I'd argue a lot of the recent focus on AI safety, "pacing the frontier", etc, is the industry freaking out about models like DeepSeek.
But the other reason is because most people in technology are just as lazy as consumers and the friction between getting onto DeepSeek vs OpenAI or Anthropic is just a tad too much and people go with what's convenient.
Hi HN peeps! My newest video is up. This one was an absolute ton of work, I hope you enjoy it!
A Pattern Language is a book that seems to come up in all sorts of circles. Not only did it inspire Will Wright to create The Sims, it changed the way software is developed – in ways you're probably familiar with, but may not have known the origins. (That's a human em-dash btw; I refuse to give them up.)
If you like this, please like & subscribe to the channel. And if A Pattern Language touched your life in some way, please respond here in the comments!
Putting this video together was fun, and as always I ended up learning a bunch of new stuff and seeing things in a new perspective. Kind of a bookend to the HyperCard video that launched my channel last year.
Wish I'd gotten to meet Atkinson, but his influence is still everywhere. More on Kare in this one, as well as some of the really cool innovations that came before.
My first digital painting program literally was MacPaint! We had the 512k Mac, not the original 128k, with the external drive, so there was just a little bit less floppy-swapping to deal with. I spent hours using that program - much of it just messing about, but I also had a few detailed scenes I came back to over and over, working on them carefully over time.
It was indeed a Thinking Machines CM-5 — Nedry actually mentioned them in his line about how Hammond wouldn't be able to find anyone "anybody who can network 8 connection machines".
An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars.
But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.
But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.
They went bust not long after this movie.
I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:
I had no idea Thinking Machine was a brand! I just thought they were "thinking machine super computers" another way of saying "artificial intelligence super computers" or "machine learning" (dunno if ML was around then :shrug:)
What a gem of an article. I don't know physics, I use computer for my work and nothing beyond, but reading about the mindset of an actual scientist is really interesting.
Great video. I visited Brewster Kahle at Thinking Machines back when I was in college and that visit ended up being one of the major influences in my career. The CM was way ahead of it's time.
Thinking Machines also pioneered WAIS which was a precursor to modern search engines.
Thank you! My biggest regret in the video is I didn't get to touch on Brewster Kahle's involvement – especially given what he's gone on to do with Internet Archive. Would love to do a followup.
Re: Search Engines, I think I mention this in the video but apparently Sergey Brin was part of the Connection Machine user community, and had that experience on his resume. (A copy of that is still floating around.)
I think Brewster is one of those photos in your video. I met him because I set up the first WAIS server in Australia and he was kind enough to offer a tour when I mentioned I was visiting Boston. Good times.
Probably not! I'd imagine that whoever did production design for the movie would have visited some of the labs of the time, or talked to people involved in AI – and the CM-1 / CM-2 were very much at the forefront of that type of computing back then.
But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!
As an American, I just want to say that I'm very dismayed by the discourse around this topic over the past 24 hours in particular. The polarization of politics has become so intense, that the bipartisan mainstream position of just a couple of decades ago – that immigrants are a net positive to this country – feels like a distant dream.
We've gone from perpetually punting the football on comprehensive immigration reform, to people saying, "Good, go back home, we don't want you here."
The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.
Immigrants are the low hanging fruit to attack, and the best to blame all your suffering on, meanwhile, the real issue is wealth distribution. Since covid, the very few people got mega wealthier while the majority suffered, do you just leave it as is for people to find out? No, you push other distractions like immigrants, race rage baits, and other nonsense to keep people busy fighting each other.
This ^
If it is secularism and religion in some countries, it is language and ethinicity in some other, and immigration and racism in America. Depends on the timing, and the need for it, politicians use it to their advantage.
The evidence for the need of immigration reform was always weak and, frankly, basically non-existent.
What happened was white people saw brown people coming in and got uncomfortable. That's it. The rest was just "fill in the blank" reasoning. Something something medicare, something something housing... eh yeah that's good enough we need immigration reform!
But that's been happening in the US for many generations now. That's just how the US works; we get a lot of immigrants and they become US citizens. If not them, then their kids. Yeah, welcome to America.
> The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.
Well, yes. The current administration and the republican party as a whole are composed of fascists and thieves who steal from hardworking citizens like you and I to fund vanity projects like a ballroom and "Arc de Triomphe but bigger and gold".
They're shitting on the history of our country and all the people who have sacrificed to make this place what it is today, and they're doing it just to enrich themselves.
Frankly they are traitors and I hope that in time the wheel of history will deal with them as traitors deserve.
This is assigning intent without evidence, as is common in tribal politics. A non-charged assessment might use the phrase "abrupt cancelling."
We cannot create a better republic without constructive discourse, and we cannot have constructive discourse when we default to characterizing the views, concerns, and actions of those we disagree with as rooted in moral failure. Even if it is true from time to time.
This chiding from you would be better received if there was a shred of evidence that the other tribe is even slightly receptive to this kind of discourse.
Unfortunately, the norms of discourse are pretty much gone. This is terrifying in the long-term.
If you were to try to convince me a 2:1 immigrant to local birth ratio here in Australia is a net good for the country, you’re first going to have to convince me your a reasonable person to have a conversation with.
If you jump straight in with claims against me that I’m -ist and -ic that’s going to be more difficult.
Here you are again [0], unable to represent comments in good faith.
