done on the road, calls, can be done offline, importance vs urgency, ...) and how to prioritise them, a really elaborate system, the whole shebang. And it results in the one task you should be doing right now.
He presented it, looked content, and invited questions, when someone asked, "ok, suppose now I know what I should be doing now. But what happens if I just don't feel like it? What then?". The presenter was dumbfounded, seemed confused, and had basically no answer (that I remember).
Completely unqualified thought, but I think it has to do with how you organize information in your brain. Are you spatially oriented or do you think in lists?
I'm a chemist, and I definitely think spatially. Creating images of physical objects in my head and reorienting them is a major part of my job, and the "memory palace" has been the most valuable memory tool I've found.
I can't think if there's an extra set of papers on my desk. I tend to organize my tasks using the physical space on my desk, so the most urgent item is about 3 inches from my keyboard at any time. I start to get anxious if too many things pile onto my desk without intentionally organizing them into priorities.
“One, for example, initiates the process for me doing an unscheduled livestream: it messages our 24/7 system monitoring team so they can take my feed, broadcast it, and monitor responses.”
Most interesting to me here is his "walking outside" work setup (fairly simple, as he says, like you're selling popcorn). Because apparently walking outside reduced his resting heart rate more than just relying on a treadmill.
One could imagine any number of reasons: air quality, sunshine, a calming effect from seeing nature or variety in peripheral vision, difference in terrain providing stimuli, strength benefits of carrying the apparatus (it sounds like he often carried stuff even before working outside)
The benefits of the outdoors are pretty widely reported. And it doesn't sound like he went outside much of his own inclination.
Say what you want about Wolfram, he's a brilliant guy. Brilliant people often have strange quirks and egos, but that's just a part of being them. Also, this account has only posted links about Wolfram. Is it him or an assistant?
Linus Torvalds is quirky and has an ego. Steven Wolfram is one of the most arrogant people I've ever read. It comes through in virtually every aspect of his writing.
It's understood that people who are exceptional smart aren't always socially pleasant, but Wolfram is trying to raise that bar by quite a bit.
Could he be autistic or something? Usually people would know how they would be perceived if they were well socialized. In any case, it doesn't bother me. He thinks his work is of the utmost importance and wants to be in the annals of mathematics alongside Newton, Einstein, etc. He won't be, but let him have his fun. He's at least doing interesting things, unlike these unbearable celebrities that are incredibly dull, but everyone fawns over. I hereby transfer the right of ego from the mainstream celebs to the scientists.
In an elite hackers setting, in an offsite camp in the Santa Cruz mountains long ago, this Wolfram character bolted around like a bull in a china shop, finding people to give orders to, basically, and blowing his own horn at many opportunities. It was quite a contrast to the intense hack sessions and co-teaching that was going on at the same time, while serious nerds did what serious nerds do... The news that he screwed dozens of programmers out of the proceeds of Mathematica (1990), exactly matched the in-person behavior. This was before the net was the way it is.. ymmv
Watching his livestreams, he seems like a reasonable guy focused on real work designing a programming language and software. Not sure what you're alluding to in 1990, guess it's been disappeared from the web.
Who cares if he’s arrogant? Linux is a mean bastard and Stallman is a weirdo who eats stuff of his feet during interviews. None of these people are well balanced great guys you’d take to the pub to watch football, but that’s not why their impressive in what they do and accomplish.
Linus is mean, but aware of it and actively working on it. Stallman is harmlessly weird. Wolfram thinks he's the smartest person on the planet when he's objectively not.
You are correct in that these are not the reasons they are impressive. It's the reason (in Linus and Wolframs case) they aren't particularly good people.
He's probably referring to a regular mouse that you move around your desk. As opposed to a touchpad or static mouse with a large sphere you spin around with your thumb.
Did you know even the old-school computer mouse uses light to work?
The new school just don't have a mechanical component of a ball and two rollers which spin two separate "gears" which blocks light and then math to figure out the horizontal change + vertical change.
I found that pretty neat when I learned. (I'm old enough to remember the pains of using a gunked up ball mouse.)
A Logitech wired optical mouse. At the very end of the article, he gives links to all of the gadgets and software he uses. (Actually, I like that he did it that way, rather then polluting the article with lots of products mentions -- other than his own product, of course.) The mouse info I've copied verbatim below. Interestingly he uses one with a cord -- maybe he had driver issues with wireless mice.
