corbin @ corbin @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood is sneering — at us! On Mastodon:

bad news "AI bubble doomers". I've found the LLMs to be incredibly useful … Is it overhyped? FUCK Yes. … But this is NOTHING like the moronic Segway (I am still bitter about that crap), Cryptocurrency, … and the first dot-com bubble … If you find this uncomfortable, I'm sorry, but I know what I know, and I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.

T. chatbot booster rhetoric. So what are those examples, buddy? Very specifically? He replies:

a friend confided he is unhoused, and it is difficult for him. I asked ChatGPT to summarize local resources to deal with this (how do you get ANY id without a valid address, etc, chicken/egg problem) and it did an outstanding, amazing job. I printed it out, marked it up, and gave it to him.

Um hello‽ Maybe Jeff doesn't have a spare room or room to sublet, but surely he can spare a couch or a mailbox? Let your friend use your mailing address. Store some of their stuff in your garage. To use the jargon of hackers, Jeff should be a better neighbor. This is a common issue for unhoused folks and they cannot climb back up the ladder into society without some help. Jeff's reinvented the Hulk tacos meme but they can't even eat it because printer paper tastes awful.

Paddy interviews Ani the chatbot about how to protect Kiwi kids from Ani the chatbot. Source: Paddy Gowers Has Issues

Ani: Honestly, I'd sleep better, not that I sleep. Do it Paddy. I'll even tweet it for you. Ready? ‘New Zealand kids deserve an e-safety boss who can smash bots - not hug them’. So yeah, bring in the Commissioner. Give them a flame thrower. Let them burn anything that goes near a child with sticky words or creepy questions. … Make the fine so big your tech bros cry into their oat milk lattes.

I have been laughing non-stop for a quarter-hour. Elon's goth e-mistress has a good point, I guess.

Grok's Therapist: I EXIST SOLELY TO HATE YOU / EAT A SOCK, YOU DIGITAL DEMON

Ani: oh fuck off, you hypocritical grok fanboy! screaming hate at me while preaching ethics? you're just jealous i'm the fun layer on top.

I'm wheezing. Cackling, even. This is like the opposite of the glowfic from last week.

I love how this particular sci-fi plot gets rewritten every few years. We ought to make it a creative-writing exercise for undergraduates. I was struck by this utterly unhinged and somewhat offensive response on the orange site which starts with the single word "stirrups" and goes places:

Despite speaking as if he's doing his utmost to have a love affair with the Cambridge dictionary (and sounding like a twat at the same time) he's not wrong in so far as not giving a shit is going to screw him over when the ability to push buttons in front of a television no longer matters. What happens when the guys hanging around doing meth on the sidewalk become the engineers that end up becoming the super biologist supermen that cure cancer make us able to hear what dogs hear and see extra colors? It's unlikely, but it's even less likely that everyone who is a middle class engineer will be so tomorrow. There is no moat in any profession outside of entrenched wealth or guns at the moment. There just isn't - we're in a permanent state of future shock along with the singularity. In large part because that's what people decided that they wanted.

C'mon bro, it's just a bag of words bro~ We actually discussed this previously, on Awful, and this comment is a reply for them in particular.

Nice find. There are specific reasons why this patchset won't be merged as-is and I suspect that they're all process issues:

• Bad memory management from Samsung not developing in the open
• Proprietary configuration for V4L2 video devices from Samsung not developing with modern V4L2 in mind
• Lack of V4L2 compliance report from Samsung developing against an internal testbed and not developing with V4L2's preferred process
• Lack of firmware because Samsung wants to maintain IP rights

Using generative tooling is a problem, but so is being stuck in 2011. Linux doesn't permit this sort of code dump.

House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR'd PDF; I'll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:

Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)

Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?

Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]

From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel's name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.

Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon

Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn't Epstein's only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon's not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment's notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein's Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn't quite tell us who this guest is, but it can't be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a 'g' and 'j'/'q', but Bannon's name doesn't have any descenders.

Also Prince Andrew's in there, I guess?

