It was available earlier. Here's the HN history:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Chomsky%20and%20the%20Two%20Cu...

The oldest submission is from 15 y.o ago - that is 2010.

I resubmitted it - thinking - with the success of LLMs - felt this was worth a revisit from "how real-world scientific progress works" point of view.

You can look into Judea Pearl's definitions of causality for more information.

Pearl defines a ladder of causation:

1. Seeing (association) 2. Doing (intervention) 3. Imagining (counterfactuals)

In his view - most ML algos are at level 1 - they look at data and draw associations, and "agents" have started some steps in level 2 - doing.

The smartest of humans operate mostly in level (3) of abstractions - where they see things, gain experience, and later build up a "strong causal model" of the world and become capable of answering "what if" questions.

The only thing inevitable in evolution is that some change will happen. Everything else is complex, path-dependent, and subject to influences.

Leslie Lamport built latex, most of distributed systems such as AWS services depend on formal verification. The job of Science here is to help Engineering with managing complexity and scale. The researchers are doing their jobs

What does LaTeX have to do with TLA+? Also I think "most of distributed systems such as AWS" might be an exaggeration. At least the public known examples of formal verification in AWS are scarce.

I think the implication is that Lamport is a proof nerd, not that LaTeX has a direct relationship to proof software.

AWS talk about it a fair amount, although rarely in a lot of detail.

Why do you think developer enjoyment is orthogonal to productivity and delivery?

Willful ignorance is a different process. Consider a food analogy.

Of the food we take - cells accept a % of it as nutrients and such, rest is discarded as waste. The cells know how to get this job done - it's a very complex process for sure.

I think it's the same with information content - a % actually is useful for making life happen - whereas the rest should ideally be discarded because it is meaningless from a life perspective. The mind just knows what's important most of the time.

In this case - willful ignorance would be something like intermittent fasting or regulating food intake carefully, since it is a conscious process.

The former process is unconscious and operates at the "cell level" whereas the latter is a conscious process that operates at the "whole-being" level.

Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.

I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed.

It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in...

My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.

It's honestly amazing when I'm around gen z people and how addicted to phones they are.

1. The survey seems limited to UK or so. Not sure - it doesn't look like a global report.

2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options.

3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done.

4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.

I can't fault people for feeling that nobody reads anymore. In the US today the majority of Americans can't even understand books written at a 6th grade level and literacy has been trending downward. Only a small number of us are propping up book sales.

Will this be open source?

I've seen this already - but Lisp seems a bit limiting. I'd have loved to use Py/Go or JS in the least - something more upto date.

You ever have a user who pines for this or that feature, and when you tell him it's already implemented, he'll change the goalposts in some trivial way? It's not solutions we love, it's the warm fuzzy narcissism of complaining.

You seem challenged with having a basic discussion without resorting to baseless personal attacks. HN discussions have nosedived in quality over the time. Feel like I'm on reddit.

On the topic - here were my original points (with some extensions):

1. I want a smalltalk-like environment but with modern languages (webassembly makes this technically possible)

2. Alan Kay himself agrees smalltalk is no longer relevant in a concrete manner anymore - it's too old and outdated. The library support is absymal, and LLMs etc won't be as helpful as modern langs, since the training data available is less in quantity and quality. And I am in line with Dr. Kay's view - Smalltalk is indeed too old. I feel the same way about using Lisp for my particular goals.

3. I am not complaining in any way - just stating my requirements in explicit terms. Also I dont consider myself a "user". I am a system builder. I am fully capable of doing things myself if there's no alternative available.