smlckz

I find it interesting that we can think about [simple and complex] mathematical structures. How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so?

I distinguish between mathematical structures and "reality". From my perspective, mathematical structures are being used provide succinct description of the perceptible portion of "reality", the Universe as we say. Need all mathematical structures exist?

What can we say about [biological, AI, or even theoretical] systems that can deal with abstract mathematical structures: to be able to construct, modify, specialise or generalise such structures in a extra-computable manner?

This refers to the pic(1) preprocessor to the troff(1) typesetter. Troff is a historical typesetting software with a long history in the Unix ecosystem. Having personally used some of the modern implementations (e.g. GNU troff or groff, heirloom troff) of troff for personal projects, it has been a pleasant experience.

https://troff.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIC_(markup_language)

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/roff.7.html

Then you arrive at questions such as "Why do we exist?", even "Why anything exists at all, what was the need for all of this?"

> Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part?

There’s the non-helpful answer “I think, therefore I am.” I don’t think there’s any good answer to these questions. We can think about ourselves, we can think about existence, so we feel we exist? Let us imagine a person can not receive any external stimuli, can not send any instruction to control the movement of body, [e.g. a brain with blood circulation to keep it alive, but no input/output], in awakened state, now what should they feel? [Such a horrible state!] It seems they should feel their existence only on the basis of the functioning of their brain.

Extra hilarious as I can actually hear the sound of crickets.

What else can be done about it instead of building things, writing down or talking?

Fabrice Bellard is a CTO? Are you talking about this guy?: https://bellard.org

> In C, a read from an uninitialized variable is an unspecified value and is allowed to be any value each time it is read. This is important, because it allows behavior such as lazy recycling of pages: for example, on FreeBSD the malloc implementation informs the operating system that pages are currently unused, and the operating system uses the first write to a page as the hint that this is no longer true. A read to newly malloced memory may initially read the old value; then the operating system may reuse theunderlying physical page; and then on the next write to a different location in the page replace it with a newly zeroed page. The second read from the same location will then give a zero value.

What? What is the benifit of such behaviour?

What does other OSes do in this regard?

For those people who are thinking about some HTML subset, you can have a look at WebLite: https://weblite.codeberg.page

Try Racket and DrRacket.

Aren't we, now?

Truly, someone should try out NetBSD here...

Naming things are hard :)

> Also, Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator, so trying to do that would potentially reduce readability.

I also didn't know about any operator to logically xor two boolean variables (thought about (ab)using JavaScript's implicit type conversion mechanisms: `x ^ y`), and then I learnt that `!=` works fine as a logical xor for booleans. Tada!

I don't know how much readability is reduced by this.

> Dutch directness.

This reminds of Edsger W. Dijkstra.

> "I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras." -- Alan Kay

- ''Artificial'': not naturally occuring, also not a "clone"/"fork" of something natural.

- ''Physical'': not software simulation, virtual; "exist" in the same world we live in.

If my original terminology is insufficient or ambiguous, please suggest better terms.

Have we humans been able to make artificial physical self-replicating machines? Is it feasible to make such machines?

I am unable to forgive the author for the following:

    #include <cmath>
    #include <stdio.h>

The code looks almost like pure C, but that little `c`...

heh, the branching is now in the implementation of the lookup table

If your compiler is optimizing for speed, you can you write the program in a way so that the compiler can unroll the loop and hopefully make it branchless as well

if you want to practice programming and like mathematics, you should try Project Euler *

* heh! https://projecteuler.net

What is left to do with the Technical Interview?

I have yet to see anything more horrifyingly beautiful (or, beautifully horrifying) like this: μkanren in lisp in prolog ?!!

https://gist.github.com/aphyr/4d41e7655b10a68e753f729bdc1c5a...

Is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does "real" work as its proof-of-work: work which is computationally intensive, but it solves some real life problems instead of "wasting" the energy?

> Because various entities tried to exploit that to defer any publicaton, which lead to things never getting fixed.

Also understandable.

> [...] so they can take their own protective measures.

Little can the ordinary citizen do whose data is at risk of exploitation. All responsibility lies on the government because the citizens do not have any other choice, as it seems to me. What protective measure can someone take who is vulnerable?

With a thorough reading of the article, it is clear that the hackers are aware of what they are doing:

> Once threat actors catch wind of major vulnerabilities against an organization they begin poking on their own, looking for more vectors of attack.

> Governments have an obligation to protect the private data of its employees and citizens. In addition, the exposure of proprietary government data can be used for great means of manipulation and for other destructive purposes.

Understandable.

> While the NCIIPC operates a Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure Program, the recklessness and avoidance of communication represents the complete opposite of a responsible program. A failure to release notification of breach to affected citizens and to patch highly-critical vulnerabilities in a timely manner reflects poorly on the state of their Information Security posture. The clock to patch vulnerabilities began immediately when the DC3 contacted the NCIIPC via Twitter, as it is a highly visible space - one which threat actors avidly monitor.

Why did they published anything about the vulnerabilities before they were absolutely sure all of those has been mitigated?

Oh! Let us not forget that Make is basically just a Prolog with (not so) weird syntax. You just need to learn a little bit of logic programming. After that we have our stat(2) :-)

> Any sufficiently complicated static blog generator contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of make.

> -- Someone who has made a static blog generator

That seems to be true. I think I am gonna try that myself.

Huh, go figure the following:

    const a = 'this is not a ' + typeof + 'number';

Or JSFuck[1] in that matter.

[1]: http://jsfuck.com

> I also started to think about other things I could work on.

I'd like to suggest PG to dive into the theory.

From what PG was working on (on Bel), a great "continuation" would be to study category theory, type theory, especially dependent type theory.

I really wonder how is it like to debug (dynamically typed) lisp programs, with errors described as effectively encrypted given the current hype around statically typed system programming languages.

He has his own emacs clone named QEmacs[1] which I think he uses personally. He uses Subversion as his version control system (at least in developing QuickJS) according to this post[2] by him in quickjs-devel mailing list.

[1]: https://bellard.org/qemacs/

[2]: https://www.freelists.org/post/quickjs-devel/Please-consider...