corbin @ corbin @awful.systems

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245

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm not sure if they're a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; I'd read that fanfiction too.

You got Schmidhuber'd! A Gödel machine would fit the bill. Nobody's built one yet, but the hard part -- proof search through something like Metamath (particularly Metamath Zero) -- is long-since solved. It wouldn't take over the world, though; it would just sit in a corner and get really good at maths over the next few centuries.

That's 100% my weird late-night word choices. You can reuse it for whatever.

I agree with your sentiment, but the wording is careful. Scaffolding is inherently temporary. It only is erected in service of some further goal. I think what I wanted to get across is that Yud's philosophical world was never going to be a permanent addition to any field of science or maths, for lack of any scientific or formal content. It was always a farfetched alternative fueled by science-fiction stories and contingent on a technological path that never came to be.

Maybe an alternative metaphor is that Yud wanted to develop a new kind of solar panel by reinventing electrodynamics and started by putting his ladder against his siding and climbing up to his roof to call the aliens down to reveal their secrets. A decade later, the ladder sits fallen and moss-covered, but Yud is still up there, trapped by his ego, ranting to anybody who will listen and throwing rocks at the contractors installing solar panels on his neighbor's houses.

He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.

In enterprise computing, “smart contracts” are called “database triggers” or “stored procedures.” They’re a nightmare, because they’re very hard to reason about or maintain, and they’re prone to unexpected and spooky effects.

It occurs to me that the situation's even more dire than this single-node description. If everything's in one database, then yes, a smart contract is effectively a stored procedure. But it can be worse! Imagine e.g. an MMORPG where city centers or dungeons are disconnected from the regional map to prevent overload. A smart contract might need to synchronize data between two databases, e.g. a dungeon and a surrounding region, to maintain correctness.

Why are techbros such shit at Lojban? It's a recurring and silly pattern. Two minutes with a dictionary tells me that there is {seldikca} for being charged like a capacitor and {nenzengau} for charging like a rechargeable battery.

Fuck this hyperreal composition. Dalí is spinning in his grave.

Paraphrasing Santayana, we must understand why people become fascist, or else we will not understand how to prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes of dehumanization and black-and-white reasoning which characterize their piss-poor attempts at logic.

While the author is being a bit of a tool, they're right about one thing: everybody who jumped the gun prior to the board announcement is now left with an ostrich-sized amount of egg on their face and no obvious path towards reconciliation other than eating a very large omelette. In particular, Jake and the Aux team don't have an obvious technical roadmap, which is a serious problem for a nixpkgs fork; also, I feel bad for Xe, who has left the community entirely and condemned themselves to pre-Nix distros. Pride leads to hubris leads to self-flagellating blogposts.

...I say, as I continue quietly working on my own reimplementation of Nix...

This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that's not an actual ancap position?

On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn't seem to comprehend that I'm mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It's difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.

That thread from Paul is such an eyeroll. "Community", says the VC-funded startup-builder. But it really does show how far out into the wilderness Dorsey has gone; not even his startup bros want to follow.

You're right. I incorrectly believed that hexa had signed based on their comments elsewhere, but I was wrong.

The original signers include members of the infrastructure and moderation teams. You can find about half of them on Mastodon. They're all well-established community members who hold real responsibility and roles within the NixOS Foundation ecosystem.

Also note that Eelco isn't "a maintainer" but the original author and designer, as well as a de facto founder of Determinate Systems. He's a BDFL. Look at this like the other dethronings of former BDFLs in the D, Python, Perl, Rails, or Scala communities; there's going to be lots of drama and possibly a fork.

Microsoft is legendary for this. In fact, I'll give you Microsoft's entire business recipe; it's not secret:

• Dogfood all products
• Maintain backwards compatibility at all costs
• Have at least a decade's worth of liquid operating funds in the bank at all times

I agree, and also I find "over a decade" to be a very funny duration. ELIZA was developed in the 60s; it's been over half a century since humans confused bots for people, which was the point.

Sure. It's a tough question, though; morally, yes, cars are physical objects and typically well-regulated, but self-driving cars are enabled by software, which tends to flout legal demands. I hope in this case that the sheer physical presence of cars will enable regulators to ban unsafe vehicles from public roads, but it's not as clear-cut as we'd like.

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I've ever seen. To recap:

• NYC elects a cop as mayor
• Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
• Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren't business
• Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can't find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
• Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
• NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
• Cop-mayor doesn't understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can't hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
• Cop-mayor's CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It's a fucking pattern, ain't it.

Wow, I hadn't read Lowe's response before, and it is capitalist cringe of the highest order. Thanks for sharing.

To be clear: I agree with every chemical and pharmacological critique leveled at the anarchists here. I also think that none of them have addressed the actual problem that the anarchists are solving, which is that medicinal chemistry has undergone so much regulatory capture that it is no longer legal to perform it at home for one's own private use or even to reverse-engineer the synthesis pathways. For more commentary on this, I recommend watching e.g. NurdRage reverse-engineering pyrimethamine and paying attention to what they say about obtaining precursors and carrying out various steps of synthesis.

This is part of why I never got into mining BTC. Even if I have a decent business plan and I can afford all of the externalities, I'd still be profiting almost entirely from the bad choices of retail investors. (And isn't "retail investor" such a nasty euphemism?)

I hear what you're saying, but I think it's sort of a motte-and-bailey setup:

Motte: Many functions can be probably approximately learned, even some uncomputable functions

Bailey: Consciousness, appreciation for art, useful laboring, and careful argumentation are learnable functions