daly

It's the same argument the horse industry said about cars.

Meanwhile California is seeing huge percentage increases in new EV car registrations. Electric car batteries last 1 million miles. I've never had a gas car live anywhere near that long. Electric cars have fewer parts and are cheaper to build. There are over a dozen battery factories being started in the U.S. this year. Tesla gives free upgrades over the air overnight, not next year. Cars can be charged at home.

My tools are all electric. My riding lawn mower is electric. My next car will be electric. I live in "Pickup Truck, Pennsylvania" and I see a lot of Teslas.

"Confidence" is not facts.

Time estimates matter not only to the business but they’re a reflection of your level of expertise as a software developer. An experienced software developer can keep tasks on schedule and communicate delays in advance.

I have 51 years as a software developer. Time estimates are worthless.

All of the information you need is in the manuals. IBM is exceptionally good at documentation.

Also, the hardware instruction set is set in stone.

Lying involves not just what you say. It includes what you don't say.

I tried orgmode. I even attended a course at CMU that used it for the "live notes". It is excellent for teaching. But it has the same flaw as the "live notebook" idea. There is no generally accepted structure to the approach.

Everyone "understands" books. They have a preface, chapters, an index, a bibliography, pictures, credits, and a table of contents. Literate programs leverage that shared understanding of the structure.

Think of a physics textbook. If you just copy every equation out of the book then you "have the code". All the rest is explanation. They belong together so the explanation and equations (code) are intermingled.

I'm a "primitivist". I work in straight text at an emacs buffer in fundamental mode.

The point of my code is to "talk to the machine". The point of my literate program is to "explain to other programmers (mostly 'future' me)". Note that this is NOT DOCUMENTATION. It is explanation, best presented in book form.

Lisp program to extract latex chunks: https://github.com/daly/axiom/blob/master/books/tangle.lisp

C program to extract latex chunks: https://github.com/daly/axiom/blob/master/books/tanglec.c

Note that the C program is just a hand translation of the Lisp code.

The lisp code has an explanation and the necessary latex macros. The idea is to scan the latex, find each named code 'chunk', and add each one to a hash table. Then the hash table is scanned to dump the requested chunk to stdout. For example:

\begin{chunk}{part1} code for part 1 \end{chunk}

Ordinary latex code between chunks.

\begin{chunk}{part2} code for part 2 \end{chunk}

\begin{chunk}{part1} this code will be appended to the prior chunk \end{chunk}

\begin{chunk}{getall} \getchunk{part1} \getchunk{part2} \end{chunk}

Assuming the above chunks are in the file foo.tex then

tanglec foo.tex getall >getall.code

will print out the named chunk (getall). For an individual chunk use

tanglec foo.tex part2 >getsome.code

This is (most of) the source code for Axiom. The code is extracted from the latex for these pdfs.

Does anyone remember Cobol? Pascal? How about Prolog (the 5th gen language)? Standard ML? and now Rust.

Compilers are a dying technology. Stop Writing Dead Programs" by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s&ab_channel=Stran... )

Meanwhile, the hardware world is moving to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Neurocomputing, in-memory logic, dynamic soft-core processors, analog memory, etc.

What does Rust do with memory that self-modifies, or has no defined logic values, processors that dynamically add or remove instructions, etc.

What does Rust do with programs that self-modify?

How long will it be until C++ (2090?) adds borrow checking and Result handling?

What's so "Secure" about Rust? Does it handle row-hammer attacks? DMA overloads? Heartbleed?

Rust is reaching "peak hype".

Sigh.

Code it, explain it, generate a Literate PDF containing the code.

The programming cycle is simple. Write the code in a latex block. Run make. The makefile extracts the code from the latex, compiles it, runs the test cases (also in the latex), and regenerates the PDF. Code and explanations are always up to date and in sync.

I have found no better toolset.

However, I've watched dozens of online courses taught by CMU/MIT/Stanford/Cornell/etc. There is a huge quality difference between my education and those top-tier schools.

Tenure track basically requires someone to advance to the leading edge of a field (or start their own field) and then become recognized for their research. You have about 5 years to make an impact or you won't get on the tenure track. Being taught by the leading edge researchers is a huge advantage.

So, given a higher quality of teaching excellence, higher standards of work, and access to the leading lights in a field, it seems likely that top-tier school graduates would be much more likely to advance their field. It is not always true. Sometimes tenure becomes "on the job retirement".

Being a professor is a job skill. In any job there is a 'bias' toward top-tier people who have demonstrated success. Look at company CEOs. If they have led a successful company they are much more likely to be chosen to lead over someone new.

There is also the "who you know bias", as in any field. When making a tenure decision would you weigh a recommendation from me or from the professor at a top-tier school who taught you, who you work with, and who you respect?

