Integrated development environment Updated 2025-07-16
IDEs are absolutely essential for developing complex software.
The funny thing is that you don't notice this until someone shows it to you. But once you see it, there is not turning back, just like Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote.
Unfortunately, after the Fall of Eclipse (archive), the IDE landscape in 2019 is horrible and split between:
  • highly buggy but still feature rich Eclipse
  • many may many other feature lacking options using possibly more trendy and forward lasting implementations like Electron
  • awesome cross-platform proprietary JetBrains IDEs
  • the God-like Windows-only proprietary language-lacking Visual Studio
Programmers of the world: unite! Focus on one IDE, and make it work for all languages and all build systems. Give it all the features that Eclipse has, but none of the bugginess. Work with top project to make sure the IDE works for all top projects.
Projects of the world: support one IDE, with in-tree configuration. Complex integration is often required between the IDE and the build system, and successful projects must to that once for all developers. Either do this, or watch you complex project wither away.
Build tool maintainers: make it possible for IDEs to support your tool! E.g., implement JSON Compilation Database output so that IDEs can read the exact compiler commands from that, in order to automatically determine how files should be parsed! Or better, just use libllvm in your IDE itself as the main parser.
Ciro is evaluating some IDEs at: github.com/cirosantilli/ide-test-projects
Intelligence is hierarchical Updated 2025-07-16
This point is beautifully argued in lots of different sources, and is clearly a pillar of AGI.
Perhaps one may argue that our deep learning layers do form some kind of hierarchy, e.g. this is very clear in certain models such as convolutional neural network. But many of those models cannot have arbitrarily deep hierarchies, which appears to be a fundamental aspect of intelligence.
How to Create a Mind:
The lists of steps in my mind are organized in hierarchies. I follow a routine procedure before going to sleep. The first step is to brush my teeth. But this action is in turn broken into a smaller series of steps, the first of which is to put toothpaste on the toothbrush. That step in turn is made up of yet smaller steps, such as finding the toothpaste, removing the cap, and so on. The step of finding the toothpaste also has steps, the first of which is to open the bathroom cabinet. That step in turn requires steps, the first of which is to grab the outside of the cabinet door. This nesting actually continues down to a very fine grain of movements, so that there are literally thousands of little actions constituting my nighttime routine. Although I may have difficulty remembering details of a walk I took just a few hours ago, I have no difficulty recalling all of these many steps in preparing for bed - so much so that I am able to think about other things while I go through these procedures. It is important to point out that this list is not stored as one long list of thousands of steps - rather, each of our routine procedures is remembered as an elaborate hierarchy of nested activities.
Human Compatible: TODO get exact quote. It was something along: life goal: save world from hunger. Subgoal: apply for some grant. Sub-sub-goal: eat, sleep, take shower. Sub-sub-sub-goal: move muscles to get me to table and open a can.
Intercontinental ballistic missile Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Missileers by BBC (2000)
Source.
Documentary about American ICBM crews working on the Francis. E. Warren Air Force Base. Wiki mentions that there are 3 main sites in the USA, and plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ii.042 suggests all/most of them are in the Great Plains area. They operate a Minuteman system, which as of 2021 is the only nuclear ICBM system in the USA.
Good documentary, shows well the day-to-day life of the operator, including outside of the work site.
Video 2.
Logistics support management by USAF
. Source. Shows logistic operations behind the American ICBM system of the time. Reuploaded to showcase the IBM 705 system used to track parts, notably the usage of a punch cards.
Internal and spacetime symmetries Updated 2025-07-16
The different only shows up for field, not with particles. For fields, there are two types of changes that we can make that can keep the Lagrangian unchanged as mentioned at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) chapter "4.5.2 Noether's Theorem for Field Theories - Spacetime":
From the spacetime theory alone, we can derive the Lagrangian for the free theories for each spin:Then the internal symmetries are what add the interaction part of the Lagrangian, which then completes the Standard Model Lagrangian.
International Computers Limited Updated 2025-07-16
They died so completely, Googling "ICL" now has higher hits such as Imperial College London.
Video 1.
Why the UK's IBM Failed by Asianometry (2022)
Source. Main lesson perhaps: don't put national money to fight already established markets. You have to fight for what is coming up next. E.g. that is part of the reason for TSMC's success.
International Standard Music Number Updated 2025-07-16
Why was this so rarely used as of 2020s compared to ISBNs? It would have been perfect for helping find obscure records from Chinese traditional music and Indian classical music!
But instead we have Discogs, which is not too bad.
ISBN Updated 2025-07-16
Because DNA replication is a key limiting factor of bacterial replication time, such organisms are therefore strongly incentivized to have very minimal DNAs.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) 7 "Why bacteria are simple" page 169 puts this nicely:
Bacteria replicate at colossal speed. [...] In two days, the mass of exponentially doubling E. coli would be 2664 times larger than the mass of the Earth.
Luckily this does not happen, and the reason is that bacteria are normally half starved. They swiftly consume all available food, whereupon their growth is limited once again by the lack of nutrients. Most bacteria spend most of their lives in stasis, waiting for a meal. Nonetheless, the speed at which bacteria do mobilize themselves to replicate upon feeding illustrates the overwhelming strength of the selection pressures at work.

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