stew-j

Little Chatroom on the Prairie, MMXXII

"Yore a poo-poo face, Laura, shut-up. I'm an idiot and this is my Internet." @WillyOlesonXXII

"Don't you try to josh me, Willy Oleson, I know durn well there ain't ever been no idiots on the Internet, you sh*tposting, edgelord jasper!" @LauraIngallsIV

"Now you two, I was on Usenet before either of you was kneehigh to a grasshopper. Couple of half-pints is what you are. 'Don't feed the trolls' we used to say, then ignore our own advice and throw 'em a handful of ASCII quotations." @CharlesIngallsVIII

"Are you aware of my law?" --Godwin

-- Stooge, er Stew-J

P.S. I'm going to do what the founders of this site are probably doing now, enjoy a good book with cup of coffee.

I think my friend might have known that in 1985. I just figured it out this morning, and by now all the good hedge fund manager jobs are taken.

From the OOPSLA paper abstract:

> techniques inspired by genetic programming with domain-specific knowledge to effectively undermine plagiarism detectors.

My creaky memory of CS Theory makes me suspect that, ultimately, Mr. Turing's halting problem may make resistance to cheating futile. [1] It's interesting that the paper is in OOPSLA, I used to follow the work from it more, especially when I listened to IEEE's Software Engineering Radio.

Thanks for your work in this area and your reply. DieHard and DieHarder are funny, creative names for fault tolerant memory managers. It's also nice to see a fellow humorist. At least we can rest assured that cheaters get what they deserve, like my classmate at Columbia. [2]

Regards.

[1] > He, for one, welcomes our new AI overlords.

Yes, let's suggest a Borg-like partnership with them. I'd be willing to drive "self-driving-car" tow truck--if they haven't invented a self-driving one yet.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532896

To be fair, I know you didn't have much context. I had to look up "tech bro":

https://www.wired.com/story/stop-calling-everyone-tech-bro/

Tech bro does not describe me (I agree they should have an eye kept on them though), I'm a 55 year old man who watches LHOTP on a 10 year old DVD player, has 10.5 years of Visual Basic programming, and wears sandals with white socks.

Last week I had to look up "sh*tpost" and "edgelord", and before that "know your meme" when those were leveled at me. Maybe people on the Internet and social media too need to understand, like TV show fans, that it is NOT reality. It also doesn't foster the kind of wonderful, 20+ year marriage we've had--we are BFFs forever my wife and I, like Mr. and Mrs. Ingalls in some ways. I also reserve my right to laugh at the incongruities of the Internet--I have a headache from laughing so hard at it today, so I will spare everyone more annoyance and quit for a long time.

I'm not sure how it would be done, there might not even be enough existing code to train it on, but I would like to try out Copilot for code-based CAD models in something like OpenSCAD. I've never tried it at all, but thanks for sharing your experience, all.

I might have missed it today in your articles or comments here--it's been a hectic day--but has there been some study of just how different code would be given that the students are using the same text from questions? Is there randomization intrinsic to Copilot, or is it just because minor variations in textual input causes code to be so different?

My wife taught CS, she did catch cheaters pre-Copilot, and my first thought it that she probably would enter test questions and print out a reference sheet for Copilot generated results.

On your advice, we just agreed to watch it separate rooms with no discussions at supper. No more calling Mrs. Oleson the meanest person that ever lived, in jest, that is OVER (we both are guilty of this one). We are going to enjoy it even if it strips the all joy out of life.

The actress who played Nellie said she used to get hate mail from fans of the show, who apparently couldn't distinguish her from her character. (She said IRL she was friends with the younger Melissa, and some of the cast attested to how nice she was offscreen--both from a special feature on one of the DVDs) Man, we aren't that far gone. It actually is the best part of our day, spending time making fun of Landon's hair.

Not every one, just Star Trek TOS. :)

We're about even though, every time she sees a horse on screen she says "Why can't I ride a horse to work instead of driving our 20 year old Mazda?" Having lived in Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming, and having mucked a few horse stalls in my day--I know why we 9 billion people don't still ride them.

Although some of their time was freed up by not having to diagnose issues with CI pipelines on the cloud, or writing meta-manager code to tame Slurm :)

Thank you for a civil, intelligent conversation.

I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. :) Languages like Ido aren't completely "artificial", and I certainly think Couturat didn't fail in some sense--my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.

