minds-and-machines

Why do I do 90 seconds burpees in the morning on most days?

I do this to touch my heart rate max and this has a reason.

By stretching the system to edges,

it becomes more flexible,

just quote( huberman)

How to use 100% of your brain.

I think this was like 10 years ago that people walked around claiming that we only use 5% of our brains or some garbage like this.

I guess all kinds of people have fun making claims about how the brain works. And because the brain is super intriguing by itself anything that has a brain in its explanation sounds like some intriguing insightful thing.

Either way, here are some ideas about taste and sensibilities:

Some ways of knowing are intuitive. How do we know what is good and what is bad? What is good design, and what is bad design?

Some of this is processed in the realm of feeling. Also called sensibilities, also called system 1, also called intuitions.

When a master is crafting a piece, they are using their sense of aesthetics and their taste, to judge and make decisions.

How could it be otherwise? For if they would not use the feeling part of their mind, they would not use their whole mind. And how could you achieve mastery without using the whole mind?⁴

Taste is an interface into the rest of our mind.

If you only used mainstream programming languages so far, you do not know yet what it means for a language to be beautiful.

If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant.

So you do not know yet that taste matters in knowing the power difference in programming languages.

This is why now I talk about taste in another realm that you already know about. Art, stories and explanations.

What makes one story better than another story? What makes one thinker's explanations better than another thinker's?

The answer is it fits your tastes. The answer is you think this is interesting and then there is more of that interesting stuff. The answer is it harmonizes with your mind in some way.

When I read a great story I sometimes think now there could be more of this stuff and then there is more of this stuff.⁵

With the greatest art, it can feel like that the artist was exploring the same space of ideas that I would explore. To the point where it is as if as a consumer of the art I am exploring parts of my psyche. Like landscapes that were already there, only to be wandered systematically. In reality, the artist was expressing something they find intriguing themselves. And either by overlap, by alikeness of mind or by them intuiting what I would like to experience, they created these substances to explore for me.

The best books do this with the story: I wish more of this would happen. I wish we would read a bit more of Harry's wizard classes.

The best video games do this with world, concepts and game mechanics.

I want to be as powerful as those mages. And then it delivers on making you powerful, as if by growing as a character.⁶

I want to see more of the magic system, different kinds of magic, powerful magic.⁷

Taste can express itself as a joyful, harmonious intrigue. Or as the feeling of gaining a deeper understanding of the world, or gaining more powerful ways to think and do things.

There is something deeply intimate in sharing what this innermost mischievous, childish aspect of our minds is up to. Maybe this is me being German but it feels like something to be ashamed of.

To explore one's taste is to acknowledge the kinds of things that one inner mischievous, childish, curious mind is intrigued by.

It is not easy to explain what makes the best stories and books. Usually, we say this is a great book. And we mean that a person's taste is extraordinarily powerfully intriguing. The qualities that make this intrigue are extremely hard to explain. A masterful piece of art is by definition the

What makes one programming language better than another programming language?

Well, what makes Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality a superbly sick book? What makes The Witcher 3 a superbly sick game? What makes The Pirates Of The Caribbean and The Man From The Earth superbly sick movies? What makes Emacs a superbly sick text editor?

The answer is that if you have good taste, you will know.

And this might not be easy to explain, the shortest possible explanation would be for the other person to experience what you have experienced.

Sometimes there is a hint of power or more ideas of the same stuff or of landscapes to explore and the art/book/story is delivering.

In the next sections, I explain what I think programming languages are for. In other words, what are the activities where it matters if you have one language or another?

The reason why Lisp is powerful, elegant and intriguing is not as profane as syntax. It is not the syntax, not the names of things, not the data structures, and not anything about the form at all. Lisp is together out there with you, thinking and building your program.

But you will only know by experiencing it.

The answer is it fits your tastes. The answer is sometimes it does what you expect.

Taste is private in a way

A programming language is a way to express yourself to the computer.

This is the flavor of intrigue and joy that Lisp provides me.

Lisp provides a honed experience of interacting with the computer. It is

It was created by hackers and is traditionally endorsed by hackers.⁸

Here is one attempt at conveying one reason at the hard of the cluster of reasons.

This is not here to convince you but to

• being lazy
• if you have to do less, you have the better language

• a programming language will have to be jugdet by what it does to your mind
• because the its purpose is to give your mind the capacity to express yourself to the computer

Programming is about ideas. It is about organizing, understanding, communicating imaginary entities of knowledge that explains both problems and solutions.

A programming language is a tool to express these ideas to the computer⁹, so that the ideas have an desired effect on computer process.

How hard is it to express myself to the computer? How close are my ideas and the resulting computer process? What is the process (me using the language), that makes the computer understand my ideas?

Language is merely a tool to make 1 affect the other. The hypothetical best language is one where there is an infinitely small barrier between my ideas and the computer process.

The hustle of the programmer is in the realm of ideas. They manipulate, create and transform the web of ideas.

Only as an annoying, grindy sub task do they need to write code in order to express these transformations of ideas to the computer. Hopefully, with a minimal loss of accuracy.

This includes thinking of counterfactuals, and thinking to make experiments. To see, if the system was this way, would the bug be there?.

Every programmer knows

Since you cannot know what you don't know

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change.

If there really is a language this much better

Clojure is generally said to bring back the fun in programming. ¹⁰

It is commonly suggested to young programmers to learn Lisp in order to expand their mind.¹¹. Consider the Perlis quote

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

There are a few reasons why