gpderetta

> There must be some perceptible difference between an intelligence w/ consciousness and one without

I think there are differences, and I think we can make good guesses, but I'm not sure we can reliably classify a P-zombie from a normal human from their behaviour with 100% accuracy..

I'm using two variables because numeric literals have the wrong type and bit_cast rejects transmutations between differently sized types.

I could have written it as x = bit_cast<bool>(char{2}), but does it really make a difference?

I don't know enough rust to know what's the difference between its const and c++ constexpr. It might not be a meaningful difference in C++.

> So this is an impedance mismatch, you've got Roman numerals and you can't see why metric units are a good idea, and I've got the positional notation and so it's obvious to me. I am not going to be able to explain why this is a good idea in your notation, the brilliance vanishes during translation.

There are plenty of rust users on HN that are capable of kind, constructive, and technically interesting conversations. Unfortunately there are a small few that will destroy any goodwill the rest of the community works hard to generate.

Great post.

Ah, interesting, so wfm does both the wait and the acquire!

When using eventfd it is indeed annoying having to both poll and later read to disarm the object (there are epoll tricks that can be used but are not generalizable).

The signal+wait is also a primitive that it is hard to implement atomically on posix.

This comes up often, but what can it do that poll can't?

More or less Wine + some experimental patches not yet I twgrated in mainstream wine + a buch of DirectX translation libraries + close steam integration.

The idea has been around for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

> President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the United States Armed Forces to construct the [...] Golden Dome

Well, that's just taking the piss!

I doubt a MW laser can reliably intercept a reentry vehicle. A lot of energy is lost through the atmosphere when intercepting a warhead in space, from a land based laser. Once it reenters the atmosphere there might not be enough time. You also need to burn through the heatshield that the warhead is equipped with for reentry.

Even if you can can deliver enough energy for long enough, there is no fuel to burn and it might not be easy to detonate or disable the warhead.

For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.

But that's very much not near-future.

Lasers might still be useful for rockets, drones and cruise missiles of course.

bit_cast and reinterpret_cast do different things: one works at the value level, the second preserves address identity (and it is problematic from an aliasing point of view).

Not sure what any of this has to do with initialization though.

FWIW, the direct translation of your rust code is:

    constexpr char y = 2;
    constexpr bool x = std::bit_cast<bool>(y);

It fails on clang for y=2 and works for y=1, exactly like rust;

GCC produces UB for y=2, I don't know if it is a GCC bug or the standard actually allows this form of UB to be ignored at contexpr time.

What is the rust equivalent of reinterpret_cast and does it work at constexpr time?

edit: I guess it would be an unsafe dereference of a casted pointer. Does it propagate constants?

I have used C++ for 20 years without LSP, but now I wouldn't want to go back to a plain editor.

First of all mem::transmute is like bit_cast (which works perfectly fine in constexpr context), not reinterpret cast.

Second, this compiles just fine:

   constexpr int ivalue = 1;
   constexpr bool bvalue {ivalue};

This fails at compile time (invalid narrowing):

    constexpr int ivalue = 2;
    constexpr bool bvalue {ivalue};

Note we don't need bit_cast for this example as int to bool conversions are allowed in C++.

After dismissing it for a long time, I have come around to the philosophical zombie argument. I do not believe that LLMs are conscious, but I also no longer believe that consciousness is a prerequisite for intelligence. I think at this point it is hard to deny that LLMs do not possess some form of intelligence (although not necessarily human-like). I think P-zombies is a fitting description.

> In "one shot" mode it can't be Turing complete, but in a weird technicality neither does your computer have an infinite tape

Nor our brains, in fact.

> It's like approaching an Italian who has never learned or heard any other language to speak French

Interesting similitude, because I expect an Italian to be able to communicate somewhat successfully with a French person (and vice versa) even if they do not share a language.

The two languages are likely fairly similar in latent space.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

-- from the jargon file

Of course you don't spawn a thread from the signal handler. You start it first thing in main and park it waiting for a wakeup.

> This doesn't really have anything to do with async signal safety.

TLS not being async signal safe is explicitly called out on the article as the reason the token is sent in clear text.

> Handle it as a synchronous event in a main loop

Of course of you rearchitect the client there are better solutions. But again, the article mentions that's not planned for now.

By comparison, delegating cancellation to a background background thread can be done non-intrusively. In principe no code outside the cancel path need changing.

Edit: the article mentions that there is a refactor in the works to implement cancel over tls [1]. Turns out that they decided to use a thread (with a pipe for signaling).

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/DEY0N7FS8NCU.1F7Q...

TLS is not async signal safe. But having a dedicated thread whose responsibility is to only send cancel tokens via a TLS connection and is woken up by a posix semaphore seems a small, self contained change that doesn't require any major refactoring.

> Make sure to check /active

Thanks, TIL.

The author is running the benchmark multiple times with the same random seed to discover how long a pattern can the predictor learn.

Typical branch predictors can both learns patterns (even very long patterns) and use branch history (the probability of a branch being taken depends on the path taken to reach that branch). They don't normally look at data other than branch addresses (and targets for indirect branches).

True. Yet he still managed to do less damage.

Ah, I remember Cosmos and SCOPE from my time at MS ~15 years ago! It was actually pretty cool technology. So is it still around?

wouldn't a concurrent change without synchronization be UB anyway? Also parent wants to cache the address, not the value (but you have to cache the value if you want to optimize manually)

ok, then it is nuts that __getattr__ (itself a specially blessed function) is not required to be pure at least from the caller point of view.

MSVC used to break library ABI pretty much on every release. They stopped after overwhelming customer demand.

I don't understand what are you saying. The journalist published an article claiming that a missile struck without being intercepted (although with no damage). The gamblers wanted the journalist to retract and say that the missile was intercepted.

Are you saying that the gamblers were actually the censors or that the reality was that the missile was indeed intercepted and somehow the censors forced the journalist to say it wasn't?

If the rules used to compute the index change (as opposed to the index composition of course), are index funds obliged to follow them no matter what? I assume this is very fund dependent, but would be interesting to know what most guarantee.

Trying not to spoil a 40+ year old story, but Asimov eventually retconned that the flourishing of humanity was driven by a benevolent AI behind the curtain.

For many, the Culture is an utopia to aspire to, for some is something to run away as fast as possible. Banks himself described the dichotomy.

It is quite independent in Italy actually. The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.