jfoutz

Take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

Cyc is sort of like that, but for everything. Not just a small limited world. I believe it didn’t work out because it’s really hard.

I went to a small show the other day, and was thinking about how tough it is to package up that feeling. An audio recording or a video or photograph can capture some, kinda. Sort of a sad shadow of the real thing.

Writing is the only thing I could think of that could come close to evoking the feeling. Clearly, you wouldn't hear the songs, but the feeling is so hard to convey any other way.

Hemingway's voice is good for telling the kinds of stories Hemingway liked to tell. I've started Lolita, but never quite got around to finishing it.

I think, for some ideas, the only hope of communicating them is through writing, and trying to connect them to shared ideas. Some writers have a very lush style because they write lush stories.

I'm not an English major, I don't have a lot of tools for critical analysis of books. But I read Snowcrash about a dozen times. It gets a lot of criticism, I think, because it's a weird disjointed set of short stories, each featuring a neat idea, that are all kind of related. I love that book. It's like each section is a facet of an intricate gemstone. Slowly, over many reads, I finally put together the connections and the relationships.

We're pretty good at gathering up and packaging drama and comedy to sell soap. Deeper stories, more complex relationships, more complex environments are so hard to capture, much less convey to a message reciever. some messages require a lot of work to understand. They're not so good for selling soap.

in general, sure, be tight with writing. But sometimes you need those apparently superfluous words to really draw the reader into the world, or the experience. I think, at least in part, the work of the reader helps drive that emotional link.

I read your comment and was all ready to write a, I guess, rant about joint probability distributions and costs associated with tests and on and on. You know, a good old rant. But I took a moment to actually read the article. Low and behold, the first line, or perhaps the actual headline,

"Wealthy People Are Getting Full-Body Scans. Early Detection or Unnecessary?"

"Wealthy" appears 3 times. Multiple allusions to income, "summer in the Hamptons" and such.

I'd need to reflect a bit, but I think I'm pretty comfortable with applying FDA requirements and prohibiting any health claims, but feel free to let the snake-oil salesmen fleece away.

As an aside, I wanted to say snake-oil alone, but I learned recently snake-oil itself got a bad rap - https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-snake-oil-got-...

Does that apply to international airports?

oh, ha. yeah, that was sort of the root of the joke. companies like Celera, or whoever had the money would write a (large) check for big iron.

smaller organizations were realizing they could get slower computers power pretty cheap, and they could get a whole lot of them. There was a little flurry of activity with flocking algorithms, objective-c had a little renaissance due to swarm computing. probably the most famous and lasting was map-reduce, from alphabet, but they were called google back then.

there were a bunch of clever little tricks, like channel bonded network cards to make multiple cards look like one fast card, so you could double or triple bandwidth.

The beowulf cluster joke was kind of the spirit of the scrappy, make something cool out of junk approach while calling companies like sun, hp, compaq dinosaurs. and it continued for a while with people building stuff like this - https://ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/ncsa-creates-sony-p... I think there was some weirdness with export controls of ps2's for this kind of stuff.

I don't remember what pc chip was the new hotness back then, it was a good 20 years ago and my memory is dim.

but that, I think, captures the gist of the meme.

I know hn isn't the place for memes, but, I'm obligated. Imagine what they could do with a beowulf cluster of pentium pros?

I'm sure someone will have a much better recommendation. Do you have an old physics book? Working a few or a lot of simple voltage divider problems, to just really nail down V=IR is helpful. a ton of digital stuff can be thought of as snapshots between two states. might give you some help reading schematics as well.

a pretty ham fisted analogy, imagine a full glass of water on the left, and an empty glass of water on the right. you pour the water from the full glass into the empty glass. There is a BOATLOAD of physics happening there. but all you really care about is Left glass full -> left glass empty. easy peasy.

if you're comfortable with https://nandgame.com you've pretty much got all you need to know how computers work. the last bit is pretty much, how do you use a transistor to make a nand gate? it blew my mind to find out it's just - https://mathcenter.oxford.emory.edu/site/cs170/nandFromTrans...

Stuff that's changing is tougher, like radios or whatever. digital is sort of steady -> chaos -> steady. analog you care a lot about all the little partial derivatives.

