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"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)

This is a remarkable, very unusual project. It looks well thought out and is surprisingly complete -- it even includes an end-to-end ML training and sampling program as an example!

Is there a writeup somewhere that explains more about the motivation and history for this project?



Starfleet Academy is some woke fever dream ...

This is entirely in keeping with the Star Trek tradition. It had a multiracial cast and female officers in 1966, when that was quite unusual in a TV show.


I never suggested it was about race or gender. Yes the original Star Trek had a cast member that was flamboyant in the show, gay in real life and came out before it was cool or even safe for that matter and I had nothing but respect for him at the time and now. The fans respected him without a need for pushing agendas in the show.

For me it is about the dynamics between characters and the disrespect for the uniform, disrespect for Starfleet in some odd type of defiance of perceived patriarchy. The recent shows are not Star Trek. They are trying to retcon Starfleet decorum, Starfleet regulation and that barely even begins to touch on the issues they are introducing. The writers are trying to suggest a military could operate with everyone just being cool buds a situation that would quickly devolve into utter chaos. That is not science fiction but rather fantasy fiction. The "Captain" in Academy flagrantly disrespects their own command position so hard it's just a slap in the face to the audience and the franchise. Being true to Star Trek word would have gotten back to command and she would have been removed, decommissioned and memories of Star Fleet secrets wiped from her mind a capability that both the Federation and the Romulans possessed.


> It had a multiracial cast and female officers.

True. And yet it was not woke.


Very interesting!

FYI, other operating systems in Haskell:

House, 2005: https://programatica.cs.pdx.edu//House/

HalVM, 2008: https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM

also

HalNS network stack 2011: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2011-May/092...


Previously, 11 months ago, 282 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43625474


Rob Pike, one of the Unix developers, observed people turning away from their philosophy back in 2001:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

"What Unix does well isn’t what people want. ...

People prefer integrated environments and browsers. ...

Perhaps people don’t want to think about problem solving this way. Maybe Unix got it wrong. (Even within Unix, the tool approach is losing ground.)"


A newer book, from 2016, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/

An interesting revelation here is that, although ENIAC was not originally conceived as a stored program computer, it was quite early converted to one. They repurposed a lookup table intended to calculate functions to store instructions instead. Many of the well-known ENIAC calculations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, were programmed in this mode.


Another book that might have some similarities, apparently from 2020:

https://aesthetic-programming.net/ Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31726334 (2022) but only one comment -- mine!


Mr. Hoare (yep not a Dr.)

Hoare's undergraduate degree from Oxford was in Literae Humaniores, nicknamed Greats - ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Latin, Ancient Greek, and philosophy. In the US, this course of study is usually called "Classics". According to Wikipedia, "It is an archetypal humanities course."


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