Dominik’s Blog

6.803 - Today Winston talked about the seminal Minsky paper, Steps toward Artificial Intelligence [PDF]. We focused in on the Introduction and Conclusion. Minsky’s introduction was great but his conclusion was sorely lacking, as it was essentially just a mishmash of various papers he didn’t cite and a throw out that “time-sharing systems are new and cool and good.” I recall from Spring 02, when I took Minsky’s class, he mentioned that he had to include the random citations in the Conclusion to help get the paper published, or perhaps just to avoid offending half of the budding scientists in AI. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember. Some good news on the waiting list front, the TA told me that a few people haven’t been coming to class, so there might be an official spot opening up soon. It’s all good, since I’m coming to class and doing assignments anyway.

6.033 - Oh boy. Today we discussed CS 224. CS 224 you ask? Let me quote an ancient version of my resume… “CS 224 — Systems Programming Concepts — Winter 2000 @ WMU.” Yeah. It’s been that long since I last saw this stuff in a class. Prof. Balakrishnan is a good lecturer, but seeing material you’ve seen before and know like the back of your hand gets old fast. I trust, however, that 6.033 will ramp up to speed within a week or two. This is, after all, MIT. I guess today was just a reminder of why I chose to go to MIT: so I wouldn’t have to suffer through stuff like that. I forgot how passionately I dislike being completely academically unengaged by material…

6.UAT - We continued analyzing the presentation from the last lecture, this time concentrating on how it was tuned specifically for the audience. It was insightful and entertaining, but there wasn’t much worth commenting on.

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Went to Ash Wednesday service. So many people! We had people on the walls, on the steps of the altar, on the back walls, behind the choir, on the floor and every single seat was filled. It was quite an experience and Father Paul gave a good homily. When he asked what people were giving up for Lent, one guy shouted out “problem sets” to the laughter of the crowd. I didn’t know so many people at MIT were Catholic… after Mass a lot of folks went out to Anna’s Taqueria (the new restaurant opening where Tosci’s used to be in W20) and got a free meal — since it’s opening eve for them, they were giving away food+drink as a marketing promotion. Good stuff.

In other news, I miss my laptop. Her hard drive had bad sectors and had to be replaced. Hopefully she’ll be back soon as Apple sent me: Your product has reached our repair center. We will notify you by email when the repair is complete. I can only wait patiently, but I never realized how useful a laptop was until I had one and used it and then find myself deprived of it…

LiveJournal is being incredibly flaky. I’m going to sit down and write my own blog software if this keeps up much longer. Little things in LiveJournal have been annoying me for a while now and I can use dominik.net as a case study to implement 6.033 system design principles: incremental implementation and modularity. My overarching dominik.net Framework 2.0 plans have been “under design” since they were first thought up in 2000. I got a serious case of featuritis and second version syndrome, and I really want to see a new dominik.net backend that will be far more extensible and allow for more cool things. There won’t be a target release date, just incremental upgrades now and then. I miss coding for pleasure :)

And what am I giving up for Lent? Complacency. Face life with a smile and a firm step forward. Dominik 2005.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2005 at 12:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.