Society

I think I've enjoyed every Paul Graham essay I've ever read. He's got a new one: What You'll Wish You'd Known, a speech he was going to give at a high school. He persuasively undercuts most graduation speeches and provides an interesting outlook on life. I found his comments on procrastination and curiosity interesting. I, and a number of people I know, have both those qualities. Graham argues that they're almost innate once you've found something you're interesting in.

In true American fashion, after the school learned that Graham was going to say something interesting, they withdrew their invitation.

Someone in #haskell pointed me to Lambda the Ultimate, a great programming languages blog. While there, I read an interesting critique of OOP in general.

And finally, IBM has a great article on HaXml, advocating its use instead of DOM or SAX for processing XML and HTML documents. They have some quite effective examples to boost their point, too. I tried HaXml and I like it.

I was bored last month. I decided that it would be fun to hack up an AI bot to sit on the #haskell IRC channel.

I wanted this bot to be a conversation bot, so I would need some sort of AI engine. I wanted it to be a learning bot, so it could learn from what people have said before. I searched around, and it seems there aren't many good learning AI engines out there for Linux. I eventually settled on MegaHAL.

I then obtained the logs for the conversation in #haskell over the past year, and used it to train the bot.

The result was sometimes hilarous, and often riddled with typos and nonsensical (considering the source, many would say that would be expected).

I started a page of MegaMonad quotes with some of the funnier exchanges.

But here's the best part: there was a person on the channel that didn't realize that MegaMonad was a bot! Perhaps we just passed the Turing Test accidentally...

There's a piece by one of the Wikipedia founders that is very intriguing -- he likens many of its problems to Usenet. If you've never used Usenet, that's a dreadful insult indeed.

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism