thechao

Oh. There was a comment to your comment saying that kids learning assembly was easy and — I guess? — implying that adults-learning-assembly is hard. I teach adults assembly on an irregular basis. Adults-learning-assembly is hard because adults are rational animals who (correctly) assume I'm an idiot for insisting on assembly. Once I explain the long-term benefits for our exceedingly specific use case, they pick up assembly in a few hours. Assembly isn't hard. Assembly is annoying because it takes absolutely gobsmacking amounts of assembly to do anything.

Right. So, there's a unit type: the type that the sum of returns the other type, i.e.,

    a + () = a

So that means there's an identity type for the product type operator:

    a * 1 = a

I.e., the type that you can "multiply" by that doesn't give you a two-field tuple, but just returns the single-field tuple. If "1" is a type, then we can build a sum-type with it:

    a + 1 = (a, 1)

Ok. Cool. But! If we can "add 1", then we should be able to remove "1", right? That kinda implies that "-1" exists:

    (a, 1) -1 = (a,) # don't shoot the messenger, I'm just riffing

But, that also implies that we can allow a product type whose result is the "-1" type?

    (i, i) = -1

OH NOES!

Well sign me up with buggy two factor!

I don't know about 43kWH/5400$. But, here's the system I've been looking at:

https://www.expertpower.us/products/10800w-50kwh?_pos=2&_sid...

That's 50KWH of battery, plus the 10.8KW of solar, inverters, etc., all for $17K. That system is microgrid (not grid following) capable; so, you can run it during a blackout. The switchover is pretty good, too, so you don't need a second backup system.

I recognize this in my self, so I usually preface the story saying something like "this may or may not have been me, but I'm telling it from the first person". First person stories are funnier. This is part of the "telling a yarn" or "tall tale" tradition I grew up with (in Texas).

I was going to reply directly to you; but the re-reply is fine. I don't think your conclusion is wrong, but your analysis is bogus AF. Compiler transforms are usually strongly superpolynomial (quadratic or cubic or some NP-hard demon); a Knuth fast pass is going to traverse the entire IR tree under observation. The thing is, the IR tree under observation is usually pretty small; while it won't fit in the localest cache, it's almost certainly not in main memory after the first sweep. Subsequent trees will be somewhere in the far reaches of memory... but there's an awful lot of work between fetching trees.

> It's like comparing an F150 with a Ferrari, a decision that no buyer needs to make.

... maybe a Prius? Bruh.

TaPL really falls down when trying to bootstrap your way to understanding the notation. A lot of the notation and theory revolves around, essentially, implementing a concurrent virtual machine. I like the original algorithm W paper because it doesn't gloss this conceptual step: it is very much a virtual machine & you can see the authors handling the edge cases. The operational semantics in TaPL are (frankly) obtuse. Also, TaPL makes it seem like new features can be desugared to old features — and they can — but a little more prose explaining the feature's behavior directly without just tossing you into the semantic deep end would've made a much nicer text.

Texas used to have a great desalination plan, but it was left pretty idle. It's ... ok?

https://www.twdb.texas.gov/innovativewater/desal/doc/2024_Th...

The current projection is ~200k acre/ft by 2070 from seawater sources. It'd be cool if the AI/data center folk would combine our three ares of strength: (1) wind; (2) seawater desalination; and, (3) mass liquid piping. We'd use excess offshore wind to desalinate seawater and pump it inland.

My great grandmother, who was born in 1891, asserted ca. 1990 that her favorite invention was large print novels. More importantly: the social right to read trashy novels. But, yeah, computers, planes, starships, nuclear power, etc etc.

He's changed the focus of his stories, for sure; I get that it's not everyone's cup-of-tea. But, his prose & storytelling is still just as strong. (I agree, though.)

I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks.

A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at that regime the characters can flit around the universe in the notional blink of an eye, even though their nanoships' velocity is only a few km/s. In my mind it'd be just a nuts-and-bolts 30's-style hard boiled detective story; but, set in the year 10^110.