Mouse
Logitech wired optical mouse
[Though I’ve considered more modern and more numerously buttoned mice]
I have somewhere between 5–20% comprehension of what they're talking about in a technical sense but found the conversation from 4m31s (as you've linked) to ~10m45s utterly fascinating.
you know what's insane about that video? the CEO of a 100 (200?) person software company is writing docs. but then again i'm not surprised that wolfram is a micromanager.
The article says 800. I can't imagine what it would be like, to be part of a machine of 800 people basically set up to cater to the whims of one overlord.
Every company is set up to cater to the whims of one overlord. Then there is a group who can change the overlord. Most effective companies are dictatorships with a fairly reasonable dictator.
I don't think I necessarily agree. While having one person who has complete control and effectively focuses a business to the correct decisions and technical goals is super effective, part of that effectiveness is getting the rest of the business on the same mindset as you and giving employees room to add their technical nous to the work.
The criticism leveled (which I do not actually any insight to the truth of) is that essentially people have to follow his "whims" and are micromanaged, which does not bring out the best of employees and can be very stifling.
But that said, I don't know the truth of that criticism.
The way you say it is like you're saying that Documentation should be second class, not just that it is anyway. Keep in mind that the software in this particular case, is software used mostly for the API, so the Documentation is front and centre.
Very much so. The documentation is the specification, so it's not merely writing the documentation, but writing the specification.
Another interesting tidbit that plays into this...the syntax coloring is programmatically derived from the documentation (yet another consequence of the documentation being the specification). This wasn't mentioned in the meeting because most or all of the participants already knew this, but it's an important part of the subtext of the discussion.
Speaking as an insider who wasn't present at that particular meeting, but has been present in some other live-streamed meetings.
Attention to detail is not micro-managing. In fact, it's very very good thing and you should have respect for people at CEO level having this kind of care, understanding and passion for their products. It's kind of thing that makes Steve Jobs, the Steve Jobs.
I think this video highlights as a leader being the 'bad guy' in a meeting because they are demanding excellence to a specific vision/goal and their subordinate's output isn't meeting their expectations.
There are no personal attacks, just critiques on the thought process, output and plan (or lack of planning), all of that is fair game. The dev(?) even admits at ~25:40 that they should be taking notes and fixing what is pointed out.
There's a bit of passive aggressive hierarchy conflict at play but it doesn't go that far IMO. Tone mostly goes back to relaxed ... could be friendlier but alas.
Not really. People can have ideal ideas that don't match their own lived reality. And the Newton / Hooke feud is probably more interesting and relevant, than the Leibniz one (given that was entirely of Newton's making).
If you google “Newton” Google attributes it to Issac Newton on the side bar, seems like it must be wrongly attributed unfortunately. Thanks for correction.
"Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done)."
So they're not paying attention because he enjoys having excess people on calls and wasting their time.
Sounds like torture. The CEO wants you on the call, probably won't need you, and you're supposed to feel comfortable disengaging when he's berating coworkers about a missing third argument in a function's documentation.
If that's what he's arranging, then its his own self-created dysfunction.
The people on that particular call didn't even seem to know what they were talking about half the time though. It's entirely possible that they're both asked to passively participate in oversubscribed meetings and neglecting to do their jobs creating further frustration.
First, it's awesome that these are live-streamed and publicised.
Second, I didn't hear anything unreasonable in that meeting. SW has a reputation for ego, but honestly this particular extract just sounds like frustration with buggy/messy documentation. I mean, the fact that the CEO is personally going through documentation is telling in itself.
I agree. If that seems ego driven, then you shouldn't be working in a professional environment. It's not even so much frustration as just getting to the bottom of the issue and resolving it.
I don't know why you're bending over backwards to excuse it.
It's toxic. He's being nasty. He could say everything he does without the snapping, blowing up at questions, dramatic sighs, 'oh boy's. It's all so incredibly passively aggressive.
And that's actually the worst bit! It's hard to call him out when he's not explicitly calling them 'idiots' or something. It's like it's some kind of plausible deniability of being horrible to people.
But I don't know these people and maybe they're all fine with it. And Wolfram is paying the bills so it's his style if he wants.
I only watched a few minutes but I didn't see anything objectionable. I was getting annoyed at the people he was talking to. It seems to me, you either know what the answer is so state the answer and the evidence, or you don't, so state that you don't know and express your plan to find an answer and return with it.
Once I hurt my back, had to drive for three hours, park far away, hadn't eaten all day, and when I stopped at a restaurant, having hobbled there with my bad back from a distant parking spot, the hostess was absent for ~5 minutes and when she finally showed up she was distracted and talking to other people multiple times while I tried to get an answer to how long the wait would be and if I could get served. So far, I've lived a fairly easy life, and I've always tried to be polite and even keeled - but in that moment of discomfort, tiredness, hunger, and disrespect, I genuinely wanted to be rude to the hostess.