The ben eater videos maybe? https://eater.net/8bit/ He'll walk you through a lot of basic electronics in a pretty casual way.

I wish I could give you something more "sure fire way to learn electronics" but my knowledge is pretty haphazard. that stuff helped me.

Amazon, Alphabet, Meta. Who are the F and G, and where is apple?

It’s a Roman numeral joke.

you can hack up eval, map, and apply in c without too much headache. I'd recommend int char and some sort of string representation as primitive. I'd also recommend not garbage collecting, and just malloc everything. Like, a weekend of effort for a really really bad implementation. So much magic disappears. Well, I guess this sort of assumes you know what a pointer is. If not, it's going to be a tough slog regardless.

as a second pass, check out the later parts of sicp and expose some array type, and implement the gc in scheme.

also I'll never pass up an opportunity to reference 3imp. http://agl.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf

I know, I know, scheme is a vespa and CL is a Ferrari. For someone who learns more bottom up, the bare minimum of scheme, but all the way is amazing.

That looks really nice. I'm sure it's a great solution for lots of developers.

I think I'm going to stick with nix. VM's, docker, orbstack and nix all seem to let me make a machine that looks like "X". The thing is, docker and VM's provide an abstraction that works 95% of the time, but that last 5% is awful (I don't know about orbstack).

Nix, by all appearances (and my limited experience) is much much worse up front. there's a lot to learn. But in exchange I get to keep control. This abstraction is wrong, we're not doing that, we're doing this. I'm not asking, I'm telling.

So, Mac doesn't come with a package manager. There are things you can do with port and brew, to alleviate some pain.

Me personally, I fool around with a lot of languages, and sometimes I don't quite keep every project up to date with the latest version. For work, the situation is even more challenging, because I don't have the authority to go tell teams to upgrade or not upgrade, but sometimes I need to build their projects.

None of this is really Mac specific. I used to use virtual box for this, which worked pretty well. I could set up a baseline environment and snapshot new boxes with new language revs.

Docker can kind of cover this, but I tend to over do it, breaking things out into the one you build with, and the one you run with, and it's fine, but it's a lot to keep in my head. So, I'm kinda flakey about that.

Now, I'm slowly building up some proficiency with nix. I think this is what I really want, to swap out the whole chain of system dependencies, and build docker containers or vms out of that if I need them.

Perhaps I'm a poor sysadmin. _everything_ locally installed makes things real weird after a while (years).

Every human, everywhere must contend with large men coming and taking their stuff. I have very little to no first hand experience with alternatives to liberal democracy. Persuading my neighbors to take more or less seems a whole lot easier than any of the alternatives I'm aware of.

They might be pissed when they find out the vast majority of cures kill the patient.

I'm happy to give lisp credit for everything cool.

but Common Lisp has all the good stuff you need to manage different generations of objects under changing classes, not the least of which is jumping into the running system and examining the running state. warnings and errors about redefinition, maybe jump under a different package to manage generations. state and functions are separate, thanks to dynamic dispatch.

Ruby, on the other hand, rewrites the class. hope all the data and functions are forwards and backwards compatible! good luck.

It’s something else. Monkey patching comes from Ruby, since classes are open, you can change implementations at runtime. I’m not quite as familiar with meta magic, but I believe it has similar characteristics. Sorta like dynamically injected accessors via autoload in perl.

There are cool tricks, but they come at a cost. Both for the reader of code, and the compiler of code.

I'm not an expert, but think about linear algebra.

you can write each dimension value in terms of time t(a) -> t(b)

x = sin(t) y = 2cos(t)

or whatever. if there is a symmetry, one of those equations should cancel out.

another way to look at it is, if you can always get x, and know y "for free", or the other way around, then x and y aren't really independent. there's some other thing, like sqrt(t) that's generating both values.

I'm new to nix/nixos but gradually building up my environment.

it's like having your whole OS in git. it's amazing. want to try out some nightly build? no problem.

on most computers (personal, home computers) the various lib dirs get scary after a while. repoquery can help, but is kind of a hassle. if some executable `foo` depends on some specific behavior in some version of some library, it's fine. that weird library can stay in place, I can try out nightly's of foo, can always rollback to the system that used to work, and can flip to the new foo when it's ready.