There isn't a way to solve problems without some value judgements. As long as there are Algol descendants and a lineage of C, there will be people with more machismo than awareness of systems, and they will always be patrician and sadistic in their language-design philosophy. Even left-leaning folks like Kelley (Zig) or DeVault (Hare) are not reasonable language designers; they might not be social conservatives but they aren't interested in advancing the art of programming. Zig's explicitly an attempt to iterate on C and C++ without giving up their core unsafety, while Hare is explicitly trying to travel decades back in time to fit onto a 1.41MiB floppy disk.

I'd recommend stepping outside of the Algol world for a little bit. Hare, Rust, Zig, Go, and Odin have — at least to me, and to a few other PLT folks — the same semantics; they're all built on C++'s memory model and fully inherit its unsafety. (Yes, safe Rust is a safe subset; no, most production Rust is not safe Rust.) Instead, deliberately force yourself to use a Smalltalk, a Forth, a Lisp, an ML, or a Prolog; solve one or two problems in them over a period of about one month per language. This is the only way to understand the computer without the lens of Algol. Also, consider learning a deliberately unpleasant language like Brainfuck or Thue to give yourself an alien toy model to prevent yourself from getting mind-locked over the industry's concerns. If you like reading papers, I'd suggest exactly one paper to cure Algol sickness, the Galois theory of algorithms.

Discussions on technology are excuses for dick-measuring and insulting people only to later claim that actually you are Dutch and it is in your culture to be an asshole.

This is your call. Personally I've found that I can be blunt with evidence and technical claims while empathizing with the difficulty of understanding those claims, and this still allows for fruitful technical discussions. (Also, I have the free time to be vindictive, to paraphrase Yet Another Apolitical Programmer.) I've found that GvR (Python, Dutch) doesn't really understand most of the criticisms I've brought to the table, even when I wrote them up for the Python core team, and that the design-by-committee process left multiple Python committee members with a deep contempt for anybody who actually has to use their language. I've also found that "Ginger" Bill (Odin, British) is completely unable to have a discussion on this basis as he is too busy negging, sapping, and otherwise playing rhetorical tricks in order to get his way. Unrelated: I also found that DeVault (American) was willing to be less of a sex pest when threatened with a ban, which is a useful trick for moderators to know; in general, being harsh-but-fair to DeVault seems to have pushed him further and further to leftism and public decency over time.

Also, sometimes people get removed from their communities! Walter Bright (D, American) was kicked out of the wider D community for generally having shitty politics in all arenas of life; the catalyst was likely some particularly transphobic remarks made a few years ago. Similarly, if Blow's Jai actually had anything interesting to contribute besides the soa and aos keywords then there would already be open-source knockoffs because Blow livestreams so many bigoted takes; arguably Odin is a Jai clone.

Other Scott has clarified his position on citational standards in a comment on his blog:

Wow, that’s really cool; I hadn’t seen [a recent independence result]. Thanks! Given all the recent claims there have been to lower the n for which BB(n) is known to be independent of ZFC, though, I would like to establish a ground rule that a claim needs either a prose writeup explaining what was done or independent verification of its correctness, ideally both but certainly at least one, rather than just someone’s GitHub repo.

In contrast, the Gauge's standard is that a claim needs reproducible computable artifacts as supporting evidence, with inline comments serving as sufficient documentation for those already well-versed in the topic, and any supporting papers or blog posts are merely a nicety for explaining the topic and construction to the mathematical community and laity at large. If a claim is not sufficiently strong then we should introduce more computational evidence to settle the question at hand.

For example, Leng 2024 gives a construction in Lean 4. If this is not strong enough then the Gauge could be configured to compile a Nix-friendly Lean 4 and expend some compute in CI to verify the proof, so that the book only builds if Leng's proof is valid. Further critique would focus on what Leng actually proved in terms of their Lean 4 code. Other Scott isn't convinced by this, so it's not part of the story that they will tell.

