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inawarminister

307 karma · joined December 11, 2015

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inawarminister··on The Kingdom of Lydia minted gold, silver coins (2022)
There's also cowry-as-coinage, which seems to be very old and very distributed (Africans, Arabs, Indians, Southeast Asians, and East Asians were still using cowry for international trade to the dawn of the Industrial Age)

Indeed, the Chinese kanji for money stems from Cowry. 貝

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9D

Incidentally, as an Indonesian, I just recognized the shells we children used to play was exactly this species! Ancient currency, of which millions from thousands of disparate culture used to toil and fight for, used for children game tokens... Haha.

inawarminister··on Elixir and Machine Learning in 2024 so far: MLIR, Arrow, structured LLM, etc.
I think Numerical Elixir (NX) allows for GPU programming. It uses XLA for scheduling computation?
inawarminister··on SpaceX has grown to 87% of the tonnage to orbit
Teleoperated remote presence robots that can do the majority of what astronauts need to do and allow for experienced operators to do EVA manually if needed (due to crossover between mind and machine)

But also human cognition augmentation

inawarminister··on Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
Thanks! The comparison table is really enlightening. I think I'll try hacking up Colemak first with layer 3-6, but if I can't make it I'll try habituating with KOY layout.
inawarminister··on Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
I like to write Clojure, and getting away from home row to write the parentheses was... annoying. I did try (and my fingers still remember!) Colemak a few years back, though.

I found Neo2, which is a German keyboard layout with 5-6 layers of keys (which is ironic since I don't actually... speak German). Tried Neo2 vanilla and Bone/other layout, but nowadays I'm just using QWERTZ + Neo2 layers, which is available for Linux and Windows/Mac with utilities.

Just look at the following layout!! https://dl.neo-layout.org/grafik/bilder-einzeln/flat/neo_qwe...

Now I'm thinking, maybe modifying Colemak with Neo2-style layer 3-6 might be perfect for me, and a few others...?

inawarminister··on [dead]
Yes.

“I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?"

- Marcus Aurelius.

inawarminister··on Demographics professor warns that by 2531, everyone in Japan will be named Sato
Wouldn't the Arabic naming tradition, having patronymic, location (like German noble names), and 'nicknames' be more of a solution?

e.g. Jason Brahamsson "the Tall" of West London

inawarminister··on Xiaomi bets big on its new electric vehicle – targets 20M premium users
Yeah, most Xiaomi users flash their phones with custom or AOSP ROM for a reason

Xiaomi SW isn't as bad as other Chinese manufacturers, but still...

inawarminister··on Things I like about Gleam's Syntax
Does Elixir's Set-theoretic Types support declaring restricted subset of types for modelling purposes as often done by ML programmers? The "Type-Oriented Programming" or "Domain-driven Design"?
inawarminister··on Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?
We know that Minoans were actively trading to Egypt by around 1600-1400BCE before they get suddenly replaced by Mycenaean Greeks, so there seems to be some support for that hypothesis...
inawarminister··on Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?
Hmm. Didn't 6000-4000BC Northwest Africa was part of Green Sahara? The Sahara drying up was part of the Civilization building in the Nile. Maybe Egypt had some myths about the earliest eras and remember a large, very large area of fertile savanna and forest of pre-Egyptians and pre-Berbers, and Plato got Atlantis from that?
inawarminister··on Israel shot down a ballistic missile in space for the first time
eh, algebra and algorithms were invented by people there. Agreed with modern history though; certainly post European colonization something broke. Especially as the colonization hasn't ended yet.
inawarminister··on Sally Ignore Previous Instructions
Reminds me of quoting ' operator in Lisps, transforming executable code to data.

e.g. from Clojure:

"

(quote form)

Yields the unevaluated form.

user=> '(a b c)

(a b c)

Note there is no attempt made to call the function a. The return value is a list of 3 symbols." [0]

Training an LLM wholly using a Scheme dialect might be interesting, hmm.

[0] https://clojure.org/reference/special_forms

inawarminister··on Google AI chief says there's a 50% chance we'll hit AGI in just 5 years
Running local AI models in your own hardware will be the ultimate case of freedom.
inawarminister··on Things I like about Gleam's Syntax
I'm a bit late, but I just found out that there's a version 3 library for Gleam called Lustre, which is an Elm-like framework for frontend. And people seem to be able to make it work with Phoenix (compile to javascript in /assets/ folder directly), LiveView should also work but haven't seen anyone trying it yet.

There's also a React wrapper

inawarminister··on Extreme parkour with legged robots
only if we can crack transferrable skill-memories. I think the current thinking is that each human have different neuron nets patterns though mostly in the same general regions
inawarminister··on A look inside a Sharia Courtroom
Taliban cleaned this practise up btw, their whole raison d'etre was fighting the Bacha Bazi practise by the warlords in 1990s. And the Republic's warlords between 2001-2021.
inawarminister··on How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]
Yes, though it makes sense as majority of Europe and Europe-descended cultures are Indo-Europeans, with Indians and Iranians as the other major cultures.

