← Feed

Posts

• Post #3115322

  (I've said various versions of this before, but maybe this makes the point clearer:) The Turing Test is **NOT** a benchmark. It's a **warning**. i.e., Turing *knew* that trying to define "intelligence" was, at best, way more difficult than people gave it credit for, likely completely futile. His proposed "test" is, "If you can be fooled into thinking there's something intelligent there, then there is (or at least there mi...

• Post #3115321

  https://cloudisland.nz/@freakboy3742/116691013883402288 Reminded of the POPL conference I went to where the hotel conference room had a stupidly low ceiling and so the bottom half of the screen wasn't visible from the middle->back of the room. ... so Phil Wadler redid all of his slides the night before to ONLY use the top half of the screen. Suffice it to say the slides were Very Short (I think he broke the title across two slides). It was a really good talk. (Also reminded...

• Post #3115320

  https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116694520503463037 @moira yeah I had this funny feeling that Stuff That Other Rich People Are Going to Care About was not going to fly quite so easily (of course I sold a lot of shit in IRA Land anyway -- basically everything that listed Microsoft, Amazon, and Google as their biggest holdings -- (yay that that can be done without tax stuff happening). Getting the idea that maybe everything should just go in international funds and call it a day...)

• Post #1678781

  "never make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s (...yeah I know, 14 years old, but I only just saw it today,...)

• Post #1444961

  stupid question: What is the actual obstacle to being able to run Linux on a cellphone (i.e., and be able to use it as a cellphone)? Is there some crucial interop spec that's being kept proprietary/secret? Or is it there some particular software component that's encumbered by patents and so there can't be a free version of it? Some weird licensing structure that the operating companies have been able to enforce (and the EU hasn't gotten around to saying, &am...

• Post #1444960

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@sparklepanic/116434925982021556 (seeing a few HTML5 things I really ought to learn... buh)

• Post #1052185

  @moira@mastodon.murkworks.net @RobynGoodfellow@mastodon.murkworks.net #monsterdon definitely needs to do Journey to the Far Side of the Sun

• Post #998837

  @ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz oh I'm sure. It's just early 70s I have this memory/perception of him having been in basically everything (or at least everything that made it to US network TV)

• Post #591968

  #Monsterdon too bad about Glauca, then ?

• Post #591934

  #Monsterdon I'll take Bad Celestial Mechanics for $600

• Post #591392

  #monsterdon Lacunt ???

• Post #590981

  #Monsterdon it's the Small Stonehenge from Spinal Tap

• Post #582557

  @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @mousebot@todon.nl @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca yay, actual experience, actual review. thanks.

• Post #580195

  @mdhughes@appdot.net @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca > I stick to posting longer-than-two-posts content to my blog, ... yeah, that's clearly the Right Thing, but has the disadvantage of not inflicting my text on people directly 🙂

• Post #579945

  @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca what I *currently* do is compose inside Emacs (the *only* non-painful alternative for long posts), then manually decide how I'm going to break it up -- which actually has some literary content to it, because in some cases, you *do* want to arrange the breaks for maximal dramatic effect (generalized How to Use Paragraphs) Problem 1 being that emacs doesn&...

• Post #579749

  @Thumper1964@mindly.social @MikeGorse@mindly.social > but they're still having to do work and I'd even go so far as to say they're doing *all* of the work that involves actual thought, because the agent is inherently incapable of that part.

• Post #579137

  @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca Yeah, I don't know. Maybe '~' was prevalant in Emacs source, or I'm conflating TECO with Something Else. By my era VT-52s were gone, you'd occasionally see a VT100 in a server room for not wanting to waste $$ there, the terminal of choice at Stanford CS was the Heathkit-19 + if you were in one of the well-financed research groups, you got...

• Post #577524

  @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca it's not so much the editor itself, which, from your description doesn't seem that much worse than, say, what you had to do in IBM XEDIT to get stuff done, but the macro system, specifically, which as I understand it,(1) was an add-on, (2) would have needed utility commands that one didn't use in the normal course of editing (e.g., for rearrangin...

• Post #576923

  @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca Yeah I had less reason to do TECO ... though ironically, I *did* learn the SAIL editor (SAIL/WAITS -- TOPS-10 derivative -- was, by 1985, a completely dead software ecosystem, *only* continued to exist because Knuth and McCarthy had decades of crap + sufficient grant $$ for the (by then) fantastic expense to keep it going; the only other people who used it w...

• Post #563323

  @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca [..it's possible I'm missing the point, but I'm going to launch anyway...] I believe trying to define/formalize "expressiveness" is roughly as doomed as trying to define/formalize "intelligence". w.r.t. the latter, there's been nearly a century of bashing on this since Church and Turing and we're still no further along...

• Post #563298

  @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca The point of Turing equivalence is that even though we have different forms for expressing algorithms and there are apparently vast differences in comprehensibility, any differences in what can utltimately be achieved by the various forms of expression is an illusion. We have, thus far, only one notion of computability. (which is not to say there can't...

• Post #529882

  @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @cdegroot@mstdn.ca @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org Is this the book you're talking about? (sorry this was after my time in Scheme Land, hadn't heard of it before) https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Handbook-International-Perspectives-dp-1032231785/dp/1032231785/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

• Post #528644

  @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org yeah, usually I start with 1/n and then edit all of the n's later, but today I was lazy

• Post #528417

  @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz > On the timeline of a hypothetical observer far outside that gravity well, of course ?? not sure what you mean. This is about a completely flat spacetime, so being far away makes no difference in the distances/times that an inertial observer will measure. There is no actual gravity well here. When I said, > Gravity increases as you go downstairs, > but you'll live longer. I was referring to the experience of the passengers on the accelerating s...

• Post #515038

  @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org There were other weirdnesses as well. Even if GC saves you the horror of referencing freed storage, or freeing stuff twice, you still have to worry about memory leaks and moreover, dropping references as fast as you can matters With copying GC, leaks are useless shit that has to be copied -- yes it eventually ends up in an old generation but until then it's getting copied -- an...

• Post #514918

  @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org Generational GC changes the way you program and it's not *just* that it's efficient. We used MIT-Scheme (which, by the early 90s was showing its age). We did all manner of weird optimizing to use memory efficiently. Lots of set! to re-use structure where possible. Or (map! f list) -- same as (map...) but with set-car! to modify in-place -- because it made a HUGE difference no...

• Post #512554

  @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @cdegroot@mstdn.ca @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz 5? maybe for mark&sweep but I can't see how more than 2 would ever be necessary for a copying GC. Once you have enough space to copy everything *to* (on the off-chance that absolutely everything actually *needs* to be copied), you're basically done... ... and if you're following the usual pattern where 90% of what you create becomes garbag...

• Post #501271

  @cafuego@misanthrope.social Make sure you use proper filters. Do not look directly at the moon.

• Post #500968

  @rmd1023@infosec.exchange @moira@mastodon.murkworks.net It is possible I'm not being completely fair. I probably did subscribe to any number of Geek Social Fallacies (this preceding that blog post by 15+ years), and the conversation did actually simplify things going forward (we stayed out of each other's way and I no longer had to expend effort on getting along). In theory, if I'd ever wanted to claim the room for a party of my own I could have done so, but somehow this never....

• Post #399157

  @spocko@mastodon.online And of course now I wonder if there are provisions for this sort of thing. e.g., can the IOC replace lost or stolen medals? Presumably one can insure them, I guess, though are there exceptions for acts of god or "stolen by the President of the United States"? or is it like, "You deliberately took it into a dangerous neighborhood; claim denied."