quuxplusone

In my day (2006–2011) Green Hills used EDG's frontend. I have the vague impression they might have already switched away. (I know Intel ICC already switched to Clang a while ago.) I'd be very surprised to learn that GHS had ever developed their own frontend.

You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting (1989), about baseball in Japan in the 1980s.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818/1831), https://frankendiff.com; and Tales of the Dead, by Mrs. Utterson (1813), https://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte

Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015).

Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older. And now that we have computers with Genuine People Personalities, it's hard to remember what it was like in the Before Times.

Recently finished Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). For better or worse (no spoilers here), it kept me guessing.

Perhaps relevant to this audience: NetHack has a routine specifically for this.

https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/src/objn...

I think I agree with the comment in NH5 that some of the new cases "probably shouldn't be handled here", and think maybe NH3.4.3's simpler version should've been fine for NetHack's purposes:

https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack-3.4.3/blob/master...

Highly recommend on this subject John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" (1984)!

https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/

I dunno, I've never done what TFA suggests, but it makes sense to me. The idea isn't that your new foo.go file would be ignored by default; it's that your Go project's repo's .gitignore file would start with * and then !*.go , so that your new foo.go file would show up as untracked-and-unignored but your new foo.go.sav~ and .DS_Store and .foobarrc files would not.

Maybe that's more ergonomic than forcing all users to learn about ~/.gitignore or manually adding .DS_Store *.sav~ et cetera into your Go project's repo's .gitignore.

What is this AI-generated gobbledygook actually trying to say? That there are infinitely many pairs of primes p,q with q=p+186?

The first equation under "The result" seems to be saying they found an infinite sequence of primes whose density is forever greater than 1/186, which doesn't match my understanding of how prime density works.

The problem is that "predictable reliable NRVO" is still a research problem. Real-world compilers do NRVO a lot but not in a way that is perfectly predictable — that is to say, not in a way that could be standardized across all compilers (or even between different releases of the same compiler).

A "perfectly predictable" algorithm was proposed in Anton Zhilin's P2025, back in the year 2021: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2021/p20... but unfortunately it had some subtle corner-case problems (which I do not remember), so it was sent back for revision, and never returned with a fix. (Maybe because a fix wasn't possible; again I don't remember what the deal was exactly.)

The Right Path Forward would be for MSVC, GCC, and Clang all to try implementing P2025's algorithm in their front ends. Either something concrete breaks (reminding me what the problem was), or else all three mainstream compilers gain predictable NRVO and then we can "standardize existing practice." But the Right Path Forward requires tedious work by at least three people, which is hard.

Yeah, the second one is supposed to read `Apple&& Cat(Apple&& val) { return val; }` — but the return type's `&&` was omitted by accident.

Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot (1997), pages xviii–xix:

> Because I have always had a very clear sense of how thing should look on a page, I dearly wanted to be able to control every tiny detail of my book's overall look, ranging from the cover art to the typefaces used to the size of the pages to the way displays are indented, and so on. Fortunately, the people at Basic Books have grown used to me and my idiosyncrasies over the years I have worked with them, and they assented to my unusual request.

> [new page] Consequently, I have enjoyed total control over such things as line-breaks, page-breaks, hyphenations, widows, orphans, density of word spacing within lines, fine-grained intercharacter spacing ("kerning"), and so forth and so on — things that most people usually are unaware of and simply leave to their publisher or their word processor. I am a fanatic, though, and these things matter a great deal to me. Not only do they matter to me, they have had an overwhelming impact on this book from start to finish. This may sound crazy, but it is the gospel truth.

> [section heading] Who Is Really Controlling Whom?

> Above, I very casually remarked that I have enjoyed total control over page-breaks and such things; yet the truth of the matter would be far more accurately captured by turning the phrase around and saying that the page-breaks and word spacing and such things have enjoyed total control over me! By this, I mean that I have been forced to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite passages in order to make a page boundary come out exactly where I wanted it. It is not just by some happy accident, for instance, that the poems inside chapters are never, ever broken across page boundaries.

> The amount of influence exerted on my text by concerns of purely visual esthetics is incalculable — and by "my text", I don't merely mean how I wound up phrasing my ideas, I mean the ideas themselves. Content has been determined by considerations of elegant form so often that I couldn't begin to imagine it. Every single line of text, for instance, is characterized by its spacing — how wide the blanks between words are. I can clearly see the spacing as I type on my screen, and I rewrite and rewrite in order to make sure that no line is too tightly or too loosely spaced. In the course of such rewritings — here extracting a word, there using a shorter or a longer one, elsewhere inserting a word where none was — words and phrases that I would otherwise not have thought of pop to mind, suggesting ideas I would not have thought of, and those ideas suggest unexpected paragraphs, and those paragraphs are in turn linked to other ones, and so on...

