I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released.
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.
Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy."
But you didn't hear the other engineer respond, "No, no, you don't understand. This is an advanced prototype using functional programming. Moving the document to the trash would have side effects. Creating a copy and placing that in the trash can, however..."
My wife worked at Boeing for seven years in the 1980s, in management. We tracked down her pension recently, hoping for a huge payout after it had been invested for 35 years. It turns out that she will get $96/month. We are very disappointed in the Boeing pension managers.
Overseeing fall of a company, huh? Hell, I can do it for free. I'll just network, see where C-suite lands, and ask for favours later while paying out significant C-suite compensation bonuses.
Lenat was my assigned advisor when I started my Masters at Stanford. I met with him once and he gave me some advice on classes. After that he was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting with (for any student, not just me). He didn't get tenure and left to join MCC after that year. I don't think I ever talked to him again after the first meeting.
He was extremely smart, charismatic, and a bit arrogant (but a well-founded arrogance). From other comments it sounds like he was pleasant to young people at Cycorp. I think his peers found him more annoying.
His great accomplishments were having a multi-decade vision of how to build an AI and actually keeping the vision alive for so long. You have to be charismatic and convincing to do that.
In the mid-80s I took his thesis and tried to implement AM on a more modern framework, but the thesis lacked so many details about how it worked that I was unable to even get started implementing anything.
BTW, if there are any historians out there I have a copy of Lenat's thesis with some extra pages including emailed messages from his thesis advisors (Minsky, McCarthy, et al) commenting on his work. I also have a number of AI papers from the early 1980s that might not be generally available.
> His great accomplishments were having a multi-decade vision of how to build an AI and actually keeping the vision alive for so long. You have to be charismatic and convincing to do that.
Taking a big shot at doing something great can indeed by praiseworthy even if in retrospect it turns out to have been a dead end. For one thing because the discovery that a promising seeming avenue is in fact non-viable is often also a very important discovery. Nonetheless, I don't think burning 2000 (highly skilled) man-years and untold millions on a multi-decade vision is automatically an accomplishment or praiseworthy. Quite the opposite, in fact, if it's all snake-oil -- you basically killed several lifetimes worth of meaningful contributions to the world. I won't make the claim that Lenat was a snake-oil salesman rather than a legitimate visionary (I lack sufficient familiarity with Lenat's work for sweeping pronouncements).
However, one thing I will say is that I really strongly get the impression that many people here are so caught up with Lenat's charm and smarts and his appeal as some tragic romantic hero in a doomed quest for his white whale (and probably also as a convenient emblem for the final demise of the symbolic AI area) that the actual substance of his work seems to take on a secondary role. That seems a shame, especially if one is still trying to draw conclusions about what the apparent failure of his vision actually signifies.
What’s your take on AM and EURISKO? Do you think they actually performed as mythologized? Do you think there’s any hope of recovering or reimplementing them?
One comment from his thesis advisors on AM was that they couldn't tell which part was performed by AM and which part was guided by Lenat. I think that comment holds for both AM and EURISKO. In those days everyone wanted a standalone AI. Now, people realize that cooperative human-AI systems are acceptable and even preferable in many ways.
I'll make sure my profile has an email address. I'm very busy the next few months but keep pinging me to remind me to get these materials online.
I once owned a 1.5 acre property that had approximately 1.4 acres of English ivy on it. It was horrible; the ivy is, by all practical means, impossible to kill. An area covered with a tarp for two months looks exactly like an uncovered area. The only way to get rid of it was to pull the roots out of the ground, mostly by hand. And it grows new roots every meter or so.
If you want to get rich, invent a way to kill ivy that does not also kill people.
I spray an extract from this plant on my plants, it’s a great antifungal. The product is called Regalia. This plant seems armed with everything it needs.
Goats work. Where I am in Georgia (US) there's a local service where they bring temporary fencing and some goats and plop them in your property to chow down. Once you decide they're done, they pull them out. The operators have expert knowledge of local ordinances and permits and whatnot. They make good money and the goats have other economic uses. The only thing is you can't really tell the goats what to eat and not eat... so you may have to get creative with the fencing, which costs more.
Fun fact about goats: you know that 'goaty' taste of goat cheese and goat milk? That's from coagulated proteins - if the producer is gentle with handling the milk, avoiding agitation, and you consume it right away, you can make cheese and milk without that noticeable taste. This is really meaningful for small scale goatery because you can avoid the use of big heavy expensive dairy cows.
Industrial manufacturers are also figuring out ways to stop the coagulation while being able to agitate the fluid. (Convenient if you want to pipe it anywhere)
If you want to devote your life to goat business, come to Georgia! We have a top tier agricultural university, an affordable cost of living, and a strong local economy.
