Michael Will 🍁

It's possible that pre-LLM records will become valuable analogously to pre-atomic steel. Maybe GOFAI will again become more than just nostalgic.

"We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public"
- Hans Bethe

"The scientific spirit is of more value than its products"
- Thomas Huxley

#CitizenScience

If you like water and you love wildlife, support Canada.
We regard both as national (and global) treasures.

#Canada #CitizenScience #Biodiversity

There was a big snapping turtle living in a pond on the farm I grew up on. I learned to respect these things early in life.

Everyone is frantically trying to guess the future.
Being fans, cultists, or disciples ain't gonna work.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
- Alan Kay (and others)

Hopefully the policy will be driven by logic, compassion, and temperance. Not delusional, vicious, greedy cultism.

There was (is) a Forth system for the PalmOS called 'Quartus' ('Fourth' in Latin I think). At one time, it did Roman number conversions.
www.quartus.net/palmsite.shtml

Line from "Pretty Fly" by The Offspring:
Now he's getting a tattoo
Yah he's gettin' ink done
He asked for a 13
But they drew a 31

bsky.app/profile/thep...

Up here, we still miss John Candy somethin' fierce. And the vacuum cleaner. But mostly John.

I'm an older Canadian who has travelled extensively in the U.S. from a young age, for various reasons from visiting family to vacationing to working and teaching. It has always struck me how little-travelled most Americans are. Hard working, smart, generous, kind people, but lacking in curiosity.

And the latest horror, designing electronic circuits that are at best useless, at worst vicious.

Can he catch? Baseball pedigree matters there.

For decades, I talked about GOFAI, and not much else. It was solid, powerful, and promising. Nobody listened. Nobody invested. Nobody cared.

Now everybody rants about GenAI, hundreds of billions flow into it. Entire nations bet their futures on it. It is vapour, snake oil, the biggest grift ever.

Neil Armstrong Quotes - BrainyQuote Enjoy the best Neil Armstrong Quotes at BrainyQuote. Quotations by Neil Armstrong, American Astronaut, Born August 5, 1930. Share with your friends.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It's sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.
- Neil Armstrong

Wombats - the dumbest, sweetest creatures on Earth.

Missing SF, but Toronto is wall-to-wall AI too right now.

bsky.app/profile/bina...

Why is it that 45 year old PCs and today's tower PCs look like they got reversed in time? My theory is that dreams got replaced by corporations.

Thanks for this Mark. During his years here in Toronto, Beer wrote several books and articles that directly address some important themes of mine. Starting to gather what I can.

#Cybernetics #GOFAI #Archaeology

The Asimovian Epoch Centuries past are like the long night, a mysterious dream world. The modern, networked Earth is like daybreak, a world-wide awakening. The fifty years 1945-1995 could be considered as a sort of ‘t…

I wish that Isaac Asimov was still alive. He'd be a perfect interview on tech vs humanity, as he embraced both.

www.scidata.ca/the-asimovia...

I have a recurring dream where I find all the retro stuff I threw out 30 years ago. Now that's a disappointing awakening.

Asimov nailed it with FOUNDATION (1950). It's not the collapse that's the real horror. It's the millennia of darkness that follow. The key is to find a way to shorten the darkness. This is the same theme as in LOST HORIZON (1933).

Jays have plenty of good arms. Problem is that management is too proud to move any Big Name Stars to the pen. Nothing wrong or shameful about being past your prime, you just need to pace yourself. It's a team, not a deck of trading cards.

bsky.app/profile/scid...

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
- (lost in time, maybe Socrates)

The Canada Lynx is a treasure.

The Trump administration’s repeal of the roadless rule could threaten wildlife - High Country News A 2001 policy restricts road construction on Forest Service land. What happens to at-risk species if it’s removed?

In June, a lynx rewilding project in eastern WA confirmed the first wild kitten litters to be born here.

But fate had ironic timing. The same month, the Forest Service announced the repeal of the roadless rule. The lynx birthing grounds would be among those subject to the repeal.

Read more here:

Matter and anti-matter. I did want to play with Bluetooth Mesh, but Bitchat had vibe splattered all over it.

FORTH is all you need.

I'm concerned that all this firefighter talk will spark the adoption of "Fahrenheit 451" as a federal policy guide.