Lambda the Ultimate

These last few months I have been a bit frustrated by my own relation to LtU; I wondered on a few occasions whether I should stop visiting the website frequently, and I eventually sort of decided not to. It is not easy to voice exactly what the problem is, even less easy to know what a solution could be.

I would say the observed symptom of the problem is simple: the proportion of LtU's discussion that I feel strongly interested in is decreasing. What about you?

I think decrease in interest for LtU wouldn't be a frustrating problem if there was another place to supersede it. Unfortunately, I know of no such place: the alternative that is developping right now is a balkanization in a multitude of places, many of which are closed gardens (eg. Quora) I don't wish to help grow prosperous.

(It's of course to be expected that not all LtU discussions interest everyone, as the topic is quite broad and people have different tastes about different subdomains.)

Why am I less interested in LtU discussions? I think there has been at times a better balance between technical discussion around articles (articles mostly following the standards of academic presentation) and less-focused discussion, possibly more radical but less precise viewpoints.

I don't think there are more less-focused / off-original-topic discussion than before, or too much of them, but rather that there not enough of the more structured technical comments. In particular, I mean no criticism of the current LtU members or discussions, which bring many interesting point of views -- there might be things to improve in this area, but I don't think that is where the real gains are. I would be more interested in attracting more "research discussions" but I don't know how to do it.

On the positive sides, here are three examples of interactions that I personally enjoyed a lot recently, and would by themselves justify my continued LtU activity this year:

• Tom Primožič linked the draft version of Andreas Rossberg "amazing" 1ML paper; without this link, I probably wouldn't have learned about this exciting work for a few months.
• Sean McDirmid posted article versions of his work on type inference (and previously, Glitch), that helped make more precise interesting discussions that had been going on and off on LtU for a long time.
• Robert Atkey saw an on-the-side remark inside the LtU submission on the very interesting work on incremental computation, and gave it enough thought to produce an amazing blog post -- that I'm sure will bear further fruits.

(That's of course not the only things I liked on LtU recently. There are many things I come to know through LtU that I wouldn't otherwise learn about, typically on approaches to programming languages that are closer to social sciences (user psychology and experimental studies, sociology of adoption, etc.)

What were your own "value moments" on LtU lately?