The point of the digression is, I imagine that's what being the CEO is like, only it's not once. It's every day. And the more committed you are, the more hours you subject yourself to this kind of thing. You just want things well documented, bugs fixed, quality high, you want people to answer questions etc. When you've been dealing with this all day for decades - I can see how easy it would be to be a bit impolite.
Rather than admit that the red, undocumented third parameter was a mistake they seemed to make all sorts of rationalizations for why it’s wrong (“It’s new”, “I thought it was fixed”, etc.) rather than just saying “You’re right, that’s a bug. We’re fixing it.” Why were the employees waffling around the fact that it actually is a problem? Calling them out on their justifications and excuses isn’t being toxic or nasty, it’s called being a professional who takes pride in the work they put out to the public.
Either it's a flaw in the engineers (lack of social skills to admit a mistake accurately) or in the working climate (fear of unreasonable repercussion make the engineers defer disclosure of failure). I'm undecided. Eitherway it seemed surprisingly inefficient way of communicating.
Can you link to a bit you consider toxic and nasty? I went in expecting to hear him sound like he was reading out a Linus Torvalds email but I couldn't find anything like that.
It's not professional for a mentor to take out his frustration on employees. I'm not saying I never get frustrated with poor quality work, but I don't see it as helpful taking out that frustration on someone. Better things I can do: 1. Figure out how to inspire quality with positive reinforcement. 2. Eliminate blockers to quality. 3. Automate quality checks so I'm not even reviewing code unless it already passes a certain QA level. Sometimes people are broken and that's fine. Let them go instead of beating up on them. But very often it is the processes that are broken and you should be fixing those instead of trying to fix people.
Interesting stuff, here's a recent one, if anyone is interested they are reviewing some new blockchain related methods and they walkthrough the methods. Not everything is clear to everyone, it's refreshing to see a very smart, CEO level person, logically step through new concepts/code.
This is crazy. He is the CEO of an 800 person company and the people talking to him sound like they are completely unprepared for the conversation. Of course the third argument needs to be fucking documented! Their response should have been "yes, this is a clear bad, we'll fix the documentation by tomorrow's meeting." Not just sit silently on the call while the CEO has to go do it themselves.
The people there sound like I did on my thesis progress reports after I had been out drinking with friends. As much as I was ready to hate on Wolfram given his reputation, he's completely justified about his complaints, and he's being professional about it.
I see nothing "toxic" about this conversation, as others have mentioned. He is completely focused on the work; there are no personal attacks. The main interlocutor sounds like he is taking things personally.
Frankly a good CEO would not tolerate this bullshit or promote people like this. My guess is people there are promoted on technical merit alone which means that there must be a lot of smart fucking people there but with obviously poor task execution skills.
It's obvious that these people are not stupid and understand that interfaces need to be documented. They are instead confused. I've had micromanagers like SW before, and have been confused many times at the state of something precisely because the micromanager took it upon themselves to "do it themselves" on the fly, just like SW did here.
Admitting that it's clearly bad and saying you'll fix it by tomorrow would be a neverending pursuit, because the micromanager's meddling is constant and touches everything.
No doubt somebody else will now be confused that this third parameter is suddenly documented when it was a task delegated to them, and somebody else is confused because they were told to deprecate the parameter.
The difference between a micromanager and a detail-oriented manager is the micromanager tells you how to do it, the detail-oriented manager tells you what to do. I only see detail orientation here. Even the string to describe the API was written by Wolfram even after he asked for suggestions. I’d expect them to jump in and commit to fixing it themselves.
Oh boy. If people think this is an example of being unacceptably direct and gruff, I need to reexamine the way I talk during technical discussions.
I've always thought it best to just cut straight to the core of issues like he's doing. I suppose it's a jerk move to corner people into admitting they're wrong even when it's obvious. Maybe there's a nicer jedi-mind way to do it.
He was a child genius, known as a bit too egotistical today, but he has made genuine contributions to the field. NKOS has a nice narrative at least, and might be worth reading as a pop sci work, but isn't very scientifically noteworthy in itself.
Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used, especially since you effectively have to use their built-in editor that doesn't even have multiple undo. Of course, it is the least-worst symbolic system out there currently. But, it's not like lisp wouldn't have developed similar capabilities if Mathematica didn't come around.