I'm not sure you are describing ivy which generally tries to parasitize other plants/trees and is quite slow growing. It will also climb up walls and spread.
I've never seen acres of the stuff. It is not a ground spreader type plant, ie it won't run across your lawn or field. It will run along fences and hedges but it does not run into open ground.
You can peel it off walls and pull roots relatively easily. You can simply cut it in several places and it will die off. You can also paint or spray the leaves with something nasty from Monsanto if killing everything is your bag but it isn't mine.
English ivy is a ground spreader, at least where I live. It won't grow on the ground if it gets a lot of sun, but ground shaded by trees will turn into a thick mat that is impossible to pull up. Some yards have it growing as a ground cover in the flower beds. You can't pull it off walls or the ground easily. It grows tendrils (roots?) into anything porous, which makes it extremely difficult to pull up. If it's growing on the ground, it's just a thick mat that is impossible to pull up. And while I wouldn't call it a fast spreader, if you ignore it for a couple of years, it will start to take over.
Source: I used to work for a yard company, and I have it in my own yard.
English ivy may be slow growing in your region but it is definitely an invasive, ground-spreading pest in other places. Where I live it's not uncommon at all to see large swaths of wooded parkland covered in it.
I live in SW England (ie quite warm n wet which is ideal for this stuff) and it really doesn't compare in the invasive stakes. We've just had a rather warm autumn and winter is a bit shag too and ivy is not close to the top of the weeds list at all.
Shallow roots means easy removal. Ivy isn't actually that pernicious either it seems. I own a company and on our land there are three whopping oaks and there is quite a lot of ivy:
The above link shows a bewildering amount of tree and undergrowth but there are three really large oaks in there and I will preserve all of that lot. It's in a town and a loosely coupled island for a lot of wildlife - it's quite a bit larger than it looks. The oaks are around 200 to 250 years old judging by girth. There's also the remains of some Alms houses to the left of the view, roughly to the right of the pedestrian.
If you look closely there is a lot of ivy there! Also two of the oaks have a lot of ivy cover and I was worried that it might weaken them. But:
and we get the assertion: "but it doesn’t harm the tree at all". I'm not totally convinced but I do have access to experts on this (SSDC int al.) so I'll take their advice.
I've been through changes like this several times and the SURE indicator that big changes are coming is when the higher-ups say "Nothing will change". Seriously.
I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are engaged in wishful thinking, rather than deceit.
Likewise! In fact, it was the first time my disabled spouse was able to get some family to talk to her since now they were in the same situation. It also opened up a bunch of services for disabled people since now everyone needed delivery and not answering the door for packages was no longer weird.
yeah, that's real. I'd lost a lot of connection with friends after my mobility deteriorated, and then suddenly I had a mahjong social club every Thursday with old friends! I didn't feel outcast for being shut-in.
I disagree that it would necessarily take that long. Per the OP, his father is not starting from scratch, and has some programming in his background. Being a CEO, CCO, etc... We can assume his father is an intelligent and successful person.
Possibly, if his father applied himself, he could find himself a niche in which he would be adequately competent within 2 years. To include being a freelancer or independent developer.
As you alluded to, because of his father's business background, he might do really well in sales for a software related company or starting his own business.
I know the OP said it was "maybe Pascal or Basic", but having done this ~40 years ago, I'd argue that it is basically starting from scratch, unless he was actually writing Javascript the whole time for google sheets integrations
> Being a CEO, CCO, etc... We can assume his father is an intelligent and successful person.
Being unable to continue working as a CEO/CCO suggests he's not currently very successful, and to put it lightly, CEO "intelligence" (whatever that means) doesn't necessarily translate to the kind of intelligence necessary for software engineering
Ya for sure, that's what people don't understand. It takes years to really be up to speed and really useful (maybe you can shortcut it with bootcamps, idk, I suspect not though but maybe you would know enough to be good for some tasks).
I had a friend ask me same thing as OP. He was 50, out of work at the time (had been in a trade before) and wondered if he could get into programming. I don't want to discourage anyone from learning to program because you can do a lot of cool stuff, but to be seriously industry useful isn't a matter of months and a few online classes but rather some dedicated years.
And (this might be an unpopular opinion) it's much harder if you don't natively think a certain way. Some otherwise smart people find programming pure torture and the chance of them going through the years needed is pretty low.
I once called a travel agent to book a flight to San Jose (California). She mis-heard me as wanting to go to Santa Fe (New Mexico). She called me a few days later in a panic, saying "Sorry, I accidentally booked you a flight to San Jose. I'll cancel it and re-book it". Two wrongs do make a right.
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.