We know much about Proto-Semitic AND Proto-Afro-Asiatic, thankfully, due to the antiquity of recorded Semitic languages in the Near East. Proto-Austronesian seems to be clear too with the 600+ languages we have access to. Unfortunately the languages between the three (Caucasians, language isolates, Tibeto-Burman, Andamanese, Turko-Mongol-Yeniseian Altaic* sprachbund etc) are much more obscure.

Yeniseian (the originator of such words as Tengri, Kha(g)an, etc) being connected to Native American Apache language was pretty amazing and evidence of the importance of paleo-linguistics in finding out informations about our ancestors

inawarminister··on Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?
HEMA. Historical European Martial Arts.

I started when I was writing a novel with swordsmen and want to research historical moves, ended up getting addicted and now am trying to grow the sport in Asia. Guess it is how things start anyway.

inawarminister··on Impending Collapse: Our System Is on the Cusp of Failure
>That general improvement, over the long haul, in the material conditions of people lends an arc to the human story. History is not cyclical, like the seasons of the year. Rather, history is the story of a fundamental inversion in progress. We are slowly graduating from top-down systems of political control to bottom-up systems. Like an iceberg rolling over in the open oceans, human society has been transiting from despotism toward democracy over the millennia.

Very much disagree. He talked about Roman Empire's (and late Republic) massive inequality, but he forgot about Athens, where Western notions of democracy were born and strangled by kings and republics (then Emperors). We have had peasants republics in Dark Age Europe (Frisia, San Marino, even Venezia and Genoa and a dozen elective city-states).

In Asia, my tribe has had majestic maharajas that spun the entire region, who then retreated to their mountain refuges to rule as sacral kings, only to lose power to bottoms-up tribal and village councils that revolted into theocracy only to be subsumed into the colonial state.

Politics is downstream of culture and economics, not the cause of the latter.

inawarminister··on Extras worry they'll be replaced by AI. Hollywood is already doing body scans
Famously, Waterloo (1970) used 17,000 Soviet Union soldiers and (Cold War-era) cavalry brigade as extras.

They also drilled, slept, and fought like real 1815 infantrymen and cavalrymen, as it was.

inawarminister··on Crystal 1.9.1
This, I still think myself as a Clojurist mainly but Elixir's Nx/Bumblebee, Elixirscript ability to use Mix.install per script file, and calling into NIF/FFI codes (as seen in Nx itself) is really strong story IMO.

Now, if only Crystal can make for a strong NIF language for BEAM...

inawarminister··on Dusk OS: 32-bit Forth OS. Useful during first stage of civilizational collapse
Or waterwheels, which would work most of the time (unless there's drought) and historically the main non-animal powered motive force for most cultures pre-steam (alright, wind too in the form of windmills and sails, but water always flow in rivers...)
inawarminister··on NixOS Linux review, is it the alternative to Debian and Archlinux?
guix-nonguix (nonfree) is a bit hush-hush but in my experience works well enough for all hardware drivers and proprietary-adjacent softwares that I need
inawarminister··on Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
In my opinion, Nim is too broad. I did some code in Nim to extend/make Python ML (Huggingface) faster and Nimpy was very good. Then I tried to learn how to use Nim for systems programming and barely any guide exist except for open-source libraries.

In my opinion, Nim's ability to be compiled to C, C++, and JS make materials for new users too defragmented (this also almost occur with Clojure, IMO, though JVM/JS/and now Dart targeting make sense with their various niches). And all the tricky parts like Orc/Arc/no GC.

But I really love the Python + Pascal syntax, to be honest. Maybe even more than Lisps.

I really wish I could buy the new Nim book but it's kinda hard as a 3rd worlder to import dead-tree books. Unfortunate.

inawarminister··on Companies in Japan opting for select offices to work in English
As far from what I know (I study in Japan in a non-technical English language program) people do have been able to work and live in Japan without knowing Japanese at all, especially with Google Translate coming.

However! It's quite hard to deal with the bureaucracy if you stick with GTranslate only. But for other purposes, it's very fine. The Japanese themselves are not into small talks so...

inawarminister··on Rondel Dagger
HEMA wrestling and grappling are mostly done with this dagger as the main killing point, so it might be interesting to watch some Kampfringen/Abrazaré videos to see how they might have been used
inawarminister··on Wall Street scooped up a third of Texas single family homes sold last year (2022)
The difference between Occupy Wall Street to Rainbow Capitalism was pretty striking. Same demographics, very different reaction to the capital class meddling in.
inawarminister··on Debian GNU/Hurd 2023
I just read on info guix that they have a setting to use GNU/Hurd as kernel, maybe that could be fun virtualized.
inawarminister··on Show HN: Verify LLM Generated Code with a Spreadsheet
You know, I wonder if Python allows you to check code shape and if valid, eval them (yes this could be dangerous)

I wonder if Clojure can do it... I think the spec can check if function-calls and data given have valid types and reasonable unit/quantity each... Hmm.

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