That's a more direct way of making my point ;-) I don't recall seeing that Pitman post before... good stuff. Interesting to see that Wolfram always had his <cough> confidence.
I mean, I wouldn't make a website with it, but for computational/mathematical code I'd choose Mathematica and its editor over a Lisp language any day, even if it's just for the syntax (though it most certainly is not). Some of us actually find it easier to understand and write math when it looks like math and not just a wall of parentheses or ASCII art.
Thank you! That's a great review - long, well-informed, savage yet trying to be fair; totally accurate as far as I could tell, although the criticisms seemed far weaker in places. Lots of good links too. ... 168 other long reviews by Cosma Shalizi on that site, and a lot of other stuff. I hadn't heard the name before, thanks again.
I thought A New Kind of Science was wonderful. It's a deep dive into cellular automata by a very creative, systematic and productive mind. He doesn't succeed in remaking physics with these models, but he does succeed in demonstrating that the natural world is full of vast computational potential that emerges everywhere from simple interactions. It's a vision of an awesomely fecund ordinary reality.
I loved the book as well. I found it exceptionally well written, researched. The content was eye-opening and the author was . This is the first I notice that there's so much discontent with it. I'm not sure where it's coming from.
Edit: actually, I'm understating things. I found not only his central ideas very noteworthy, but how he managed to portray the historical development of mainstream science as largely random (as opposed to the, now silly, idea I may have had that today's science is somehow "optimal") was great and a positive influence on my outlooks, I'd say.
I think a lot of the discontent is that (reportedly, I have not read it) he seems to present the material as 1. largely his original work, and 2. revolutionary, while the ideas may be interesting and well presented, neither of those things are actually true.
NKOS is probably the (or at least one of the) defining works on cellular automata and the thought around/behind them, at least when it was written. It will likely be as interesting as that sounds to you.
Well, he started Wolfram Research. You should try their products if you haven't. If you have, just try to imagine how you'd make something like Wolfram Mathematica or Wolfram Alpha.
> Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?
The best thing about ANKOS were the footnotes. The footnotes/appendices could have made a good popular book on the history and relationship of computation and physics, except for all of the gag-reflex-inducing Mathematica self-promotion. Here is an example from the first footnote I clicked on just now:
"But in the so-called lambda calculus of Alonzo Church from around 1930 what were instead used were pure functions... of just the kind now familiar from Mathematica."
I really like the personal homepage idea. Reminds me of the iGoogle days.
Anyone know any products / tools to create a simple one consisting of essentially an organized collection of links? I guess any static site generator could work, but would be nice to have an out of the box theme and can show RSS Feeds.
Wow, I'd love something like this, but that would incorporate my social media into background stream of super-compacted, mostly-text events. Think of being on a Slack channel (in Compact mode), where the only things that are posted are messages from your Facebook timeline, e-mail, HN stories, replies to your HN comments, new IM threads etc. Also, you could pin stuff you care about, and with one click/keyboard press, everything else gets cleared.
Alas, I don't think Facebook in particular allows for such deep integration with one's feed - because yes, that would essentially replace me the facebook website/app.
I just started using Notion (https://notion.so) for organizing to-do lists, links, notes, and reminders. It's simple yet amazingly flexible. I highly recommend it.
Doesn't have a theme or ability to show RSS feeds but... I built an open-source Chrome extension I call SwiftTab for creating a custom page of links from my Bookmarks Bar (or a folder named "_Swift") https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/swifttab/poikmgend...
Is there a good open source database of people and things like the pBase Wolfram mentions in this article? I've been thinking of hosting an instance of Monica myself.
I can see why some people think this guy is a bit much (Wolfram-branded Pilot Precise Grip pens, Wolfram Cloud, Wolfram Language) but this is a very thorough and interesting article. He even admits the embarrassing stuff: Apple Mac Pro.
Wolfram is a notorious misogynist. I recall hearing complaints how badly his staff was treated. From finding socks to finding pencils, this story is yet one of many highly highly distorted one.
>The big empty spaces are when I’m asleep, and, yes, as I’ve changed projects—e.g. finishing A New Kind of Science in 2002—my sleep habits have changed; I’m also now trying an experiment of going to sleep earlier
I did not see in the article, but I wonder if all of those times are in the same timezone and if those times are based on UTC or his actual timezone, I did not see data on that but could have missed it.
It's his actual timezone - EST (Concord, Massachusetts).
>The first thing one sees from this plot is that, yes, I’ve been busy. And for more than 20 years, I’ve been sending emails throughout my waking day, albeit with a little dip around dinner time. The big gap each day comes from when I was asleep. And for the last decade, the plot shows I’ve been pretty consistent, going to sleep around 3am ET, and getting up around 11am (yes, I’m something of a night owl). (The stripe in summer 2009 is a trip to Europe.)
