okaleniuk

Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."

Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.

I love it!

In fact I employed the same idea for the slide stack site I use for teaching. Not exactly "URL is an app" but "URL is a slide"

https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/_1.html?sequence=...

The same consideration applies. No backend, no storage, also no user data collection, no authorization, no hurdles in general. Everyone can use it.

My point is, it's easier to remove a spymark than a watermark.

Try.

The vulnerability of steganography is that is has to pretend that signal is noise. Remove the noise - and the signal is gone. I'm pretty sure that the simplest gaussian blur will remove the spymark from any picture.

Or... add some noise. Just align the last bit of every pixel channel with a random bit sequence - and Bob's your uncle.

I'm working on a highly specialized isosurface extraction algorithm for 3D-printable surface-based lattices.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/okaleniuk_isosurface-mesh-stl...

The lattice configuration comes from a conventional triangle mesh, so you can prepare it with any STL editor of your choice, and the lattice shape comes from a precalculated Fourier polynomial in barycentric coordinates.

https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/barycentric_fouri...

Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.

Publishers have their KPIs too.

Exactly.

And if you play by the spirit and not by the rules, you're fucked. Because, with masters, it takes about a year to get to the first publishable result, and about a year to publish it in a respected journal. And that's the happy pass. You might get an extra rejection, or fall into the back of the publishing queue. This could cost you three or six month easily.

The masters program in our uni is 1.5 years long.

Academic publishing is in deep crisis. It didn't start with AI, and it probably wouldn't end with it. The crisis came from trying to turn academia into a factory of some sort.

I coauthored 4 papers this Summer. All bona fide: no AI slop, no fake data, all genuine research papers. But the substance of each is barely enough for a paragraph in a paper I would have gladly written instead.

But I have KPIs. And KPIs don't care about quality, quality is unaccountable. So it is in my best interest to publish a lot of "barely science" instead of spending a year or two writing a good paper that will take another year to publish, and by then my contract will end, and I'll have no numbers to show.

Has anyone ever argued that AC is luxury? This century? Really? I believe, the division goes between harm/comfort and not luxury/necessity.

I don't have AC at home. Some think I don't install it because I somehow don't get hot in summer or cold at winter. It's the other way around. We, people, have one of the best thermoregulation systems among animals, our whole skin is essentially a huge cooling system. The only way to render it incapable is... stop using it for a prolonged amount of time. It's use it or lose it all over again.

If you don't believe me, read what ultra-marathon runners have to say. If a trained athlete can survive Badwater, almost everyone can train themselves to survive a European heatwave.

Sure, some people can't. Some need AC because of cardiovascular conditions. It's fine, let them have it. But some people can't walk because of musculoskeletal conditions, but no one would argue that a wheelchair is a necessity.

It's not just AI. The whole business of academic publishing is a mess. Can't imagine anyone outside academia wanting to get there. In theory, it should have been a bridge between people who do interesting things that benefit society. In practice, it's a huge indifference machine powered by the institutions KPIs and benefiting no one but Elseveir.

The alternative is to use your network directly. The very notion of "I'll publish my work and someone will notice me" is wrong. Most people in academia are too concentrated on their own work to care about yours. The only minority that cares is already in your contact list.

I'm exploring triply periodic but non-minimal surfaces. https://codeberg.org/okaleniuk/faitps

Triply periodic minimal surfaces are the golden standard in thermal management, acoustics, and even medical applications. But minimality itself doesn't contribute much to practicality. We use them because they are simply studied better than the non-minimal surfaces.

So I'm studying the non-minimals. They are much more governable, what I link to is a demo of a surface builder with two levels of control. Next, they are conjugatable including conjugations with different period of self (that will be the following paper), they generalize nicely to non-periodic or partially periodic surfaces, and they work in other space configurations. E. g. I'm now playing with bi-periodic curves that cover the 2D space with self-replicating hexagons.

If all that I'm experimenting on today in 2D will turn out well in 3D too, we'll have a whole new direction in implicit modeling.

Classics!

There is a different take on Lisp in Python - fakelisp. It's literally Lisp in Python, not an interpreter, but a syntax sugar library that allows embedding Lisp snippets into valid Python.

https://codeberg.org/okaleniuk/fakelisp

    from fakelisp import *

    # And now you can start mixing Python and LISP
    X = (BEGIN
        (SET (F) (LAMBDA (X)
            (IF (EQ (X) (1))
                (1)
                (MUL (X) (F (SUB (X) (1)))))))

        (LIST (F (4)) (42)))

    # Back to Python any time
    print "x: ", str(X)

This is one of the most unexpected ecranisations ever. The book is great on its own, but I would never assumed it could become a film. The topic itself is a bit heavy, and I somehow assumed that most of the people pan Szablovski interviewed at one point or another are already dead. This is going to be a fascinating watch.

Walking doesn't change as often as C++ standard.

There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime

There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.

I exploit the similar idea for teaching: https://lnkd.in/gsySKda4

Students are lazy, in a good way, so they are more likely to run things on their own and play with interactive bits if the whole lecture is just one link.

AI will definitely make more people thing about verification. Formal or otherwise.

I'm working on a collection of stackable interactive slides for teaching numerical methods and operational research.

https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/

The idea here is, one can pick the slides they want and arrange them into a sequence right in the URL. This way, there is no registration, no user data collection, no persistent state even. You just pick the slides, teach your material, and move on.

It's very raw, I still want to add a convenient sequence constructor, a "blank" slide so you could display your own content in it, and a similar quiz page. But I already used some of the slides for teaching, students seem to like them.

Hopefully, I'll have the rest done by the beginning of the spring semester.

The most interesting thing in this whole picture is not AGI, it's how the collective intelligence works. CEOs claim the AGI is near because that's how they manipulate the public. But the public knows that it's only a manipulation. So how come the manipulation is still possible?

Nokia snake is a pinnacle of technology really. It all rolls down hill from there.

Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"

The Fiat 124 was actually a pretty good car for its era. Russians improved its suspension, refitted the engine, and messed up the hydraulics. Still, pretty good car for the 60s. And then, they continued to produce the same car with miniscule modifications until 2010s.

That's the problem with authoritarian regimes. You can buy a plant by a fiat (pun intended), but you can't make a decent car by a decree.

Is software an engineering discipline at all?

There are plenty of activities that are essential for engineering but not a sort of engineering themselves. Like writing documentation, or communicating requirements to your colleagues. Making instructions and operational procedures. Management. Accounting. Marketing. What makes making software an engineering discipline and making coffee not? Where is the line and why we presume we should be behind that line?

Well, yes, but after the 75 years, don't you think that "too young" argument is getting old? Nuclear energy, medical imaging, and the space part of aerospace are all younger than "software development". These are all mature industries highly codified, and they also all also encompass software development among other things. Could it be that software development isn't an engineering discipline at all but a supporting activity?

Writing isn't an engineering discipline. And all industries rely heavily on writing. Could it be that writing software is just writing for computers and as such could only by codified within another engineering discipline and not by its own?

Maybe this is today. Because, you know, AWS is down.

Most of the startups actually plan to survive for more than 2 months. And it makes total sense to think about scalability, reliability, and performance while it's still possible to change your whole stack every other week. Not forgetting about other things such as securing your cash flow, growing your talent pool, protecting your IP, etc. Finding a good balance between multiple focii is exactly the job for a founder. Of course, it's a hard job, that's why we don't see many successful startups to begin with.

Yes, reliability comes from the same ground the scalability does, and yes people are mostly chasing the latest trend. One does not contradict the other.