Sure, there is "bias". But that is true of any top-tier profession. If Dolly Parton said of someone "He's the best singer / songwriter I know", would you hire that person to write your songs?

Hydrogen makes steel brittle.

Hydrogen WILL leak through any joint you make.

Hydrogen flame is invisible. You can't feel it when you are next to it but it will burn you if you enter the flame area.

Hydrogen is energy storage, not an energy source.

Hydrogen in certain percentages is a REALLY good fuel-air explosive. Sigh.

Platinum will self-ignite hydrogen.

Don't try this at home.

I'm looking into ideas like "push learning into the fingers". For example, when you learn to type you gradually move a computed action (finding the right key) into a twitch reaction (moving it into the fingers). One way to do this is to dump the state machine from an FPGA, add a new state that captures the action, and reloading the FPGA. There are lots of issues to study and puzzles to solve.

For example, if one FPGA is using a neural net to train, can a "piece" of that neural net be "extracted" into a state machine state? I'm experimenting with the interaction / combination of neural nets and state machines. How can a "subset of neural net learning" become an independent state?

I've not found any research on the intersection of state machines and neural nets, nor any research on the idea of "moving behavior into the fingers". I haven't found any research on self-modifying FPGAs, nor any research on self-modifying FPGAs using genetic programming.

I want to be able to A/B test one FPGA output against another.

A single big FPGA requires proprietary software that can't handle the dump/reload idea. Multiple FPGAs have very limited pathways for interaction. Neither seem to be the best medium.

I wish I had such a robot for such an experiment.

Thanks for the pointer.

In particular, the members of the appropriations committee have staff working on the bill, including the republican members. The republicans on the committee are: Shelby (Vice Chair), McConnell, Collins, Murkowski, Graham, Blunt, Moran, Hoeven, Boozman, Capito, Kennedy, Hyde-Smith, Braun, Hagerty, and Rubio.

She writes "They did not tell us ahead of time, no one had any idea." ...

I would find it hard to believe that McConnell was unaware of what is in a 1.5 trillion dollar appropriations bill.

If Marjorie found out about this bill for the first time when the bill was published then it appears that her staff is not doing their job. Or perhaps it might help if she spent less time doing podcasts and more time with her staff on her committees.

Oh, wait... Marjorie HAS no committee assignments. It appears she has a lot of free time to cash her paycheck without doing any work. I believe the correct term is a "no-show job".

Wikipedia: A no-show job is a paid position that ostensibly requires the holder to perform duties, but for which no work, or even attendance, is actually expected. The awarding of no-show jobs is a form of political or corporate corruption. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-show_job )

What this has to do with hacker news is unclear to me.

The Unimate was hydraulic. It had a normal working weight at full length of about 400 pounds. It was VERY fast. You REALLY don't want to be anywhere within its reach.

You can think in any language but as noted by Wittgenstein “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." For example, while it is technically possible in any language, the ability to write self-modifying code is unlikely to be thought of in most languages. Try writing non-object oriented code in Java.

The goal for a 'standard' is not ossifying a language. Don't pretend that Python3 is in any way related to Python. Call it Snake or something else. Then 'python' code continues to work and 'snake' continues to work.

The confusion, especially evident in C++, is that 'C++' is at least half-a-dozen languages related by chance. When asked if you know C++, you really should reply with the 'standard' that you claim to know. There are 6 C++ "standards" that I'm aware of. I understand there is a 7th due to arrive in 2023. I wonder if 'concepts' will be in the new 'standard'. If so, do you know what it means to inherit 'up the add chain' versus regular inheritance? If not, can you still claim to 'know C++'?

It takes a LONG time to get "command of a language". Reading other people's code is a great way to see how much you don't know. For example, did you know that in C++ you can dynamically create a class and an instance IN THE ARGUMENT LIST OF A FUNCTION? It can take years to really "know" a language, much longer than the change time of languages.

(Philosophy): Does the table exist? ... We can only admit sense data.

(Quantum): Does the table exist? ... It only exists when measured.

(Comp. Sci): Does the table exist? ... That depends. The table definition implies a table that does not (yet) exist. Instantiating the table makes it exist, except in the case where the table is dynamically allocated, in which case it is partial.

(AI): Does the table exist? ... The neural net is undecided whether this is a table or a chair.

(Politics): Does the table exist? ... Let's table that resolution and never speak of it again.

(Amazon): Does the table exist? ... Your table shipment has been delayed.

(Dad): Does the table exist? ... My broken little toe is permanent evidence that the table exists.

(Me): Does the table exist? ... define 'exists'

(Wife): Does the table exist? ... OMG, can you be more pedentic?