I have a few of those for different uses: mini toiletry bag, extra toiletry bag, mini electronics bag, extra electronics bag, travel laptop bag, world adapter bag. I use zip locks or water-resistant roll-top bags to compress better in a 25L "personal item/carry-on" bag.
My camping gear is organized the same way: cold weather gear bag, cookery bag, bug spray/sunscreen/soap bag, medical bag, utility tool bag, hydration bladder, tent bag, sleeping bag, burning man costume bag, burning man crafting bag, mini cocktail kit, ...
I just don’t know about hiking with a laptop. Down time is also productive time. That said, it is interesting how he organizes the digital assets of his life.
A little off topic: I subscribed to use the Wolfram Language a couple of years ago and really liked the integrated documentation, and the capabilities built in for just about everything. What was a turnoff was the very slow cycle time between entering code to be evaluated and seeing results. I signed up for a less expensive level of service (about $20/month) and that may have been the problem. I would like the speed of, for example, Common Lisp repl development with the power of the Wolfram Language.
Rather than throwing even more money at Wolfram, it would be even better to put up a fund (maybe a crowdsourced campaign) to buy the rights to Macsyma and PDEase to release them under the GPL.
> Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world.
Which is mostly pulled in from public data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, US census and economic data, US Geological Survey data, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase, which in 2016 transferred its database to the Wikidata project (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page). So once again, instead of throwing more undeserved money at Wolfram for appropriating other people's work, the better alternative is to work on integrations of Wikidata into Common Lisp, SciPy, Org mode, etc. and contribute to Wikidata itself.
Isn't it at least conceivable that there are a small number of people who can just be mentally productive all the time? Considering what he has accomplished in his life, if such a person could exist, wouldn't he be one of them?
I think it depends on person. Also Cal Newport, though advocating the concept of "stopping the work day at 5 p.m.", also strongly advocates that one should not mindlessly spend the time "after work", but should engage in other types of productive activities such as reading books. He quotes Bennett, who said that the human mind doesn't tire except for when sleeping, and all it needs is switching to a different type of intellectual activity, which I find to be very reasonable.
My personal experience has been that whenever I'm varying the type of productive activities throughout the day, I get a lot done, feel satisfied, stay sharp and productive. Whenever I do too much mindless entertainment such as playing too much of one video game or browsing reddit, I end up not feeling very well the next day whatsoever.
So in the case of Wolfram maybe he checks email or does some type of activity that is not the same as the type of activity he does while at the desk, which I think can be totally conceivable and productive.
I just realized upon reading this that I might have car sickness too (and that it's a real thing). It's worse if I sit at the back, usually its a concoction of strange feelings, mild nausea, weird pangs of pain...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 419 ms ] thread>A group of friends and I used to do dramatic readings of the About the Author text from the Mathematica Book, which begins thusly:
>About the Author
>Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.
>The guy wrote that himself.
>Wait, while searching for that, I see he updated it slightly in later versions:
>About the Author
>Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and a well-known scientist. He is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today, as well as one of the world's most original research scientists.
>I guess the original didn't fully express the boundless expanse of his awesomeness.
>"Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?"
http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_O...
It honestly took me a while to realize the article wasn't an April fools post!
I am still upvoting the submission for its comedic value.
Those who haven't had enough can find their fill at https://hn.algolia.com/.
Curious example of how the thread position/reaction of others really primes how we receive a comment.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's just another black hole, and one of the most trivial. And since (Wolfram being Wolfram) there are also interesting things in the submission to discuss, that's what we should focus on.
When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.
At least that was my experience with Pocket. Maybe it works for some. I do the same thing with physical books. I don't keep a list of books to read. I keep a bookshelf full of stuff I'm making my way through over the years. Spending the money forces me to choose what I actually feel is important I read vs what I think I want to read.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl... (tl;dr view tabs on the left with some visual hierarchy to indicate what came from where)
and
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo... (TL;DR click the button when you can't see the favicons anymore because you have so many open. It'll save them to a single page that includes all the previous tabs you've saved so you can cmd+f it if you REALLY want to find That One Thing You Had Open That One Time)
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Accumulating tabs works for me. I always end up working back through them because they are so visible.
I kind of force myself to do it, because deep down I think we are all pack rats. It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why?
Um, money?
