abathologist

I am so sure because of the self-evidence of my experience, the results of 2 millennia of analysis into the nature of cognition and experience, and consideration of the material composition of our organism (we obviously have lots of critical analog components, which are not selecting tokens, but instead connecting with flows from other continua).

Prediction is obviously involved in certain forms of cognition, but it obviously isn't all there is to the kinds of beings we are.

TikTock, Face Book, Twitter etc. are all aiming to be AI already: https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/mark-zuckerberg-ai-generated-...

> The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.

> ...

> Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

> ...

> Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

Good point. Non-determinism is not fundamentally problematic on many levels. What is important is that the essential behavioral invariants of the systems are maintained.

> Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad?

No. That is a result of bad software engineer practices and stacks, not a symptom of proper abstraction.

How big a dent do you think we could make if poured $252 billion dollars[0] just into paying down all our towers of tech debt and developing clean abstractions for all these known problems?

[0]: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo...

Not me, because I know how to avoid falling into nonsense speculation based on worthless analogies :D

Sand away! Enjoy copying and pasting your nails, or having LLMs apply your varnish or whatever. I hope it brings happiness.

Ground Hog day is optimistic, I think. It will be like "The Butterfly Effect": every attempt to fix the systems using the same dumb, wrote solutions will make the next iteration of the architecture worse and more shitty.

This is a terribly confused analogy, afaict. But maybe if you could explain in what sense boilerplate, as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_text, is anything like a nail, it could be less confusing.

This is the glaring fallacy! We are turning to unreliable stochastic agents to churn out boilerplate and do toil that should just be abstracted or automated away by fully deterministic, reliably correct programs. This is, prima facie, a degenerative and wasteful way to develop software.

"Actually, proving things is bad. We should arrange the world so that everything is self evident."

My theory is that the digital revolution has mostly cancelled out potential productivity gains with its introduction of productivity sinks: the technology has tended to encourage less rigorous thinking, more distraction, more complexity; and even if you can do task T X times faster, most people as spending X * Y more time being distracted, overwhelmed, or just reflective button pushers.

The ways AI is being used now will make this a lot worse on every front.

Github Page: https://github.com/etiennecallies/click-and-collect/wiki Linear Logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_logic

I am not a Haskell expert, nor an expert in effect systems, but, AFAIU, what mrkeen has provided is an analogous pattern in Haskell -- where effects are represented via the free monad with an interpreter -- and not an account of what is described in the article.

In OCaml we can (and do) also manage effects via monadic style. However, we don't have ad hoc polymorphism (e.g., no typeclasses), so that aspect of the dependency injection must go thru the more verbose (but more explicit, and IMO, easier to reason about) route of parametric modules.

The point in the article is that effect handlers allow direct-style code with custom effects, which enable a kind of "dependency injection" which actually looks and feels much more like just specifying different contexts within which to run the same program. If you are very used to doing everything in Haskell's monadic style, you may not really notice the difference, until you try to compose the handlers.

Here is an example I've put together to show what the author is talking about in practice: https://gist.github.com/shonfeder/a87d7d92626be06d17d2e795c6...

Almost as if the development of PLs is not a straight line of monotonically additive features XD

One clever ingredient in OpenAI's secret sauce is billions of dollars of losses. About $5 billion dollars lost in 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...

Finally, someone has thought about the importance of making things go faster!

Is the most pressing problem facing the world is that we are not doing enough things fast enough? Seems a bit off the mark, IMO.

See https://ocaml.org/industrial-users

Current industry uses are largely in specialist areas including compiler engineering, static analyses, formal verification systems, and systems programming in critical domains.

Indeed it is.

Yes.

Would be great to get concrete feedback on the docs, because a lot of energy has gone into improving them in the last 2 years: https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html

> F# as essentially Ocaml running on the .NET

IMO, a language without proper modules, GADTs, or (now) an effect system, does not seem to me like it could plausibly be described as "essentially OCaml". Your point about having ad hoc polymorphism (outside of an object system) is another good point about why F# really is not OCaml on .NET.

Not to mention the difference of being trapped in (or having the luxury of, as you prefer) .NET vs. compiling to native binaries.

Glad you like F# tho!

Ah yeah, that is absurd, given how successful they have been, and how much they attribute that success to their technical decisions.

People love to sulk in their parochial pits, I guess?

Thanks for clarifying :)

What are you talking about?

Yeah, he is also committed to race science, the belief that diversity is fundamentally bad, and that states "own" their citizens, and can do anything they want to them. None of that is just the basic idea of a benevolent dictator. Yarvin's views are repugnant and evil as well as reductive, childish, and unoriginal.

It seems to me that monads and effects are likely best viewed as complementary approaches to reasoning about computational contexts, rather than as rivals. See, e.g., https://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/koka/padl16.pdf or https://goto.ucsd.edu/~nvazou/koka/padl16.pdf .

> The first thing to note is that there is no indication that foo or bar can fail

I think this is a part of the point: we are able to simply write direct style, and not worry at all about the effectual context.

> how do you find the code that will run when they do fail

AFAIU, this is also the point: you are able to abstract away from any particular implementation of how the effects are handled. The code that will when they fail is determined later, whenever you decide how you want to run it. Just as, in `f : g:(A -> B) -> t(A) -> B` there is no way to find "the" code that will run when `g` is executed, because we are abstracting over any particular implementation of `g`.

Effects in OCaml 5.3 are quite a bit cleaner than there were a few years back (tho still not typed).

How do you know that generated text is actually a compression of what the author is trying to say?

As a matter of fact, I don't think its true that

> if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

But I also think that this claim is (1) practically impossible to prove and (2) a claim we morally ought to attempt to disprove.