Oh! Oh! And Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.

> This is a Muslim conception of God. How can this be true when so many things that give us comfort in the natural world: fresh fruit, shade trees, sunshine and warm sand between our toes, etc., were not created by man?

...

> The Jewish [Christian] ideal of God (YHVH) is so much more balanced.

There's enough bigotry out there. Let's not make assumptions about people's beliefs.

This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis.

I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now?

My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?

I think good historians are on the same foot as philosophers in the arena of "thinking really fucking hard and making an airtight analysis".

Fuck. I write shader compilers.

Sheesh. I've got a multimillion line modern C++ protect that consists of a large number of dylibs and a few hundred delivered apps. A completely cache-free build is an only few minutes. Incremental and clean (cached) builds are seconds, or hundreds of milliseconds.

It sounds like you've got hundreds of millions of lines of code! (Maybe a billion!?) How do you manage that?

While I hate the current housing gridlock, these laws represent a classic Chesterton fence. They were enacted precisely because "upzoning" fell heaviest on the poor, minorities, the elderly, and other functionally disenfranchised people.

Since I like sortition, here's a goofy idea... eminent domain should be of two sorts: adverse and voluntary. Voluntary is bought-and-done. Adverse means we pick some other property in a different part of the jurisdiction, at random, and also adversely posses it. To drive the point home, I'd bias the selection to be directly proportional to value, ie, the more valuable, the more likely to be selected. The lock up in the adverse possession should be no less than, say, 25 years, or the lockup on the original possession, whichever is longer.

My high school was right across from a branch of a university (UHD) where the PhD candidates developed IQ tests. We (the HS students) could take them for extra credit. My favorite example was a block-arranging test (there was a set of blocks & some pictures). Anyways, they printed the blocks "symmetrically"; once I figured that out, making the picture was limited only by how quickly I could move. (The test normally had you looking at all sides of the cube, repeatedly.) My "IQ" was well over 200 on that test. The candidate said that it was going to set their lab back bag years.

Hand computed in the finest morning rays by monks in the Dolomites.

RAM Air in San Marcos, south of Austin. Ask for Edgar. He's self trained and likes to rebuild boards from scratch. He'll service out to west Austin if the job is big enough. He mostly trains techs. So, if you ask, he'll happily walk you through a repair in the phone. (Most jobs are only 20–40m.) He makes his money on the big jobs with repeat customers. When he retires ... fuck me.

I don't know what scale of "billions" you're talking about; but, Intel blew 1–2 billion on Larrabee. Even worse: Intel blew 5+ billion on mobile pre-iPhone. I remember when that team was shown the door — that's when we had to evaluate the early RGX GPUs as a backstop to try to win Apple's business; the RGX's were turds.

Penny-wise pound-foolish.

A lot of people fear monger about AGI. But... I've met a lot of NGI, and they mostly watch TV, surf the intarwebz, drink beer, and watch the game.

If you're ever in Austin, gimme a call. I'd love to be a dumb & doctored, together.

Day 53: 2000m below sea level. 41g gold. Yelled at for breaking driver ABI. Feet hurt.

Nothing that spends a lot of money on the scale of the Fed. Just low cost culture war stuff.

> On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.

As an American who lost 100+ pounds & kept it off for more than a decade ... this x1000. It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a healthy diet in the US.

I have a question: do Epic's games have in-game stores. Do they have to open those stores to 3rd parties, now? I mean ... fair-is-fair, right?

In my teens I worked with the statistics department at UTMB. That had a cast of characters there; many profs in the 70s and 80s, who'd gotten their degrees before WW2. A number of them had schooling of the form: Start school at 9-10, do 5 years of public school, got to a 1 year prep, do a year or two of college, do a two year PhD. Most of them had their PhD's by 22.

The serpentinization process is an alternate history humanity saver. Here's a crazy long article that has an analysis smack dab in the middle of it: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/ .

I seem to remember that one off the Central American countries has actually built a "green beach"; but, for the life of me, I can't find it. I may just be misremembering.