It turns out that, for me, there are quite a lot of things you suddenly need a year or more later that felt unimportant at the time.. insurance documents, warranties, car related documents that are useful when selling the car, documents relating to house improvements. These should probably be filed better on day one, but this is life :-D
I do this because sometimes it's easier just having the hard-copy around, but if I haven't used it in a month, it's rare I still need the hard-copy.
I use DEVONthink Pro Office which embeds Abbyy for OCR, along with a Fuji SnapScan.
Better than a cheap shredder by miles, and some nice heat that makes it pleasant in wintertime. :)
Maybe, maybe not! I've optimized aggressively for writes (common) over reads (rare) - I don't want to even waste time deciding if I can throw something away or not, so I also keep everything that isn't super obviously recyclable immediately (mass mail, autopaid bills for less 'important' things like internet/utilities, most receipts since I don't itemize my deductions, etc.)
Anything sent to me goes into either a yearly "keep long term" (10+ years - tax docs, house/car stuff, etc.) or yearly "keep short term" (2+ years - insurance receipts etc.) folder in a filing cabinet where it can be forgotten about. Even that's over-complicated IMO - I haven't gotten rid of any folders from either category. If I need my hard copy of something, I probably need it for a specific year anyways. Sorting into more categories doesn't help much - I'd still have to remember which category my 401k documents went in (tax documents? did I have a financial folder? was my system still the same in 2012?)
Hand written notes are slightly more complicated - I actually read my notes enough to optimize reads a little by scanning them in to save me the hassle of opening up my filing cabinet. Still extremely streamlined - I symlinked the default location to a single dumping folder where I actually want them (I:\home\scans\) without needing to select anything. I keep the default sequential numbering naming scheme. I got a sheet fed scanner so I don't have to keep lifting the lid of a bed scanner. I setup a shortcut on the scanner so I press the scanner touchscreen twice ("Shortcuts", "Scan to File"), and a file appears. I don't bother with OCR - my handwriting is terrible, a computer probably can't read it, I probably can't read it.
helpdesk empties deleted items
Hey! I keep stuff in there!
I don’t throw the second pail away and just put it in a storage bin, forever (so far). About once a year, I fish out a document. To me, it seems cheaper than the time I spent trying to think about how to sort or keep stuff.
My desk has to have exactly, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, 1 A4 5mm graph paper pad and that's it.
I used to struggle to work on a slightly cluttered desk but these days it has to be basically empty.
In terms of paperwork, it goes behind me on shelves sorted by "Important, will need soon, Important, will need later, Not important" everything else goes in the bin.
Periodically I rip the pads apart and put them through the bypass scanner on the MFP in the main office and store the resulting PDF's.
First time my partner saw my office at work she was positively shocked because at home (other than my work space) I'm a messy, "leave it where I had it last" type.
[1] I'm actually a lot smarter than my college self, I tested few years ago when wildly sick trying to do proofs from scratch on stuff I knew nothing prior (theorems on fibonacci series). And after a bit of sweating and pencil twisting I managed to have insights and solutions. So it's not a linear decrease in brain power, it's more like a rotation or shapeshift.
Beats doing it by hand.
This would be a Nigerian scanner then? ;)
“Dear sir or madam, I have come in possession of a very valuable document scan which I am unable to get out of the country...”
;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnuOa7tDco
The goal isn't to have everything meticulously organised (that becomes a task that takes more time than you save, it's yak shaving for me at least) but to be able to find it quickly (few minutes) if I need to and crucially out of my sight line, at my desk it's completely out of view.
Are you sure you wouldn't like to try a plain sketch pad rather than graph paper with all those nasty lines?
He presented it, looked content, and invited questions, when someone asked, "ok, suppose now I know what I should be doing now. But what happens if I just don't feel like it? What then?". The presenter was dumbfounded, seemed confused, and had basically no answer (that I remember).
I'm a chemist, and I definitely think spatially. Creating images of physical objects in my head and reorienting them is a major part of my job, and the "memory palace" has been the most valuable memory tool I've found.
I can't think if there's an extra set of papers on my desk. I tend to organize my tasks using the physical space on my desk, so the most urgent item is about 3 inches from my keyboard at any time. I start to get anxious if too many things pile onto my desk without intentionally organizing them into priorities.
Must be nice!
The benefits of the outdoors are pretty widely reported. And it doesn't sound like he went outside much of his own inclination.
It's understood that people who are exceptional smart aren't always socially pleasant, but Wolfram is trying to raise that bar by quite a bit.
;-)
By the way, he is in the annals of particle physics...
You are correct in that these are not the reasons they are impressive. It's the reason (in Linus and Wolframs case) they aren't particularly good people.
