Life was life, we made it this strange.
I did the work for my ████████ service today and it seems I’m going to spend my birthday in ████████ camp. How I hate that.
guitar; there are different things that you may like. I have found something that is true about me but can also be true for others. At first people like me; the noobs would probably buy “Iconic” guitars and behave like the way it is “supposed to be”. Wear guitar-like clothing; be like true legends and stuff.
Then comes the time when people start to get comfortable and forget the need to be like The Template. Here they will start to customize their stuff. Make stickers; have some changes and basically get comfortable in it. Here the ideas of preservation slowly give their place to making the inheritance theirs.
And then the last part is where people in the area of mastery fully get tired of the idea. Customization here is at its peak. They no longer can get comfortable with the idea itself and thus; they start looking for the next thing and so in the case of guitar for example; they either go to build their own or move to inventing a whole different instrument and thus the process becomes:
(3) Be Creative and Explore ideas that do not require feasibility, market demand; price — or in fact any form of optimization. Ideas here can be goofy; or very stupid. Either way; it is the right approach.
(4) And never forget the fact that this is all just for the fun of it.
And well with all of this jotting down said; I am beginning to realize just how and why we even play. This is everything one needs to not just learn but to grow. And then take this and apply it to the rest of the things we know or have.
We have been smart enough to have realized the machine learning models must learn in the exact same way that children learn. AlphaGo learned Go by playing lots of it. We have companies trying to teach machines to play things like Minecraft. And that has been a very interesting thing to do but then has anyone tried to do the same with learning?
This can be answered in parts. We have the idea of games but they essentially have no way to advance someone in anything. What will come of playing war games in the video game consoles? I don’t believe much. It is pure entertainment which is quite irrelevant to what we know as learning and then of course there is the matter of gamification. Gamification — as far as I can define it after all of these years of being used to it — is to use the game design techniques to “Addict” people to make them need a product and service. Not only it is a fairly unethical approach; it is easy to spot that it too; does not adhere to the idea of play.
If we believe animals and machine learning models are learning through play; then perhaps much of our work in designing all sorts of educational design that are not play; we have been committing crimes. And thus I would urge anyone to move into the thinking of what might be a good design for 1285 that is even more play centric.
Today I’m at sharif university and the people here are not the people I used to know. Not that I knew anyone here but that the overall theme of this place has radically changed. I do not like that.
More than ever; people here are religious people which is simple to understand. After all they have taken control over this country and now own much of it. It’s theirs to choose who goes in here and who doesn’t. But then; this is not the main important factor in here. The shocking part is where we have people gradually change. A basic “Ship of Theseus” situation. No longer is the figure about revolutions but tends to have its place to total chaotic change:
Now the interesting observation happens when you think to yourself: " What is the result of generation change? " It becomes fairly interesting here and afterwards. Basically in a society when things change slowly but gradually one thing gives its place to another thing and slowly and slowly things change to a point where like the previous picture nothing is the same.
Imagine if a new generation is raised that believes some thing like Pizza is a bad thing and must never be eaten. One does not need things like health or alike; all you need is to believe that Pizza is not “cod”. So when the new generation creates a new place; they create anything else but Pizza places and as people who love Pizza die and Pizza places —one by one— go out of business; Pizza slowly dies and gives its place to something else entirely. I have witnessed this many times. Old fashion cutes have died; American-style Pizza is about to die; and well; much more.
This then also works the other way around Imagine the creation of things. Electronics for example.
when I was young; it was like magic to have something with a micro processor in it. Things with automation or electrical circusy were really rare. But as time passed; more and more things adopted to the electronic intelligence that we have today and now almost everything that we buy is smart or has an app or works with auto- motion and software inside of it.
Now lets talk about the main interesting thing: Our body What is our mind? it is a network of interwingled cells. Yes: Cells Cells live and then they die. When They die they give their place to new cells. We know how the network operates but we have no clue how the brain in our system of operation learns. And this is for me to research next but I believe that the brain may or may not work as cells passing their training knowledge to each other in the reproduction process. So what needs to be checked in advance is this: Can the brain be a society with distributed knowledge as humanity is and thus by the means of cellular reproduction and passing of their knowledge to each other there be information loss and cultural change? Well…
I actually don’t think if we need to research some parts of it any further. As we grow we go to many " Phases " . By learning about things our personality changes and then we often forget who we previously were. We change; Things that we used to do change; the way we felt things change. And if we look more closely we became aware that we have changed as a person. This is such a strange thing and yet it is a it is.
So can we attribute this difference to the way societies work and conclude that is basically the result of the Ship of Theseus taking place inside of our brains? I believe we can. I would like to finish this with a quote that I have lost both the name of its author, and the place of its origin, but the quote went to be so far like this:
I was talking to my father about these legacy systems. I asked him “What would be the price of software like this today?, how much time and resource will it take to build this now days?” he replied “We can’t son. we no longer know how to do it like those days.”
Today I was riding the bus and contemplating on how it changed my perspective on living in the city. In the past my father used to say that he used to walk in Paris and feel good but as soon as he started using the public transportation things changed. People were depressed and sad and it made him sad. I felt alike and used to go here and there with taxi only. This was all till recently that new nice buses were added and now I ride them.
My contemplation was on how Zee likes cars and I the bus but then she so much likes the trees and nature and in that I felt varied. So basically we both liked machines and the nature but in totally different — yet the same — terms.
But the second and, in our view, most important reason was that almost nobody needed other iterators.
A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
So, we settled for a small set of control structures, with syntax borrowed from Modula (while, if, and repeat until). From CLU we took multiple assignment and multiple returns from function calls (a much cleaner concept than in-out or reference parameters). From C++ we took the neat idea of allowing a local variable to be declared only where we need it.
One of the few (rather small) innovations was the syntax for string concatenation. Because the language allows coercion of strings to numbers, a + signal would be ambiguous; so, we created the syntax … (two dots) for that operation.
A polemic point was about the use of semicolons. We thought that requiring semicolons could be a little confusing for engineers with a FORTRAN background, but not allowing them could confuse those with a C or Pascal background. At the end, we settled for optional semicolons (a typical committee solution).
Like any language feature, it was too easy to add it (although it did complicate the lexer) and soon programmers began to use it (programmers will use any language feature).
Because the new language was a modified version of Sol (sun), a friend at TeCGraf suggested the name Lua (moon, in Portuguese), and Lua was born.
Replacing the scanner generated by lex with a hand-written one almost doubled the speed of the Lua compiler.
It is much easier to add features later than to remove them.
Our decision not to hard-code any of those possible behaviors led to one of the main design concepts of Lua: meta-mechanisms. Instead of littering the language with lots of features, we provided ways so that the user could program the features herself, in the way she wants them, and only for those features she needs.
Everyone that works with programming languages knows how easy it is for people to start “religious wars” about the subject. An interesting characteristic of those wars is that, usually, the more mundane the subject, the hotter the discussion. For instance, people get much more excited discussing semicolons than discussing higher-order functions. Of course, one reason for that is that many more people have opinions about the former than the latter. But another, more important reason is that mundane details have a strong impact in how comfortable people feel with the language. It is no use to create a marvelous, well-thought tool, if it does not have a good grip – no one will use it.
Like in Lisp, nil represents false, and any other value represents true. This is one of the few economies that we sometimes regret today.