I get that this is essentially vibe coding a language, but it still seems lazy to me. He just asked the language model zero-shot to design a language unprompted. You could at least use the Rosetta code examples and ask it to identify design patterns for a new language.
I update Linux maybe once a year. Sure, there are security vulnerabilities. But I'm behind a firewall. And meanwhile, I don't have to spend any time dealing with update issues.
Logic minimization is kind of boring? I had to solve a problem once and the answer was still to use the espresso software from the 1980s. It is a pretty specialized problem and honestly I don't see how you would improve on it, besides integrating the digital circuit design research. But in terms of software, there is not really any reason to use a Boolean logic formula instead of just passing around the truth table directly.
I'm wondering if a firewall is a solution here. Don't mess around with the stupid device settings. Just block the Xbox store, and then presumably Minecraft uses different server IPs, so you can let those through.
Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.
For me, the entire inbox is this DBTC folder. I have notifications set up on my smartwatch and I triage each email in real-time as it comes in. If it's urgent, I act on it. If it is important or I want to follow up, then I add it to my (separate) to-do list, with a Google tasks voice command. And otherwise I just ignore the notification and the email sits there in the inbox until I feel like dealing with it. I use the unread status and pick things off in occasional focus sessions. Some things never get "read", and that's because they don't matter. Zero bandit stuff because I know exactly what's in my inbox at any given time, at least up to what my analog brain can hold. It fits right into the old "I heard a noise. What is it?" routine humans used when we were hunter-gatherers.
Well, so what the actual ruling was was that use of the books was okay, but only if they were legally obtained. And so the authors could proceed with a lawsuit for illegally downloading the books. But then presumably compensation for torrenting the books was included as part of the out of court settlement. So the lesson is something like AI is fine, but torrenting books is still not acceptable, m'kay wink wink.
So, the takeaway I get from this paper is that if you have a language model and you set it up so it has an input and it generates an output that is towards some goal (e.g., "make this sentence sound smarter"), then it should converge, because it is following a potential function.
But I have used prompts like this a fair amount, and it is more like stochastic gradient descent - most of the time, once it is close to the target, the model will take a small incremental change, but when it is really close the model will sort of say "this is not improveable as it is" and it will take a large leap to a completely different configuration. And then this will do the incremental optimizations and so on. This could be an artifact of the sampling algorithm, but I think it is also an issue that the model has this potential function encoded, but the prompt and the structure of the model do not actually minimize this potential. So, a real lesson here is that there is actually a lot of work still left to do in terms of smarter sampling. Beam search like is used today is sort of the tip of the iceberg. If we could start doing optimization with the transformer model as a component, like optimizing pipelines of reasoning rather than always generating inputs and outputs sequentially, that is where you could start using this potential function directly and then you would see orders of magnitude smarter AI. There is stuff about prompt optimization, but it is still based on treating models as black boxes rather than the piles of math they are.
It seems an absurd amount of people misuse the term dopamine, I found this video https://youtu.be/x6_Ukic1tRM?t=1297 (in Polish, but there are subtitles and dubs). If you want to continue to spread "manipulative disinformation", by all means, some people have to be evil, but just be clear that it is pseudoscience up front.
Maybe one way to think about the efficiency of markets is that an efficient market is honest. So then the analysis here is essentially saying that the markets are getting more inefficient and corrupt, or at least not getting better. And this is borne out by things like the surveys of Americans' trust in government. But this corruption is more systematic than individualized. It is reflected in things like the lack of options if your Google account is banned. It is essentially the lack of human intervention and instead the use of AI systems. The failure modes of these systems are not obvious, and these "corruptions" essentially do not show up in typical statistics, only in super macro statistics like these productivity things.
There's a clear line, and it is when it starts to involve other people. Example: reverse engineering the firmware on your thermostat so you can use it after Google shuts down - technical problem. Not releasing it because you're worried about DMCA and/or Google lawsuits - social problem.
But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.
Yeah, so what that paper shows is that 6-7 cognitive tasks show low involvement with the language areas. What it doesn't show is that all cognitive tasks are independent of the language areas. As the paper itself admits, some forms of reasoning seem to involve language.
You can't generalize like that. Aphasia is a symptom - of course by definition it is merely the inability to use language. But people with stroke will typically show a lot of impairment, not only aphasia - they will have difficulties reasoning, gesturing, reacting, etc. Different people will have different abilities and different levels of impairment, but this tells you very little - it is not like each ability has its own little neuron in the brain, fMRI has confirmed that most activities involve several different parts of the brain. There are complex thoughts that require linguistic involvement to process, sign language and dancing combine gesturing with language, etc. The main thing the OP paper shows is that language is pervasive and intricately involved in how activities map to mental states.
