Hi all, I'm not a regular X user, but I see that there's a thriving community here, having fun with the idea that there's now a memecoin celebrating the birth and long-term popularity of the :-) and :-( emoticons. So I thought I should at least send a message to greet you all, and to assure you that I am, in fact, "the real Scott Fahlman". You can go to my homepage at Carnegie Mellon to check this out: cs.cmu.edu/~sef/ And the smiley story (from my point of view) is here: medium.com/life-nuggets/t… As I say on my website, any contributions that I receive as a result of this memecoin will go to a few local Pittsburgh charities that my wife and I support. That has already started. Aside from ten minutes writing a silly Email message forty years ago, my real life's work has been the study of AI. I am currently working on a book, arguing that we will need symbolic, knowledge-based AI (but not formal logic) if we want to achieve reliable commonsense reasoning, while the deep-learning machinery handles the sensory/motor parts of intelligence. This is a heretical idea, in the age of Large Language Models, but might be an important contribution if I can persuade people. One advantage of my symbolic reasoning approach is that it doesn't need hundred-billion-dollar data centers. I'm pretty sure we can make it run on a high-end laptop. In any case, finishing that book needs to be my focus going forward, so I won't have a lot of time for discussions on X or elsewhere. But I will look into this X community from time to time, and I hope to see that you are all having a good time with this. Keep smiling! -- Scott Fahlman :-)