I think it's a good practice to wipe and re provision from time to time to make sure provisioning and backups actually work, but like, you can screw around with _crazy_ things and not really have to worry about having to rebuild the whole thing. (well, I haven't yet) I still will, because that's how I am. but I can do it when I feel like it, not when I fucked up. it's so easy to un fuck a nix system.

I guess the big caveat is, this is a hobby. I haven't used nix for work. Back in the day, I did support docker in production when the kernel patches were coming pretty quickly. Finding the right balance of patch level, and libc version, that would support docker, and the other stuff that needed to run was a pretty complicated dance, and missing a step would be, not great. Knowing what I know now, even as a hobbyist, I probably could have made my life a lot easier back then.

not quite the same, but the police used to work the same way. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constabl...

   Traditionally, householders served in the office of constable by appointment 
   or rotation. During their year of office they performed their duties part-time
   alongside their normal employment. Similarly, householders were expected to 
   serve by rotation on the nightly watch. From the late seventeenth century,
   however, many householders avoided these obligations by hiring deputies to 
   serve in their place.

Essentially being a police man was sort of like jury duty.

this is still my favorite. https://oimo.io/works/life/ That dev has a bunch of cool projects.

Printing press. broad access to clean water. transistor.

Wasn’t the paper leaked by the industry guy? Didn’t he edit it to include himself?

He might have jazzed up some other wording as well.

It’s worth giving the benefit of the doubt to the final product. Let’s get some replication (or not) and go from there.

It's been a while since I had an anthropology class. If I remember correctly, it's really tied to how harsh the environment was. So natives in Alaska had to hunt or starve. For equatorial people, the stakes were much lower. There was an abundance of alternatives.

One way to look at it, how much art did they produce? Lots of art? Food was probably pretty easy to come by. Scratch a line on a log? Those folks worked _hard_ to survive.

I'm sure there were lean times for everybody. I'm not trying to say you or parent poster are wrong, I'm saying it's a big world, and all of those things and more were true for somebody, somewhere.

All my knowledge of keming came from roundabout sources, but I think there are some pretty serous sources. I've never gotten around to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_Typesetting but that's a pretty serious start.

There's the normal stuff about rivers and lakes, but from the game Toronto is a kinda funny one, To ronto, what's ronto? why are you going there? I think there's a good amount of looking for potential mis-parses, and making sure the reader never slips out of reading, and is forced to re parse.

Yet another username password pair? Yet another credit card entry?

Nah, let jfoutz pay the fraction of a penny and get no ads. Content producer gets paid, and I get to read the article.

The site can choose, based on attested properties to send to an ad network, or just take the money from the user.

There are other ways to do it, but this makes it a standard.

It provides a uniform service for ensuring a client has desired properties.

That’s kinda tricky to do well. Traffic for monitoring, you can do with a jwt, but like, enabling chunked transfer in python request lib is a problem you discover. An array of attestors could guarantee feature sets.

This kinda seems like a fantastic way to implement micro payments. The site owner sets up a attestor that knows they’ve paid.

I hate Wei in general, but it really could open up control over bots and paid access.

Yes. Applets were very slow to load, and more dangerous than flash. I think applet was the first tag removed. But at the time, you could load up excel in a tag with the right com magic.

The early web boom was wild.

A friend, college educated responsible adult, went to the petrified forest in Arizona. Park ranger gave the whole talk about how rare and special these rocks are, and how they're disappearing because people are stealing them. The ranger indicated there might not be a park in the future, because so much is going missing. She had an immediate impulse to steal a rock. She claims she didn't act on it, and I believe her.

I think there's some inherit psychology that's tough to get around, some "I better grab one while I still can" deep down part of our reptile brain. People are still animals. Out on vacation they may not be fully engaging their critical thinking skills.

I think, far and away, the most effective preservation is Pele's curse - https://www.hawaii-guide.com/why-you-should-never-take-lava-...

Total fabrication by the parks service. They show you the rocks people have sent back, to lift the curse.

If you're fully engaged and thinking critically, it's harmless. If you're not, it encourages good behavior.

I'm not a big fan of marketing, but the way you tell the story really does have a huge impact on guest behavior.

I get the joke.

I would absolutely buy a tool factory factory. Tempering the steel alone would be worth it.

I’d even be interested in one more layer up, for access to car, rocket and chip factories.