Typically people develop aphasia after a stroke. This provides a natural before/after comparison. When for example Mark Brodie had a stroke, he wasn't able to speak - and he also wasn't able to read or write computer programs. This indicates that natural and programming languages use overlapping regions of the brain.
Regarding language being in conflict with other modes of thinking, there is indeed a "savant" effect of aphasia, where after an aphasia-inducing stroke people suddenly develop amazing abilities in visual art, music, or mathematical thinking. But it is not consistent - most people don't develop these. And it comes with impairment of emotions, memory, etc. So really what the evidence suggests is that some people suppress parts of their brain, and these injuries unlock that potential because the suppression mechanisms break. It's most likely a cultural thing - people act how they are "expected" to act. There is some evidence that females actually have more biological capability for math (in cultures with very high gender equality) but typically you see less performance, so the conclusion is that the culture essentially "programs" in the lower performance. It is probably the same with the supposed "conflict" between thought, action, and language - the culture treats these as distinct modes and inhibits cross-modal thinking like synesthesia.
Tell it to the papers: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~csg63/publications/onward24/onwar...https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.03916 As vague analogies go, much more ridiculous and vague things have been published and peer reviewed and even gotten significant citations. Like ecological niches and invasive species, DNA as genetic blueprints, selfish genes, ... About all that can be said about these is that they are closer to the truth than what came before, and that if you actually learn the field then you can appreciate how they kind of get it right.
To summarize the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, the "strong" hypothesis that language determines thought has been debunked. But there are many things that a language influences. To use a computer analogy, all mainstream programming languages are Turing complete, so you can express any computation in them. In this sense the language does not determine what programs you can write. But in practice, as any computer person will tell you, different languages are good at different things. And that is kind of this paper, they cite a lot of examples where English has poor vocabulary or odd quirks, and show by comparison to other languages that this measurably affects conclusions about certain cognitive abilities. The issue they're complaining about is like if you benchmarked Python programs and tried to draw conclusions about the speed limits of computing, but never tried C++ or assembly.
There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.
Sounds like a very restrictive tracker... but I guess the more restrictive, the more likely it has good stuff. Seems kind of strange though because most trackers I have seen just completely ban any sort of proxy or VPN.
The Nixpkgs repo is a Git repository. I forked the repository and I merge in updates using the normal git workflow. I've tried flakes and stuff, but none of them are as convenient as directly modifying files.
It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.
Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.
Linux has become the dominant operating system for a wide range of devices, even though other options like FreeRTOS or the BSD family seem more specialized. The widespread adoption of Linux suggests that a single, versatile operating system may be more practical than several niche ones. However, the decision to drop support for certain hardware because it complicates maintenance, as seen here, would seem to contradict the benefit of a unified system. I wouldn't be surprised if it really just results in more Linux forks - Android is already at the point of not quite following mainline.
All I can find on the Smithsonian is that they did press interviews, where various staff expressed opposition, and that they also sent some report to Congress. The press interviews are, quite naturally, public statements, and it could be argued they're unrelated to lobbying. As for the report, that's part of their normal duties - it would be a real catch-22 if such a report were considered lobbying. This feels like bluster from the politicians; they write dumb letters all the time for PR purposes.
The space shuttle situation, though, is a disaster.
So all articles will be open and free to read. The ACM Open subscription mainly includes publishing at a lower overall cost than the per-article rates, but also includes "AI-assisted search, bulk downloads, and citation management" and "article usage metrics, citation trends, and Altmetric tracking".
Casey says he “didn’t really cover Alan Kay” https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI?t=8651 To me that says that Kay wasn’t a major focus of his research. That seems to be reflected in the talk itself: I counted 6 Bjorne sources, 4 Alan Kay sources, 2 more related to Smalltalk, and about 10 focused on Sketchpad, Douglas Ross, and others. By source count, the talk is roughly 18% about Alan Kay and 27% about Smalltalk overall - not a huge part.
As far as the narrative, probably the clearest expression of Casey's thesis is at https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI?t=6187 "Alan Kay had a degree in molecular biology. ... [he was] thinking of little tiny cells that communicate back and forth but which do not reach across into each other's domain to do different things. And so [he was certain that] that was the future of how we will
engineer things. They're going to be like microorganisms where they're little things that we instance, and they'll just talk to each other. So everything will be built that way from the ground up." AFAICT the gist of this is true, Kay was indeed inspired by biological cells and that is why he emphasized message-passing so heavily. His undergraduate degree was in math + bio, not just bio, but close enough.
As far as specific discussion, Casey says, regarding a quote on inheritance: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI?t=843 "that's a little bit weird. I don't know. Maybe Alan Kay... will come to tell us what he actually was trying to say there exactly." So yeah, Casey has already admitted he has no understanding of Alan Kay's writings. I don't know what else you want.