My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently. She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?" She read the books as a girl, but boys generally didn't in the '70s. Our elementary school in Kansas distributed a screen play for one of the episodes as part of a literacy program. When I went to school in New York, many people had the idea that we still lived like that, way out west in Kansas. One of the first episodes of the TV show was about a Typhus plague, and how the population cooperated and sacrificed to survive. My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books, but I'm sure TV moves even more away from the reality of Laura's life.

LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. One boss I had was Mennonite, and his wife, after decades of growing and processing the family's food, started shopping in stores. She remarked how wonderful it was to have store bought canned food, which I guess is a partial explanation.

Guess how I learned query/replace in Emacs in 1985?

My friend who copied my Pascal programming assignment is now a director at a $1B hedge fund. I'm the founder of a series of scrappy, ramen noodle startups. I guess it's the "Senator Blutarsky" effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_%22Bluto%22_Blutarsky

The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems):

https://www.github.com/kaveh808

https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme

If you are interested in the nature of machine code and assembly language I would recommend at least looking at Scheme86:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042

It's like a Scheme interpreter running on hardware, and the latest successor to Steele/Sussman's Scheme-on-a-chip--I'm working on microcoding it with my inferior S-assembly. :) I didn't think you were being insulting--my last refuge in an increasingly humorless world appears to be self-deprecating humor.

Have you reached out to John Cowan, who is working on the R7RS Large Scheme standard, and is interested in topics like auxiliary human language as well as computer language and their representation? I'm not serious enough, I'm afraid, for the Scheme community (see above)--but they might take you more seriously:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Cowan

Another Scheme person, Jonathan Rees, was (or still may be) at a forward-thinking institute called "Ronin Institute"--I'm not sure what their process is for onboarding scholars but they might be interested in your work:

https://ronininstitute.org

Elmer Hanks wrote a forward thinking book many years ago called "Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment: A Proposal for a Universal Human Language" (my Shakespeare quote), about his machine readable, sign-language friendly, auxiliary language, and is worth a look in your domain of study.

I have been meaning to re-install Whitaker's Words which I used frequently in my own study of Latin, but lost when I upgraded my OS. You might have heard of Ido, an auxiliary language designed by Louis Couturat, a French logician, and the successor to Esperanto. It's almost completely regular, and I thought it might be a start for a more human-language neutral Scheme implementation (it is a Eurocentric language, so not completely neutral, unfortunately). My middle-school English teacher in 1981 pointed at the Esperanto booth in the language arts faire we took a field trip to and said, "I don't know why that booth is always so disappointingly unattended." I guess "ain't much changed", right?

I recommend "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" if you haven't read it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Guide_to_Shakespear...

and maybe we should both just continue to choose "to be" rather than "not to be".

[edit]

I was talking this over with my wife, and after reading your links, I still don't completely understand the overall advantage of coding word stems rather than characters. It did remind me of the first computer I owned, a Sinclair ZX-81 I built from a kit. Its Basic keywords, FOR, GOSUB, RETURN were each represented as a bytecode--and I think you could enter with a special key modifier with one key-chord. Is this like what you are saying?

Yes, I was surprised to see marketing, even criticism of their own previous products, in a programming guide. Once past the "history lesson" the book is actually very good--with concrete examples on building an operating system and a coherent explanation of IEEE 754 floating point format. Hardware floating point for x86 used to be offered as a separate coprocessor chip--the x87 series--otherwise it had to be emulated in software.

I would also argue that the 8008 was a real computer. The ENIAC was the first "real" computer (in the sense of general purpose, digital), with its ~.005 MIPS (integer add/sub) vs. the 8008 at ~0.05 MIPS, and was a bit larger and more difficult to program. I wrote programs on a 6502-based Apple years before the IBM PC appeared. I guess that was a phantom computer.

> I don't believe we should store text as characters

Could you briefly elaborate?

[edit]

I read the article on your HN link. I didn't quite "get it". Program text gets in the way, let's replace it with [?]. Dr. Strandh at U. of Bordeaux, et al., have argued that we shouldn't store programs as text files in an operating system--is that what you are advocating? An image based system, for example?

> none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does

Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. :) My work doesn't get much attention either, even if someone else happens upon it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ezruuc/tovero_...

