DougMerritt

Although its core is low level, PostScript is a pretty good language by some metrics; it's often been claimed to be a (supposedly accidental) dialect of Forth with some powerful features bolted on.

What makes Zmachine.ps so bad? Certain programming issues, or are you going off a general feel?

Years ago, somewhere I read that children have a genetically-based urge to avoid bitter flavors, since they may signal natural poisons, whereas adults can judge better, so the urge is lessened.

(And even if that source were true, that wouldn't make the genetic effect an absolute; it would depend on individual genetics and the variable expression of those genes. And probably on the individual's experience, either as a child or as an adult.)

> we shouldn't judge coffee based on months-old pre-ground grocery store roasts.

Next you'll be claiming that we shouldn't judge sushi based on months-old grocery store sushi.

> I am now just going to go through the (single file) of code and just fix it myself.

That's front page news, in this era.

It's a humorous reference to a (in-)famous serious post by Stallman, see https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.en.html

1. It says it is $8/month, which is not mentioned on the github page, so I had been thinking it was free in addition to being AGPL-3.0; it links to https://snapify.it/ which is where I see the fee.

2. It says "for everyone" but looks like it might be Linux-specific, and it doesn't say anything about which OSes are supported.

This appears to be mercifully shorter and less intimidating than the must-have bible, "Curtis Roads. The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press, Cambs, MA, 1996".

It says it was originally published by Wiley in 2009, and the rights reverted to the author in 2025, whereupon the author released it on the net for free.

I think he should fix that, but meanwhile see: https://almightylisp.com/book/essentials

It's not uncommon to have a regression test for compilers that are written in their own language (e.g. some C compilers): compile each new version with itself, then use that to compile itself again, then use the result on unit tests or whatever, which should yield the same results as before.

The point being that determinism of a particular form is expected and required in the instances where they do that.

(I'm not arguing for or against that, I'm simply saying I've seen it in real life projects over the years.)

That's an excellent question, but the answer would depend on goals and the evaluation system used.

It seems to me that CEOs have a different opinion than anyone who cares instead about actual people.

SO is the website Stack Overflow.

Life mimics art.

Yep; this has frustrated me for two decades.

For the languages that we westerners regard as having very exotic grammars -- not like Chinese, which is comparatively straightforward, but like the aboriginal languages of Australia -- AFAIK there's no experience on such subjects yet.

For the world's most common/famous languages (English, Mandarin, Portuguese, etc) there's every reason to think that it's just a question of how much training data is available for training up an LLM.

In particular note that the Chinese experiments with their Deepseek LLM technology does well with both Mandarin and English, which all by itself is fairly illustrative.

If "exotic" grammars turned out to pose a major problem for LLMs, that would possibly challenge some of the most mainstream theories about linguistics, so I regard that as unlikely.

And it's not even a full moon.

You're arguing with people talking about how things are currently by talking about how things could be or should be and how people should change how things are.

That can be a great topic on its own, but it's not the same topic others are discussing.

And unless I missed it, you didn't say "let's switch the topic", you just went off in your own direction.

Why aren't they satisfied with merely pondering strats made in US vs Mexico vs Japan vs Indonesia? Careful reviews of quality versus price (which of course varied over time) always showed more correlation with sometimes-unwarranted reputation than with reality.

Since the topic arose, FWIW, here in the U.S. it's common to have one power socket in a room (e.g. living room, bedroom) controlled by wall switch, and multiple other power outlets lacking such a switch.

I'm not in the industry, but I think the idea is that, in the absence of built-in lighting, one should be able to add lamps to a room that can be turned on/off by a handy power switch next to the room's entrance.

> It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all.

Those are two different groups of humans, as you implied yourself.

...which needs more to explain it, such as (if true): "the diversity originating in Africa did not migrate out of Africa, and the gene lines that did leave Africa did not develop as much diversity as had existed in the ancestral gene pool, despite facing far more diversity in climate than exists in Africa".

And then I would again ask of the latter, "what? Why not?"

Ultimately: Why did Africa stimulate so much gene pool diversity? It seems more homogenous in environments than the rest of the world that Homo Sapiens emigrated to.

And there would have been cross-breeding between African subpopulations. Environmental barriers in sub-Saharan Africa are minimal in terms of gene movement, aren't they?

Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.

What lead to this?

"Let rich kids party and hook up for 4 years, and then hand them a well-paying career."

It's been done, of course (by their parents in those cases).

Sometimes, sometimes just optical, but in any case, there's even a guy, Ken Sherriff, who has been doing this as a hobby for ages. It's not like this is merely theoretical.

https://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering

It's not that you're utterly wrong; some transformations are irreversible, or close to. Multiplying each pixel's value by 0, assuming the result is exactly 0, is a particularly clear example.

But others are reversible because the information is not lost.

The details vary per transformation, and sometimes it depends on the transformation having been an imperfectly implemented one. Other times it's just that data is moved around and reduced by some reversible multiplicative factor. And so on.

TSMC has not committed to a US plant that applies their most advanced technology. Currently, they are going to produce chips with larger slower features, some generations behind their state of the art -- that's commercially very useful, and a good idea, but in no way replaces the state of the art chips that they produce in Taiwan. Alas.

But 3.8 billion A.D. is far in the future.

> Impedance is analogous to index of refraction

That's not just an analogy; impedance is index of refraction, with the same body of modern theory, except that "impedance" derives from the history of analysis of low frequency ("radio") waves whereas "index of refraction" derives from the history of analysis of high frequency ("optical") waves.

Specifically, physics papers concerning research based on particle accelerator experiments always have hundreds or even more.

It doesn't minimize the research; that sort of thing just requires a lot of participants. But it does imply a lessening of credit per contributor, aside from the lead investigator(s).

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?