You should have to suffer brilliant assholes.
That was definitive. How is he objectively not? How are you defining the smartest person on the planet. By what criteria?
The new school just don't have a mechanical component of a ball and two rollers which spin two separate "gears" which blocks light and then math to figure out the horizontal change + vertical change.
I found that pretty neat when I learned. (I'm old enough to remember the pains of using a gunked up ball mouse.)
See this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_optical_mouse.jp...
That's not a regular mouse pad, it's a special red/blue/silver grid detected by a laser in the mouse.
Edit: At least on a Sun workstation
Mouse
Logitech wired optical mouse
[Though I’ve considered more modern and more numerously buttoned mice]
https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Optical-Wired-Mouse-Black/dp...
This is particularly candid moment I happen to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGjvFyRk_4I&feature=youtu.be...
edit: I wasn't aware of the negative opinions regarding his ego, but from listening to this meeting I can say they aren't unsubstantiated!
> Usually we (which quite often actually means me) will write documentation for a function before the function is implemented.
The criticism leveled (which I do not actually any insight to the truth of) is that essentially people have to follow his "whims" and are micromanaged, which does not bring out the best of employees and can be very stifling.
But that said, I don't know the truth of that criticism.
Another interesting tidbit that plays into this...the syntax coloring is programmatically derived from the documentation (yet another consequence of the documentation being the specification). This wasn't mentioned in the meeting because most or all of the participants already knew this, but it's an important part of the subtext of the discussion.
Speaking as an insider who wasn't present at that particular meeting, but has been present in some other live-streamed meetings.
There are no personal attacks, just critiques on the thought process, output and plan (or lack of planning), all of that is fair game. The dev(?) even admits at ~25:40 that they should be taking notes and fixing what is pointed out.
> Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
That does not sound like Newton ar all.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/07/18/tact/
His staff didn't even seem engaged in the subject.
"Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done)."
So they're not paying attention because he enjoys having excess people on calls and wasting their time.
Sounds like torture. The CEO wants you on the call, probably won't need you, and you're supposed to feel comfortable disengaging when he's berating coworkers about a missing third argument in a function's documentation.
It seriously doesn't sound like he's happy when he snaps at them to unmute and start responding!
The people on that particular call didn't even seem to know what they were talking about half the time though. It's entirely possible that they're both asked to passively participate in oversubscribed meetings and neglecting to do their jobs creating further frustration.
Second, I didn't hear anything unreasonable in that meeting. SW has a reputation for ego, but honestly this particular extract just sounds like frustration with buggy/messy documentation. I mean, the fact that the CEO is personally going through documentation is telling in itself.
It's toxic. He's being nasty. He could say everything he does without the snapping, blowing up at questions, dramatic sighs, 'oh boy's. It's all so incredibly passively aggressive.
And that's actually the worst bit! It's hard to call him out when he's not explicitly calling them 'idiots' or something. It's like it's some kind of plausible deniability of being horrible to people.
But I don't know these people and maybe they're all fine with it. And Wolfram is paying the bills so it's his style if he wants.
Have you ever dealt with bad docs? Seriously!!!
Once I hurt my back, had to drive for three hours, park far away, hadn't eaten all day, and when I stopped at a restaurant, having hobbled there with my bad back from a distant parking spot, the hostess was absent for ~5 minutes and when she finally showed up she was distracted and talking to other people multiple times while I tried to get an answer to how long the wait would be and if I could get served. So far, I've lived a fairly easy life, and I've always tried to be polite and even keeled - but in that moment of discomfort, tiredness, hunger, and disrespect, I genuinely wanted to be rude to the hostess.
The point of the digression is, I imagine that's what being the CEO is like, only it's not once. It's every day. And the more committed you are, the more hours you subject yourself to this kind of thing. You just want things well documented, bugs fixed, quality high, you want people to answer questions etc. When you've been dealing with this all day for decades - I can see how easy it would be to be a bit impolite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYcH0IngWxs
I see nothing "toxic" about this conversation, as others have mentioned. He is completely focused on the work; there are no personal attacks. The main interlocutor sounds like he is taking things personally.
Admitting that it's clearly bad and saying you'll fix it by tomorrow would be a neverending pursuit, because the micromanager's meddling is constant and touches everything.
No doubt somebody else will now be confused that this third parameter is suddenly documented when it was a task delegated to them, and somebody else is confused because they were told to deprecate the parameter.
