Marty Fouts

@StefanThinks open from August 1 to November 2, every year.

@mb21 @bsdphk They were mostly in the ACM Language Design Special Interest Group publication. I don’t think they are available online, unfortunately.

@bsdphk Ada was entirely the result of DOD procurement, intended to solve a DOD problem. Dijkstra, rightly, criticized the design process and the final language and his writing on the subject should be required reading.

Ada suffered from the same problem PL/1 did and was almost immediately fragmented into the infamous “profile” subsets that resulted in it failing to meet DOD requirements.

It was not a good language to start from, revisionist views notwithstanding.

@bsdphk Dijkstra is rolling in his grave and I can’t stop giggling.

I have to admit that I never thought I would see anyone attempt to salvage Ada’s reputation after the way it imploded at the DOD.

Thanks for sharing.

@benfry I assume you are using the modern definition of AI that equates it to large language models and I completely agree that it is impossible to understand why anyone would do that.

But AI is much more than just LLMs, or it was until a couple of years ago; and it’s been doing good data analysis since the 90s. It’s especially good at finding unexpected relationships and hidden trends.

@KathyReid I know that the most popular answer is “when AOL came online but to some of us it started much earlier, when the requirement that you were doing DARPA related research was relaxed to allow anyone on who was affiliated with a university that had access.

Nobody realized it at the time but it started with students from certain universities who were the earliest to attempt to monetize being online.

@scalzi Sure Grandpa, and I suppose Han shot first.

@wohali Ironically what they thought was “the Internet” was AOL, and it was a passing fad. 😉

@straphanger Ironically one of the few robots that are present in homes is a vacuum cleaner.

@maxleibman We were talking about the subset of machine learning known as Large Language Models that for some reason people keep mislabeling as “AI” because they can’t be bothered to be precise. Do you really want to throw out nearly 70 years of research and development because of sloppy labeling?

@mattwilcox No. you didn’t stutter. You just missed the valid reasons. people die and should not be left on the rolls to reduce the temptation to commit identity fraud based voting fraud. People move and most elections have residency requirements.

Sure, both of those might be resolved differently but the mechanisms to do so are not in place.

The problem is not purging the rolls per se; it’s using purges as a voter suppression tactic.