s-expressions, LISP, Linked Lists, Associative Arrays, Reductionism, Luddites & Dogma

by Mike Levin

Yesterday I responded to Zoronoa01 who wrote: I can listen to the history of computer languages and OS narrated by you all day long!

Thank you Zoronoa01 and what a boost! I responded by using one of the most difficult car-trips I’ve had to do in my life to respond. Positive feedback loops are a good thing! Good and right decisions lead to more good and right decisions, and engaging with my YouTube audience is definitely feeling like a good path for me in life. It helps me:

• Practice listening (it’s not pandering if I also want to talk about it)
• Practice researching (filling in my knowledge-gaps)
• Practice teaching (the best way to learn is to teach)

Yeah, I’ve had concerns with pandering to the wants of my audience in the past versus talking about (and working through) the things that I wanted to talk about (and work through). But there’s such a thing as serendipity and the simple statistical fact these things are bound to align with so many billions of people in the world, more online all the time, and YouTube really doing such a good job as the connector of such people with the vlogging format.

Google was bound to happen and something needs to serve this function in the global digital nervous system. And I am a “search engine optimizer” (SEO) after all. Even though it all started with AltaVista, Google is the gift that keeps on giving, and so I should use my skills to be more and more on the receiving end of those gifts… in all the best ways that align to my vibe, morals and evolving mission and purpose.

I missed many of the early dot-com and AdSense money-grabs in the SEO-world. I hate empire-building. I don’t like being held under the sway of money-grubbing alpha-investors. They judge themselves and others by money, money, money and the love gets sucked out of things. I’m sensitive to that deflation-feeling… with what’s being deflated being the inherent love of things. It’s fragile and disappears easily when the host body gets corrupted.

This must be why the story of Fernando Corbato’s fighting the corruption of computer-time-hoarding elitists leading to Multics appeals to me, as does the subsequent fighting of the corruption of Multics by big business and Ken Thompson’s reaction of making Unix and leaking a distribution at Berkeley (BSD) appeals to me. So what led Linus Torvalds to copy Unix? Unix was too expensive! Wow, what a story, right?

Ugh! Okay, why not live-cast a bit. Think through your next steps. Get it very clear in your mind.

• People “latch onto” a concept and don’t let go.
• This can work for you or against you.
  • A technique of predisposing and avoidance of accountability.
  • A technique of rallying resources properly
  • LISP is one thing
  • Unix is another (small, modular, toolbox)
• LISP! Talk more about LISP!
  • Linked lists / smallest building blocks / s-expressions!
  • Start at the beginning
  • Apply it to your blogging system
    • Categories & tags
    • Organizing posts
    • YouTube playlists

• Machine Learning

• Search Engine Optimization is changing & evolving… how?
• Machine Learning… Evolving…
• The old ways: Crawl & Index
  • Comes from database world
  • Indexes are everything! (fast lookups)
• The new ways: Training models
  • More things being recognized
  • Answers… things get weird
    • Six-degrees of separation
    • Thinking agent working for you
    • Lightning speed researcher
    • Custom answers

Go go pack & think on it!

• What’s really important in life?
• Remember the 80/20-rule
  • Reductionism is its own sort of trap
  • Back-off & rebuild appropriately
  • Decide what appropriately is
  • Let go of “Dogmas”
    • Dogma
    • Luddites