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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Old Man Stallman comes out swinging against ChatGPT specifically, adding it to the long long list of stuff he doesn't like. For some reason HN is mad at this, as if RMS saying slop is good actually would convince anyone normal to start using it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203591
The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.
The orange-site whippersnappers don't realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity". In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT's AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn't part of MIT's AI programme.
Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like they're all well into their 30s/40s at this point.
I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.
But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, it's relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.
@nfultz
In college I took an AI class and it was just a lisp class. I was disappointed. Also the instructor often had white foam in the corners of his mouth, so I dropped it.
My college used the green Russell Norvig text, which had (checking...) 12 pages on neutral nets out of 1000 pages. I liked the class well enough, but we used Java 1.3 and lisp would have been better.
Only four (August 2021).