Yes. This is what one wants, since if you have recently rebased it, you're clearly doing work with it. Meanwhile, branches you don't care to touch sink to the bottom of the list.

> One speculative interpretation treats these numbers as a distorted memory of prehistory. Under this hypothesis, the reign boundaries encode real climate shifts...

"One theory" implies that someone somewhere has ever claimed this. But has anyone? TFA gives no source for the claim, AFAICT (although I skimmed a bit).

Because English. If you're writing a data file and one row of data elements is like "one, red, 3.14, Tuesday," why wouldn't you write exactly that in your ASCII text file? And when you do, that's CSV!

And that book is (naturally enough) borrowable on archive.org. :)

https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...

I was thinking that "I come alive with 0 neighbors" wouldn't make a sensible rule: it's not reasonable to have the whole universe strobing on and off every clock tick.

But "I stay alive with 0 neighbors" probably makes sense, so okay, multiply what I had said by another factor of 2 and call it 17 bits total. :)

Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.

Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.

And that book is (naturally enough) borrowable on archive.org. :)

https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...

+1. Tom Di Mino hasn't posted anything on https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7471395... since June, nor has Stephen Kosloff posted anything more on https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/ . I wouldn't expect any updates on that story.

As for Linear A decipherment claims, claiming decipherment isn't the same as decipherment. For example, here's a claim from 2014 that Linear A encodes spoken Japanese: https://konosos.net/2014/12/09/the-phonetic-method-in-linear... Does Linear A encode spoken Japanese? of course not.

TFA includes a link to an archive of John Carmack's .plan updates, 1996–2010:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/mast...

(1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

Oops! Should be fixed now.

(Author here.) Oops! and thank you. Should be fixed now. Happily I used SVG for those images, or it'd have been harder. :)

The submission is AI slop.

Hm, but I think he's right. The problem comes when you try to break down the authority portion into host and port; TFA's parser treats the first colon as introducing the port, which is wrong.

https://github.com/bkaradzic/bx/blob/0b001f5f36579e8aea07efa...

... which started with "Night of the Living Dead"... :)

> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])

IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

[2] - https://knowware.dk/dos56/norton-commander-1.shtml — see the last two screenshots on this page, from Norton Commander

> it doesn't make sense to spend hours papering over a legal agreement with someone who wants to sell seven copies of a book at an anarchist book-fair

Huh, you're right. That's not at all a correct use of the phrase "paper over." There are three more uses, too, vaguer and thus less obviously wrong. I wonder what the deal is.

In this particular sentence, "going over" would fit.

However, in general I think Cory is (mis)using the phrase as if it means "legitimize" or "associate a paper trail with": not just to review the wording but to come up with the wording in the first place. (Not just "going over" but "working up.") I could just barely believe this is the jargon of some lawyerly (sub)culture.

Indeed,

> (A writer to the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser of 1903-10-24 points out that you can get the apparently-most-common wrong answer if you read the puzzle incorrectly as “She was twice as old as Ann was when Mary [sic] was as old as Ann now is.”)

> Dozens of people declare solemnly that Mary and Ann are twins, though the slightest attempt to "prove" this shows it does not fulfil the conditions of the problem. [...] "About Mary and Ann, I think they are eight years old," says a woman, disregarding the first words of the question, which state that Mary is twenty-four.

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn88085488/1903-10-31/ed-1/?sp=...

Not the Flynn effect; just people having fun, and selection bias. I (the blogger) deliberately left out many boring responses, except for linking to the Evening World's letters page of 1903-11-11.[1] I filtered out scores of replies from schoolchildren walking through the algebra to get the correct answer, and dozens of (usually short) replies from people of various ages giving wrong answers with and without reasoning, some almost certainly joking, some almost certainly not. But that's what you should expect from a Letters to the Editor section on any given math meme! Our discourse hasn't changed that much over 120 years. See my other post,[2] linked at the bottom of the current one, on "What is 8÷2(2+2)?" — that's not as fair a question, but the discourse is pretty much the same in unfiltered Letters-to-the-Editor sections: "I think it's X. Well, I think it's Y."

The whole point of this kind of meme is for the populace to perform disagreement about the answer! (See also: the Monty Hall problem; sports; comments sections.)

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1903-11-11/ed-1/?sp=...

[2] - https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/08/01/what-is-8-divi...