I've always thought it best to just cut straight to the core of issues like he's doing. I suppose it's a jerk move to corner people into admitting they're wrong even when it's obvious. Maybe there's a nicer jedi-mind way to do it.
Is he legit?
Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica
I would consider that legitimacy.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/BUxXH76CYdc/I...
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/program/wolframsc...
Have you used Maple? I had to for a General Relativity course, and far preferred Mathematica and its syntax.
A New Kind of Science is part of where Wolfram gets his bad rap...just read the Amazon reviews to get an idea.
> Is he legit?
Yes - but he's amazingly full of himself and incredibly self-serving.
> Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?
Not really, no.
Edit: actually, I'm understating things. I found not only his central ideas very noteworthy, but how he managed to portray the historical development of mainstream science as largely random (as opposed to the, now silly, idea I may have had that today's science is somehow "optimal") was great and a positive influence on my outlooks, I'd say.
The best thing about ANKOS were the footnotes. The footnotes/appendices could have made a good popular book on the history and relationship of computation and physics, except for all of the gag-reflex-inducing Mathematica self-promotion. Here is an example from the first footnote I clicked on just now:
"But in the so-called lambda calculus of Alonzo Church from around 1930 what were instead used were pure functions... of just the kind now familiar from Mathematica."
https://wolframscience.com/nks/notes-11-12--lambda-calculus/
The whole book is full of things like that.
Anyone know any products / tools to create a simple one consisting of essentially an organized collection of links? I guess any static site generator could work, but would be nice to have an out of the box theme and can show RSS Feeds.
Alas, I don't think Facebook in particular allows for such deep integration with one's feed - because yes, that would essentially replace me the facebook website/app.
https://github.com/codemac/config/tree/master/chrome
Currently, I have a cronjob that greps my todo files in org mode, and puts the currently scheduled task below a picture of General Sherman.
Source code is @ https://github.com/joshbuchea/chrome-ext-swifttab
Honestly, that's just swag. I must have a box of them, plus 10 t-shirts, cardboard spikeys, bags from various conferences.
https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2012/03/outgoin...
EDIT: oh, NKS. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+wolfram+nks+release...
>The big empty spaces are when I’m asleep, and, yes, as I’ve changed projects—e.g. finishing A New Kind of Science in 2002—my sleep habits have changed; I’m also now trying an experiment of going to sleep earlier
>The first thing one sees from this plot is that, yes, I’ve been busy. And for more than 20 years, I’ve been sending emails throughout my waking day, albeit with a little dip around dinner time. The big gap each day comes from when I was asleep. And for the last decade, the plot shows I’ve been pretty consistent, going to sleep around 3am ET, and getting up around 11am (yes, I’m something of a night owl). (The stripe in summer 2009 is a trip to Europe.)
https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti...
My camping gear is organized the same way: cold weather gear bag, cookery bag, bug spray/sunscreen/soap bag, medical bag, utility tool bag, hydration bladder, tent bag, sleeping bag, burning man costume bag, burning man crafting bag, mini cocktail kit, ...
A little off topic: I subscribed to use the Wolfram Language a couple of years ago and really liked the integrated documentation, and the capabilities built in for just about everything. What was a turnoff was the very slow cycle time between entering code to be evaluated and seeing results. I signed up for a less expensive level of service (about $20/month) and that may have been the problem. I would like the speed of, for example, Common Lisp repl development with the power of the Wolfram Language.
I worked with the Knowledge Graph at Google and Wolfram Language seems like an easy to use personal version of that.
I would be happy to pay for it, forever, if it were more responsive.
Which is mostly pulled in from public data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, US census and economic data, US Geological Survey data, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase, which in 2016 transferred its database to the Wikidata project (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page). So once again, instead of throwing more undeserved money at Wolfram for appropriating other people's work, the better alternative is to work on integrations of Wikidata into Common Lisp, SciPy, Org mode, etc. and contribute to Wikidata itself.
Something to consider starting. A quicklisp library that caches wikidata, etc. and provides a uniform interface.
...or maybe it's not productive and not being productive all the time is a good thing for your mental health.
My personal experience has been that whenever I'm varying the type of productive activities throughout the day, I get a lot done, feel satisfied, stay sharp and productive. Whenever I do too much mindless entertainment such as playing too much of one video game or browsing reddit, I end up not feeling very well the next day whatsoever.
So in the case of Wolfram maybe he checks email or does some type of activity that is not the same as the type of activity he does while at the desk, which I think can be totally conceivable and productive.
https://targetblank.org
I thought at least 90% of inhabitable place has some GSM signal?
https://www.wolframalpha.com/knowledgebase/