Nobody said "non-white" and it isn't even implied because a significant proportion -- 35-40% of Australian Permanent Residents (US green card equivalent) -- come from EU/"White" countries.
The suggestions above are consistent with my request for you to review the HN comment guidelines.
Complaining about 2:1 immigrant to local birth rate has absolutely nothing to do with long-time permanent residents (who are locals). It's clearly a fear that white culture is being overrun by brown/chinese people.
Your comments degrade the discourse at least as much as you think mine do.
> This is assigning intent without evidence, as is common in tribal politics
You are calling for constructive discourse and yet your response is an accusation of dishonesty. A non-charged assessment might use the phrase "without presenting evidence".
Because absent more evidence we don't yet know if this is a different variant of the Andes virus than the one people have had experience with. A lot hinges on whether this flight attendant is hospitalized out of an abundance of caution, or something entirely unrelated. But given that they came into relatively brief contact with an infected person, it would be significant if somehow she contracted it. A lot of people disembarked and went to various parts of the world. Combined with a long incubation period, that's a lot of guessing.
So far, the flight attendant has tested negative. This of course doesn't mean she hasn't contracted it - hantavirus has a long incubation period after all - but as of right now, whatever symptoms she is experiencing are not due to hantavirus.
The messaging is "please keep on living your lives despite all the psychological terror you've been subject to by the power/money that be that don't even attempt to cover its fascist face anymore".
Ah, this is amazing thank you. I had dug and dug for some demoscene examples for the video. It turned out to be quite difficult to find many of these sources, especially the early Japanese stuff.
Despite having recently done a video on The Connection Machine, the Links-1 was new to me – and I basically did a double take to learn that they had this parallel ray-tracing super computer back then. Sadly, there's not a ton of documentation beyond a couple of brief papers.
Didn't have much time to comment earlier, so an addendum.
The intro gene was the first time I had seen real-time metaballs. The implementation, and AFAIK all real-time metaballs in the demo scene at the time, relied on the Marching Cubes[1] algorithm, detailed by Paul Bourke here[2].
At the time the algorithm was patented, though up here in the Scandinavia that was not something that would hold back some teens. You can see the characteristic artifacts of the Marching Cubes algorithm in most demos.
In general metaballs is just one example of using isosurfaces for rendering[3]. Other typical applications is in visualizing partial differential equations, for example computational fluid dynamics. Often it's easier to formulate equations which govern the volume rather than the surface, and you use an isosurface technique to extract the surface you're after.
A point echo of Fudge told me was that a metaball doesn't have to have a strictly positive influence, you could have one which has a negative influence. I think this is what's going on with the red metaball scene in the gene intro.
Nice video, was fun to learn the origins of one of my beloved demo effects.
Oh that's interesting because I would have assumed the demoscene stuff would have done some kind of direct signed distance field rendering and skipped the marching cubes part.
And yea I remember the patent being in effect for so many years. The Spore creators got around it by using the "ear clipping" algorithm.
Negative Metaballs are really fun — included them in our app I mentioned at the end of the video. But they date all the way back to Blinn's paper!
Uploading 15 minute videos to YouTube, downloading hundreds of gigabytes of 3D assets, updating large applications, streaming movies for a 4k projector, frequently downloading beta OS updates, etc, etc, etc.
>Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.
sure, and the time for that is before you bring them to potential critics.
unless a meeting is intended as a brainstorming session where any thought, no matter how unformed, is welcome, meetings are not a time to present your initial unexplored thoughts to colleagues, bosses, or other departments. take a couple days, think about it without spending other people's time, try to imagine people's objections and have answers to them. then present. shouting things out in a meeting before you've considered and come up with answers to the most obvious counter-arguments is just a time-waster.
You must have very different kinds of meetings than I do. Unless you're going into that meeting with a rehearsed PowerPoint presentation, or there's a strict agenda that doesn't allow any time for exploration, I expect to hear imperfect-ideas-in-infancy. One of the reasons we have meetings is to allow collaboration to happen. It's a format for working together.
Yes, meetings vary profoundly in terms of their quality, purpose, and participation. For instance, is it a meeting of peers, or are managers in the room? If there's a large disparity of roles in attendance (e.g., junior engineers, marketing managers, and maybe one or two executives), it's different than if it's a true meeting of peers. And if managers are capable of attending those meetings without quashing collaboration, hats off to them.
Really depends on the context I think, brainstorming session? Naysaying does have a habbit of stunting an idea's growth in the session. Sometimes you need to imagine you've solved a bunch of hard problems before you can explore the value the idea has.
I say this as a semi-reformed naysayer. I am critical of implementation plans, but let ideas breath a bit in a more exploratory setting before I start bringing up constraints.
If the proof of concept takes an hour to code up, or proving the market exists just takes a bit of googling, then sure, you can prepare that before the first meeting where you suggest the idea.
If the proof of concept requires spending a few days in the machine shop making jigs and parts, purchasing equipment, and a custom PCB, then I really hope you'll bring it up for discussion beforehand in a meeting. Ten minutes of discussion with colleagues might be as useful as several iterations of prototyping. Not so that they'll shoot it down, but because someone might say "oh yeah, we have a spare mcguffin from last year's demo that you can use, should save you lots of time."
But the other reason is because most people in technology are just as lazy as consumers and the friction between getting onto DeepSeek vs OpenAI or Anthropic is just a tad too much and people go with what's convenient.