I was trying to figure out how large this thing was (I found it hard to tell from the picture). And wow -- a life-size throne. Must go next time I'm in DC (if the government isn't shut down :p).
Well, both Guy Steele and Danny Hillis were doctoral students advised by Gerry Sussman. Whether Hillis worked on the Scheme chip or how much overlap they had, I don't remember, but as you said they were all there around the same time.
It's also remarkably respectful of Bay Area geography -- they got the major bridges right. None of that Dustin Hoffman going the wrong way on the Bay Bridge stuff.
Seeing as this is considered remarkable by some people, it makes me want to watch a compilation of all movie scenes that were an insult to Bay Area geography. There should be a channel someplace, where each video is a compilation of a different city/landmark.
There are also under-the-hood changes that I found truly upsetting: among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. Tracing things on Instruments suggests a culprit (the culprit?) is NSAutofillHeuristicController. This is not a new feature, but I'm guessing with them pushing Apple Intelligence it was rewritten. AFAIK no obvious way to disable this "feature". (Turning off Apple Intelligence doesn't seem to do it.)
> among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable.
So basically my #1 work tool will no longer work.
That’s a hard deal-breaker right there.
As a longer-term means of escape, what’s the best way to run a «full» Linux desktop on a otherwise managed Mac?
Parallel or Vmware (the former is paid and the latter is tortuous to download). Then you can go with debian (for minimal installation) or fedora (for ready to work desktop installation). Works quite great.
The developer of ghostty had this exact same issue with his terminal. Ironically apple's iCloud password autofill extension on firefox also practically halves my firefox performance. Seems like they haven't figured out autofill yet. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/commit/b58a761aba75fa...
- With GNU Emacs, this seems to work just fine. Hurray!
- With Emacs-Mac port, which many people like (including myself): I haven't had any luck so far. In particular, if you (like me) like to compile your own from source, doing this on macOS 26 (with XC26 etc) will compile but the resulting binary will very quickly (in seconds to minutes) become unresponsive. If you use a precompiled binary (including Homebrew cask) compiled on an earlier macOS version, that may be fine (provided you set NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled as above).
Somehow the combination of the compiler & library (runtime & statically linked) is breaking Emacs-Mac for me. I haven't quite figured out why, and probably don't have time right now to get to the bottom of this...
Quite agree with the sentiment, and the presentation of science to the public in general. However, that probably also reflects a rather accurate assessment of scientific literacy in the general population on the part of planners.
Anyway, among US museums of natural history & science, a prominent exception is the AMNH in NYC: yes there are things for kids, but also things for "grownups". After dozens of visits I still learn something new every time.
Gradescope partially solves the problem. There are certain kinds of questions that are more amenable to rigid rubrics (e.g., techniques of integration in a beginning calculus course) where the space of correct solutions is rather limited. Once the material gets more advanced, the space of correct (and partially correct) solutions gets really large, fast. One could design exam questions to restrict the solution space, but sometimes at the cost of testing real understanding. Also, at that point giving partial credit with Gradescope-style rubrics is not always straightforward (not impossible, but not trivial).
This is not an uncomon situation in e.g., math departments across the US. Luckily I've not had to grade more then 60-70 in a single term, or ~200 but a select number of problems in a large course.
Also, second stapled exams with prescribed spaces for answers. So much time wasted just looking for where the answer is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hampton_(artist)#Throne_...
I was trying to figure out how large this thing was (I found it hard to tell from the picture). And wow -- a life-size throne. Must go next time I'm in DC (if the government isn't shut down :p).