Programmers From The United States

"Most of this printout was analysis from the Kotok program. And I also saw some kind of a textual thing, which I don’t believe was Kotok’s thesis, but which had some of the same information as Kotok’s thesis. It was probably some kind of a technical report, or something, that was anticipatory to Kotok’s thesis [2]. Anyway, one of the things I remembered, and which I just talked with Kotok, as a matter of fact, a few days ago, was the detail that they had is Alpha Beta, and so forth, and they had these whips, and the whips were set at 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1. In other words, that was how many. It would first look at the top ply. It would look at the four best moves. The next plys, it would look at the three best. Next ply, two best, next ply, one best. Well, I just recognized immediately that that was incredibly wrong."

"You see, basically looking at only one wide, you just have no signals or noise function. In other words, you look at one move, which you think is the best, but there’s a tremendous amount of noise. Well, you look at some more moves, and if you find that one of those are better, you’ve effectively rejected some noise. Well, essentially the thing that I knew that they did, they were very weak chess players, both McCarthy and Kotok. And basically they had a very romanticized view of chess. And so I knew, however, that chess is a very, very precise game. And you really- the name of the game is take the other guy’s pieces, and you don’t just go along. In any kind of a strong game, you don’t just lose pieces, win pieces, lose pieces, win pieces. I mean, if you lose even a single pawn without compensation, then you may have drawing chances, if you’re lucky. Otherwise, the game is lost. Losing more than one pawn almost invariably results in loss of the game, period."

"If it means being smart and being a good programmer, then "I have no problem being a nerd."

"being able to have complete power with these apps I develop is very fulfilling."

"I started programming games on my TI-89 calculator in middle school or early high school, but I never thought of it as “coding.” I just thought of it as a way to create cool games to play with."

"With modeling, you never have control over anything."

"It’s always refreshing to hear how my work is now being used outside of the government and I am still amazed by the technological advancements navigation has made since the GPS Project began in 1973."

"That motivated me to do well in school so that I could get a scholarship and go to college. I had a great support system and many mentors along the way who kept me motivated."

"It never gets too old. I am just so pleased that I was able to make a contribution. When I was working, I never imagined that the GPS would be used in the civilian world. I love seeing all the ways that it can be used and I probably have no idea how vastly used it is."

"It has history to discover, outlets for shopping, good food and a quiet atmosphere."

"I aspired to do something outside of farm work and I knew that having a good education would be the key."

"So, someone wanted to know what I use Ubuntu for. I use it to download VMware to run TempleOS. What do you use Internet Explorer for? You use Internet Explorer to download Firefox. There you have it."

"Now, I had to do something I'm ashamed of. I had to put a call to a subroutine that I stuck right here. I'm kind of ashamed of that. And as a matter of fact, God just questioned my judgment. He said, "Terry, are you worthy to be the man who makes the temple?" If you are, you must answer: is this niggerlicious, or is this divine intellect? And that's the question. I'll leave you with that. You know, Google – they ask you interview questions. Well, the kind of question I face on the job is: is this niggerlicious? Is this too much voodoo for our purposes? For our mission statement? Our mission is to be a modern Commodore 64. Is this too much voodoo? This is voodoo; the question is – is this too much. And this is the hardest question you could ever face in programming."

"What's reality? I don't know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, "That bird has no idea what he's looking at." And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can't really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice. Yeah, he can kinda live. Usually the bird is okay even though he doesn't understand the world. He can kinda learn what's safe and what's dangerous. That's where I've been living. You're that bird looking at the monitor, and you're thinking to yourself, "I can figure this out." Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that's the best you can do."

"When I fight Satan, I use the sharpest knives I can find. I ain't shedding no tears cause you don't like "nagger"."

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity."

"The CIA niggers glow in the dark, you can see 'em if you're driving. You just run them over, that's what you do. Fucking CIA niggers!"

"You banned me from Twitter, God bans you from Heaven."

"What people are going to read is, "It's about a pathetic schizophrenic who made a crappy operating system." My perspective is, "God said I made His temple.""

"I am King Terry the Terrible. The CIA will be executed with an A10 gun. The fist of God maybe, individuals will be spared through extreme repentence and humility."

"Hell no, I'm a white man, I wrote my own fucking compiler. I'm not a nigger like Linus, I'm a professional!"

"I like elephants and God likes elephants."

"Now, there was a nigger, who came up with this idea: cout << "Hello" << endl;, well that's pretty niggerlicious."

"The difference between a professional and amateur ni-. The difference between an amateur and a professional is you write your own compiler, okay?"