----

I don't know why I keep quoting Shakespeare this week, I mostly slept through the Shakespeare module in high school English, but I guess some filtered through and maybe WRT promotion on the Internet:

"Had I so lavish of my presence been, so common-hackneyed in the eyes of men, so stale and cheap to vulgar company, opinion, that did help me to the crown, had still kept loyal to possession and left me in reputeless banishment, a fellow of no mark nor likelihood." Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 2

It seems to me like for the most part only the best connected, ruthless, garrulous, overly vocal people get their ideas heard. I've tried business development orgs (including personal connections), directly contacting relevant researchers or sources of funding, on and on. Mostly, the advice has been to throw the spaghetti on the wall (put up a Github project, e.g.) and see what sticks (yell on Twitter, try to get some users). Even one of the founders of this site had difficulty marketing his idea for a new variant of Lisp, you know.

After a cursory look I found it interesting. Homoiconocity of assembly language isn't something I had thought of--although I have been working on a higher level S-expression based assembly that is lowered to more concrete assembly for Scheme86 microcoded emulation.

I'm no genius for sure, but even when I do sometimes find myself ahead of the curve, I fall into Hamlet's dilemma:

"...Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of Thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

I wish I could explain why the best people and ideas are ignored, or bullied away, but I am at a loss. Best wishes.

More fun facts from "Programming the 80386", Crawford and Gelsinger (chief architect and designer of the 386 respectively), 1987, pp. 1-2

"The 4004 was quickly enhanced to the 8008. These devices, very trivial by today's standards, were novel but hardly taken seriously as computers of any worth...In 1978 the third generation was introduced--the 8086. This marked the beginning of microprocessors as 'real' computers...The 8088, the little brother of the 8086, was used in the IBM personal Computer...and this launched the personal computer revolution."

I wish someone else would have read that for me.

This is, in spirit, what Solvespace does--although like the other reply here says with extruded 2D.

From https://solvespace.com/tech.pl

> The core of any parametric CAD program is its geometric constraint solver.

and

> In SolveSpace, constraints are represented as equations in a symbolic algebra system. In general, these equations are solved numerically, by a modified Newton's method.

and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_constraint_solving#M...

> symbolic methods have been applied to this type of constraint solving (see Reference 20 on the Wikipedia link).

And your Zen "beginner mind" question got me to thinking, maybe I could use Prolog itself in my CAD system to directly make 3D shapes, since Prolog has been written in Lisp. Although Prolog does have a number of limitations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog#Limitations

> we're working on the clean API problem developing what we calling the Modular Object-Oriented Solidity Engine (MOOSE)

MOOSE meet Tovero the horse.

I guess everybody's gone from this post, but for posterity, it might be worth looking more closely at the source for Tovero, since we had to work around the lack of a formal C API when wrapping BRL-CAD with C++. In retrospect, I probably wouldn't even have chosen C++, but just done a C API which would be easier to use with the FFI of many languages like Python, Julia, or Common Lisp--and eliminated the need for SWIG. At least think about putting a C API on top of the OO of MOOSE, if you intend it to be accessed by other languages.

For an intelligent way of putting a C API over a C++ OO design see:

https://www.libfive.com

This project also demonstrates F-rep, a technique for modeling geometry with implicit functions and SDF, and Tovero 2.0 used it as an external dependency for its geometry kernel.

The point of which, looking back at this comment, is that I'm older than BRL-CAD. :)

My gateway metal idols were Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoads and Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, all of whom I got to see in concert. And I'm going to just going to say it, "1984" was one of my favorite albums (although not really metal, the cover reminded me of the one on Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell"). Paul Graham's description of high school in one essay was right on the mark for me, I sat at the heavy metal table at lunch when I wasn't truant.

A friend of mine at work mentioned around 1988 that I should listen to 10,000 Maniacs--the name sounded interesting, and (I'll probably get beat up here for saying this) Natalie Merchant's Greek Siren-like voice led me down a more, er "primrose path" musically. Peter Tosh, too.

[On a personal note, I might have been able to get the courage to ask Natalie out back then even though she was totally out of my league--like my wife, and I dated a few women like Lita over the years, but asking Lita out? That's a whole other level of courage. Iommi was engaged to her, by the way, for reference.]

