"Back in 2011, Con Kolivas left the Linux kernel community. An anaesthetist by day, he was arguably the last great Linux kernel hobbyist hacker. In the years since it seems things have, if anything, only gotten worse. Today, it is practically impossible to survive being a significant Linux maintainer or cross-subsystem contributor if you’re not employed to do it by a corporation. Linux started out as a hobbyist project, but it has well and truly lost its hobbyist roots."
Hinton has no published books on physics, and his bibliography of papers, to the extent I've examined, lacks any serious contributions to physics. There are underrepresented physicists who never will come close to winning a Nobel. Not to speak of the women in Physics, and the fact that we still have Edward Witten who still isn't worthy of winning a Nobel. As someone who has seen friends and others give up on physics due to being denied for funding and other institutional issues, I am infuriated at this gesture by the Nobel Committee.
When was the last time we gave someone a Nobel physics who hasn't bothered writing a book? We have professors dying without a tint of recognition for their work. The whole ordeal is terrible, it's like giving Einstein a Nobel in medicine because his research on photoelectric effect has opened a new domain in biotechnology and because that's the new cool thing in the market, we'll go with that.
A lot of the outsiders think "physics is dead", but dare they look into the research inside it. It is not at all dead. And arguing that failing to have definitive answers to the Big questions means being 'dead' is a terrible way to look at the field. Math still doesn't have a definite way to look at primes, for centuries we didn't have the definite way to look at algebraic equations of higher degrees and general solutions to them. That didn't make math die, that's what keeps it alive. I am fine with Hoppfield for once maybe, but seriously why Hinton?
When I get really stuck on project, or have lost my way, or drive, or whatever, then what I do is switch to a different project for a while. I usually have a half dozen or so projects going at a time, in large part to allow me to do this.
The main difference between a hobby and a job is that you don't have to work on your hobby if you don't feel like it.
I guess it depends on the audience you are looking for. If you want to specifically target the gullible or you are really good at lying, this might be a great strategy.
Ah, working in the 80s with Lisp and AI, that's pretty awesome! Thank you for sharing this, but my functional mind would just ask...how have you liked Haskell compared to any of the Lisp(s)?
To answer your question directly, Haskell is too hard for me :-( I'm a pretty crap programmer - I was a professional back when you didn't have to be GOOD at it, you just had to be able to do it!
More interestingly, I wonder whether Haskell has, or lacks, the careful choice of orthogonal features that I love in a language.
You might try OCaml. Haskell (like Common Lisp) is more a big soup of features than a carefully chosen orthogonal set. Standard ML (SML) is maybe more orthogonal than OCaml, but less used in practice.
He isn't really forgotten in the academic circles who deal with the history and philosophy of existentialism. Jaspers is very well remembered along with Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus and others. But yes, at the 'general public' level, he isn't really forgotten.
"Back in 2011, Con Kolivas left the Linux kernel community. An anaesthetist by day, he was arguably the last great Linux kernel hobbyist hacker. In the years since it seems things have, if anything, only gotten worse. Today, it is practically impossible to survive being a significant Linux maintainer or cross-subsystem contributor if you’re not employed to do it by a corporation. Linux started out as a hobbyist project, but it has well and truly lost its hobbyist roots."