Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

Just a comment: this sounds a lot like when someone I knew mildly succumbed to AI psychosis, and thought he, with Gemini, had made some physics/metaphysics breakthrough. If you’re losing sleep and feeling distressed or euphoric, maybe lay off for a few days, no matter how hard that is. Talk to friends and/or family about unimportant things. Get outside for a while. Go back to old hobbies (reading, hiking, just going to coffee shops or thrift stores - whatever) and then reassess.

This language looks interesting, but I don’t understand the concepts. Does this stuff make sense to other people?

The heap is content-addressed over Λ₂₄: every value is mapped to a lattice point and canonicalized under the Conway group Co₀ (via libmmgroup), so the same content always lives at the same address.

What is ‘Λ₂₄’? What is a ‘lattice point’?

giving up the GC stopped being a renunciation, since cells are immutable and content-addressed, so there is nothing to trace and nothing to move

This kind of sounds like you’re saying that there’s nothing to free, which implies that nothing takes up memory, which I presume is not the case. Do you mean everything is immutable and content-addressed (like Git)? Doesn’t stuff still need to be freed somehow when the programs done with it, otherwise memory will grow for ever?

Agreed. Everything is a weird mixture of poetry and mathematics jargon. Basically every page of the book contains some esotericism which makes empty claims. It's completely divorced from reality.

> Does this stuff make sense to other people?

Nope, and I actually learned about application of category theory to programming language in university.

I tried to get an idea about the main points, and then stumbled over

> a thing is what you can observe of it. > > [...] > > Content addressing is extensionality made physical (chapter 11): two values indistinguishable by observation are not merely equal, they are the same slot

That only works in a category because you have enough (a countably or uncountably infinite number) functions that you can compose and "test" so you don't need (or don't care) about the "value" itself.

But on a real computer that doesn't work, because you can't go beyond a countable number, and even then you run into the halting problem pretty soon. So equality in this model is not computable. Which is sort of bad if you want to somehow store values "in the same slot" just based on observability. It might work for string literals, and even for concatenated strings, but not in general.

Picking some random lattice (a lattice is a partially ordered structure with some extra conditions) as a base of addressing doesn't help...

So yes, crackpot AI slop. The words sort of make sense, but there's nothing solid behind it, and as soon as you look at details it falls apart.

I didn't even get that far; I found the syntax annoying.

I am using flat memory comparisons (memcmp)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice

Maybe I just don’t have the mathematics knowledge to understand it, but that doesn’t really tell me how you could represent one in memory, or use one as a backing store for a hash-addressed data structure.

There is nothing physics/metaphysics about this. If you don’t understand the terms, don’t pretend you do and write slop as a comment, it is really not that different from using LLM to generate slop.

What if it's pure nonsense, therefore impossible for anyone to understand. Does that mean all criticism is "slop" and nobody's allowed to comment on it?

This is multiple logical fallacies in one comment and definitely a comment I would mark in the "pure nonsense" bin. Not all criticism is slop, but anything ad hominem (personal attacks), argumentum ad populum (appeal to popularity), or argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) is not useful.

"If you don’t understand the terms, don’t pretend you do"

The comment you're replying to explicitly says "This language looks interesting, but I don’t understand the concepts." so I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Their note about physics/metaphysics was about "someone [they] knew", not TFA.

Then why even insinuate that these are similar? It's just using it to heavily suggest it is crankery.

I indeed was insinuating that OP may be in the early stages of AI psychosis - or, if you don’t believe that’s a thing, at least in a mildly delusional or hyperactive state.

If I’m wrong, I don’t think any of the advice I gave was harmful. Really it’s good advice for anyone sunk deep into a problem to periodically take space, relax and recharge - and potentially allow their brain to work on it in the background while they do.

My questions came from a genuine place of wanting to understand the system though.

Thanks for being honest, at least.

The parent comment is not suggesting that Yon is about physics/metaphysics.

Understanding is important for readers. Demonstrating understanding is important for writers of both technical documentation and internet comments, and of critical importance in the era of AI.

Understanding goes both ways. OP was just sharing something they thought was interesting. The Ted Chiang piece was horribly written logically and yet it was "written well" in prose. We should look past the writing and learn (if any) the interesting parts.

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