Four short links: 27 Nov 2020
Unix History, Robot OS Talks, Learning with Language, and Easy Theory
- Brian Kernighan Interviews Ken Thompson — From a fun interview: McIlroy keeps coming up. He’s the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)… McIlroy sat there and wrote —on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer— TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG… And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won’t say without error, but with so few errors you’d be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it’s the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I’ve ever seen in my life. (via Hacker News)
- ROS World 2020 Videos — all of the ROS World videos, including all the lightning talks. ROS = Robot Operating System.
- Learning from Language — we propose a simple approach called Language Shaped Learning (LSL): if we have access to explanations at training time, we encourage the model to learn representations that are not only helpful for classification, but are predictive of the language explanations. (Paper)
- Easy Theory — YouTube lectures on computer science theory. Mondays: Algorithms; Wednesdays: Theory of Computation; Fridays: Theory of Computation; Sundays: Livestream/bonus.