I'm 55 and I still listen to metal especially while working, but I stopped trying new stuff in the early 2000's. So the newest I listen to would be Slipknot or Soulfly. My brother tried getting me to listen to modern "Norse Core" or something, but I didn't get it.

I suspect my wife got into metal through the albums of Bon Jovi, but she denies it.

BRL-CAD was open-sourced in 2004. MIT Scheme was released as free software in 1986 after being started somewhere near 1979 (which was about the time I started programming in Basic, using the TRS-80 and Apple II). The initial revision of the MIT git repo is dated December 1986--I think it started in RCS. The original license was some variation of the MIT one, which requested that changes be sent back to the team if at all possible, with a request to tell them what the use was. They changed to the GPL around release 7 or 8.

My first language was FORTRAN 66, learned from a book in the library, but on paper only as I had no access to a computer until a couple years later in 1979.

I also had a kind of Seinfeld "soup nazi" story. When I was an undergraduate studying electrical engineering at Columbia in the late '80s, my friend and I were commiserating in the dorm about our girlfriend problems. I was living in the Barnard women's dorm as an exchange student from CU, and there was a nearby pizza place known for horrible service and extra-rude waiters. I guess we decided to wallow in our misery, because we went there that night to see if the stories were true.

At first, we were greeted normally, seated and our order for a pizza taken by a nice woman. An hour later, a guy came out with a pizza, with heavy smoke pouring from it. He looked almost exactly like the soup nazi in Seinfeld, same mean look on his face. He dumped the charred pizza on the table and said, "It's a little well done. That is OK, isn't it?" Little did he know about our girlfriend problems, we were feeling a little mean ourselves, we both glared back at him--with the look like not getting a tip is going to be the least of his problems if he didn't bake us a new one. The replacement pizza was really good.

NYC at that time really was like the one in Seinfeld, neurotic and off the rails. I was a poor student, so I didn't get to eat at pizzerias or diners much, but I did stop by Tom's a few times. It was much different inside, dingier and not so yuppie. They just used the exterior shot in the show. The service was OK, too.

[edit]

I just remembered--I'm not making this up, really--I used to have a blue puffy down jacket like George when I lived in New York. I wonder if my classmates thought back to me when they saw the one on Seinfeld?

They used to call me "Costanza" when I worked in aviation, because I would occasionally take a nap in the comfortable seats in the mockup jets at the Customer Service Center. That was back when I wore suits, and one time a group of unaccompanied buyers woke me up. I recovered enough to half convince them to buy a mid-level jet (I was a software dev), I was arranging a test drive when the real salesman came in and ran me off.

Running Scheme on logic gates:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042

I prefer my female-fronted metal to be "glam", not the inferior "symphonic power". I actually owned a couple of her LPs in the '80s:

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

Since our tastes are so far apart, I guess we have nothing else to talk about.

> It looks like your e-mail was the victim of my paternity leave

10 years is generous paternity leave. :) Seriously though, no hard feelings, separating the wheat from the free software chaff takes time--ask me how I know.

> interactive editor like mged with lisp wrapping BRL-CAD's libged editing library

That interests me!

IME, I have found S-expressions to be an elegant, succinct way of expressing geometric models (especially in the F-rep domain):

https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero/blob/master/examples/ro...

I wrote a referencing counting C++ reader/writer for S-expression models like that directly into Open Inventor, in place of the IV (VRML) format, avoiding the use of CL.

Emacs has a C FFI, IIRC, so it should be possible to develop a S-exp formatted BRL-CAD model in elisp, with the right C shims--giving a live-coding, REPL experience for building BRL-CAD models.

Thanks for your work on BRL-CAD!

Thanks, that makes sense--maybe operate 16 in parallel? Logic (human) still probably wouldn't stop me from trying if I had one laying around--what the chip would do outside of the design discipline, that is. :)

Another interesting fact:

The BRL of BRL-CAD is the Ballistic Research Laboratory:

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

which developed, along with the Penn, the first general-purpose digital computer ENIAC:

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

It seems to me (having sworn to not ever publish another line of free software after many years of doing so) that a kind of serfdom has been established in free software similar to the one working directly for FAANG. The difference is free software doesn't pay enough to live on ramen, if they even notice your project at all.

[I noticed the stump of the pine tree, which apparently was cut down after a fire, in the picture at the head of this article--maybe why the author left Pine64? :)]