Aha i saw this video in a comment on another HN thread this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791117 Avoiding the babbling-idiot failure in a time-triggered communication system
aworks 1 hours ago [-]
Alvin Lucier wrote other highly interesting, if unconventional works, although similar to John Cage's 4'33", this is the one that achieved meme status as conceptual art.
dang 3 hours ago [-]
The full talk seems to be at https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0..., but with a confusing interface (text chat flying by at speed, and no actual video of Alan, though you do get a prolonged view of a whiteboard). Maybe there's another copy that exists or will show up somewhere?
DonHopkins 48 minutes ago [-]
Yes it's a pretty klunky interface. Easy to miss that there are multiple camera icons to the right of the time slider, and you can switch to see different feeds like the speaker or their slides. It's still kind of hit or miss with some of the speakers, but at least Alan got a chance to test things out and debug all the glitches before his talk, so he didn't end up repeatedly interrupting himself!
Here is the full list of links from the video description to other related and interesting topics.
I can highly recommend smoking a joint and watching James "Doctor Chaos" Crutchfield's "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback" film, which he made at UC Santa Cruz in 1984, building on Ralph Abraham's video feedback experiments there in the 1970s:
Did he though? TMK Shannon did specifically not give a way to deal with noisy channels, no. He invented a way to quantify what could be sent on a noisy channel if you figure out the optimal way to do it. This is very similar to "no matter what you figure out about faster travel, you can't go faster than light in a vacuum".
Calculating the limit is easy with Shannon's theorem. Approaching it in practice is hard.
PunchyHamster 2 hours ago [-]
> Calculating the limit is easy with Shannon's theorem. Approaching it in practice is hard.
Many modern modulations already operate basically on Shannon's limit for a given band/SNR. Well, on raw data, the encoding almost always use some kind of error correction so the decoded bitrate is few % lower than the wire one
ironqcold 1 hours ago [-]
Fair distinction
RobRivera 2 hours ago [-]
Can someone please explain to me what this is all about?
thatspartan 1 hours ago [-]
The way I've understood it is Shannon showed that it's possible to reliably send a signal even if you know the signal will get corrupted before arriving at the other end.
Shannon's theory is foundational to modern communication systems. You can expect to have WiFi remain functional even as other devices use the same medium. Up to a point, the Shannon limit in other words.
My favorite part was how Google's speech to text transcriptions censored the word "fuck" to "[__]", adding another layer of censorship noise and interpretation to the mix.
And how the conference's real time speech to text transcription would occasionally lapse into Danish, and say things like "We will eat your hands".
notarobot123 2 hours ago [-]
I can't wait for the autotune remix of this.
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
It would have been kind of great to see an OOP language with Alan's design, but with a better syntax. I dislike smalltalk syntax. Barely anyone uses smalltalk today.
Even then, we'd also have an OOP language to be really really fast. Otherwise people will just use C.
Java itself is too verbose and has a rather boring OOP model.
Rochus 56 minutes ago [-]
How about Elixir and Erlang? They do pretty much exactly what Kay preaches.
Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds better to Kay's message-based vision than Smalltalk-80. Wirth arrived here not by trying to emulate biology, but by trying to avoid the V-Table.
Java implemented the Simula 67 object model according to a 2017 Gosling lecture (as did early C++ and Smalltalk-80 to a significant degree).
dang 25 minutes ago [-]
> Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds better to Kay's message-based vision than Smalltalk-80. Wirth arrived here not by trying to emulate biology, but by trying to avoid the V-Table.
That's interesting! what did they do that corresponded better?
Rochus 3 minutes ago [-]
In contrast to the "usual" (i.e. Simula 67 based) OO approach, Wirth avoided virtual methods in his Oberon language, but instead used type extension (i.e. inheritance) to declare specialized message records (as the replacement to variant records of Pascal and Modula) which were handled by procedure-typed fields of record variables (i.e. objects) using polymorphic dispatch based on the dynamic message type. The intention was not to "correspond better" to Kay's vision (Wirth likely didn't know Kay nor was he interested in his visions), but he arrived at a similar design from a different motivation. And the analogy only works when considering what Kay and team actually implemented (i.e. "message delivery" - a record in case of Oberon, a stream of tokens in case of Smalltalk-72 - via synchronous procedure calls). Smalltalk-80 instead implemented compiled virtual methods and table-based polymorphic dispatch like Simula 67, just with a dynamic language.
goatlover 2 hours ago [-]
Crystal is a fast, compiled OOP language. It has static type inference with Ruby-style syntax. Ruby's OOP model took inspiration from Smalltalk.
This place being well-known now for the prohibition on "shallow dismissals", I think it'd be great if we brought back the rule against submissions that are merely "shallowly interesting" (which is frankly something that this, er... "performance"* doesn't even qualify as):
* hard to read this characterization and see it as anything other than the product of unvarnished, I-want-to-believe (that emperor is wearing magnificent robes) hero worship
DonHopkins 37 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 21:21:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Here is the full list of links from the video description to other related and interesting topics.
I can highly recommend smoking a joint and watching James "Doctor Chaos" Crutchfield's "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback" film, which he made at UC Santa Cruz in 1984, building on Ralph Abraham's video feedback experiments there in the 1970s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Crutchfield
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Abraham_(mathematician)
Kristen Nygaard 100 Years, Celebration Symposium (Aarhus University, Aug 27 2026):
https://cs.au.dk/nygaard100years/celebration
Entire Nygaard Symposium Recording (Alan Kay's talk begins at 3:27:49):
https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0...
Alan Kay:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
Claude Shannon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
Information Theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Noisy-Channel Coding Theorem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem
Audio Feedback:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_feedback
Video Feedback:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_feedback
Live Looping: The History And The Practice, by Stephen Garza:
http://computermusic2008.wikidot.com/live-looping:history-an...
I Am Sitting in a Room:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XJWBZBzq4
Calculating the limit is easy with Shannon's theorem. Approaching it in practice is hard.
Many modern modulations already operate basically on Shannon's limit for a given band/SNR. Well, on raw data, the encoding almost always use some kind of error correction so the decoded bitrate is few % lower than the wire one
Shannon's theory is foundational to modern communication systems. You can expect to have WiFi remain functional even as other devices use the same medium. Up to a point, the Shannon limit in other words.
Hopefully Don won't mind!
And how the conference's real time speech to text transcription would occasionally lapse into Danish, and say things like "We will eat your hands".
Even then, we'd also have an OOP language to be really really fast. Otherwise people will just use C.
Java itself is too verbose and has a rather boring OOP model.
Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds better to Kay's message-based vision than Smalltalk-80. Wirth arrived here not by trying to emulate biology, but by trying to avoid the V-Table.
Java implemented the Simula 67 object model according to a 2017 Gosling lecture (as did early C++ and Smalltalk-80 to a significant degree).
That's interesting! what did they do that corresponded better?
https://crystal-lang.org/
<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22shallowly+interesting%22>
* hard to read this characterization and see it as anything other than the product of unvarnished, I-want-to-believe (that emperor is wearing magnificent robes) hero worship