"You're a nigger, you're a fucking nigger!"

"Don't get fooled by people who claim to have a solution to Artificial General Intelligence, who claim to have AI systems that work "just like the human brain", or who claim to have figured out how the brain works (well, except if it's Geoff Hinton making the claim). Ask them what error rate they get on MNIST or ImageNet."

"The analogy I've been using is the fact that perhaps an equivalent event in the history of humanity to what might be provided by Generalization of AI assistant is the invention of the printing press. It made everybody smarter."

"AI is going to bring a new renaissance for humanity, a new form of enlightenment, if you want, because AI is going to amplify everybody's intelligence."

"The direction of history is that the more data we get, the more our methods rely on learning. Ultimately, the task use learning end to end. That's what happened for speech, handwriting, and object recognition. It's bound to happen for NLP."

"[AI progres is very dependent on Moore's law.] The one thing that allowed big progress in computer vision with ConvNets is the availability of GPUs with performance over 1 Tflops."

"My problem with sticking too close to nature is that it's like "cargo-cult" science... I don't use neural nets because they look like the brain. I use them because they are a convenient way to construct parameterized non-linear functions with good properties. But I did get inspiration from the architecture of the visual cortex to build convolutional nets."

"[Can a commercial entity] produce Wikipedia? No. Wikipedia is crowdsourced because it works. So it's going to be the same for AI systems, they're going to have to be trained, or at least fine-tuned, with the help of everyone around the world. And people will only do this if they can contribute to a widely-available open platform."

"The vast majority of human knowledge is not expressed in text... LLMs do not have that, because they don't have access to it. And so they can make really stupid mistakes. That’s where hallucinations come from."

"Every reasonable ML technique has some sort of mathematical guarantee. For example, neural nets have a finite VC dimension, hence they are consistent and have generalization bounds... every single bound is terrible and useless in practice. As long as your method minimizes some sort of objective function and has a finite capacity (or is properly regularized), you are on solid theoretical grounds."

"Many of the papers that make it passed the review process are [good but boring] papers that bring an improvement to a well-established technique... Truly innovative papers rarely make it, largely because reviewers are unlikely to understand the point or foresee the potential of it."

"[Large language models] require enormous amounts of data to reach a level of intelligence that is not that great in the end. And they can't really reason. They can't plan anything other than things they’ve been trained on. So they're not a road towards what people call “AGI.”"

"I don't like to call [human intelligence] AGI because human intelligence is not general at all."

"I try to stay away from all methods that require sampling. I must have an allergy of some sort. That said, I am neither Bayesian nor anti-Bayesian... I think Bayesian methods are really cool conceptually in some cases... but I really don't have much faith in things like non-parametric Bayesian methods..."

"I want to create a collection of games during my career, so that when I’m on my deathbed I can look back and see that I created all these wonderful things that brought people joy."

"It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you're destined for greatness. It's not even an ego thing--it's just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering you."

"I've always been obsessed with creating stuff, I spent my spare time doodling, making music, writing... basically all the different aspects of making a game. I just didn't know at the time that I would find a way to combine all those things to bring a cohesive vision to life."

"It feels like my life has been worthwhile because of Stardew Valley, even if I were to die tomorrow. It feels good to see it manifest in new ways, and see people appreciate it."

"You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you."

"There’s a balance you have to have between being very critical of yourself and your work while also maintaining a strong faith in your own ability. Your unique voice and perspective matter and if you can find a way to bring that out then you will create something special."

"What really makes me feel good, makes me feel like my life has been totally worthwhile, is the fact that Stardew Valley has brought such joy and happiness to people. People describe it as a therapeutic game. Because I know that this little game brings so much positivity to the world... that really feels good."

"My whole goal as a game creator is to create these moments where I want people to feel something, like actually feel this connection to something deeper than you would normally feel like in a video game. I want to go deeper, and connect with people in a real way that’s memorable, that they’ll take with them for the rest of their life. I think music is integral to that."

"I’m just making music, I’m not even thinking about what it’s for, and it gives me ideas for the game. It will make me think of a particular scenario or environment, and then I really envision it through the music and put that into the game. That’s my favourite way to develop, actually."

"It’s very important to me that I make good on my promises."

"Making art, making video games, is my way of sharing who I am with the world. My goal, deep down, is that I want to connect with the rest of humanity, and maybe have them connect with me in some way."

"Music is somehow pure, you don’t think of it in terms of symbols. It just exists, it’s like magic. It feels like a way you can almost directly interface with the transcendental or divine."