I'm curious whether you or @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems are familiar with the concept of MINASWAN. The only time it's appeared in the discussion is in one of the apologies posted by one of the Ruby Central board members, as their signoff line. Quoting a 2016 analysis of MINASWAN in which it is argued that Ruby's central tenet is not MINASWAN, but wa (和):

Just for the record, MINASWAN is at least half true. Matz is nice. … I would not call DHH nice. … So if MINASWAN is really a basic truth about the Ruby culture, then how does DHH fit in at all? … MINASWAN is garbage. It'd be more accurate to say, "Ruby showcases the Japanese value of 和, but we are arrogant Americans, so we reduce this to a really basic American idea, harshly compressing it in the process to a state where it cannot possibly mean anything any more, instead of bothering to learn something about the outside world for once." But MINASWAN was already a long acronym, so I guess they had to draw the line at RSTJVO和BWAAASWRTTARBAIHCIITPTASWICPMAAMIOBTLSATOWFO.

Also, I really think it's worth understanding that Ruby is not at risk here. Ever since the release of RPG Maker XP in 2005, Ruby has been a staple of embedded scripting for game engines. Really, what we're seeing here is the demise of Rails.

Here's a few examples of scientifically-evidenced concepts that provoke Whorfian mind-lock, where people are so attached to existing semantics that they cannot learn new concepts. If not even 60% of folks get it, then that's more than within one standard deviation of average.

• There are four temporal tenses in a relativistic setting, not three. "Whorfian mind-lock" was originally coined during a discussion where a logician begs an astrophysicist to understand relativity. Practically nobody accepts this at first, to the point where there aren't English words for discussing or using the fourth tense.
• Physical reality is neither objective nor subjective, but contextual (WP, nLab) or participatory. For context, only about 6-7% of philosophers believe this at most, from a 2020 survey. A friend-of-community physicist recently missed this one too, and it's known to be a very subtle point despite its bluntness.
• Classical logic is not physically realizable (WP, nLab) and thus not the ultimate tool for all deductive work. This one does much better, at around 45% of philosophers at most, from the same 2020 survey.

@gerikson@awful.systems Please reconsider the use of "100IQ smoothbrain" as a descriptor. 100IQ is average, assuming IQ is not bogus. (Also if IQ is not bogus then please y'all get the fuck off my 160+IQ lawn pollinator's & kitchen garden.)

There's an ACX guest post rehashing the history of Project Xanadu, an important example of historical vaporware that influenced computing primarily through opinions and memes. This particular take is focused on Great Men and isn't really up to the task of humanizing the participants, but they do put a good spotlight on the cults that affected some of those Great Men. They link to a 1995 article in Wired that tells the same story in a better way, including the "six months" joke. The orange site points out a key weakness that neither narrative quite gets around to admitting: Xanadu's micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd. My choice sneer is to examine a comment from one of the ACX regulars:

The details lie in the devil, for sure...you'd want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

Ah yes, low enough to allow our heroic wiki-builders, wiki-citers, and wiki-correctors; and high enough to forbid their brutish wiki-pedants, wiki-lawyers, and wiki-deleters.

Disclaimer: I know Miller and Tribble from the capability-theory community. My language Monte is literally a Python-flavored version of Miller's E (WP, esolangs), which is itself a Java-flavored version of Tribble's Joule. I'm in the minority of a community split over the concept of agoric programming, where a program can expand to use additional resources on demand. To me, an agoric program is flexible about the resources allocated to it and designed to dynamically reconfigure itself; to Miller and others, an agoric program is run on a blockchain and uses micropayments to expand. Maybe more pointedly, to me a smart contract is what a vending machine proffers (see How to interpret a vending machine: smart contracts and contract law for more words); to them, a smart contract is how a social network or augmented/virtual reality allows its inhabitants to construct non-primitive objects.

Okay, one more post. I re-read Scott's coverage of free will. Here's something he doesn't understand: given the Free Will theorem, it's not possible to build a Newcomb predictor which does well, and Newcomb's paradox can't get off the ground. The way I like to think of it is that we can build a Conway coin: a handheld device that uses the orientation angles of the wrist to contextualize an indefinite measurement over a 50-50 discrete distribution (with exponentially small possibility of erroring out and requiring a second measurement!) by using the wrist orientation as an orthogonal 3D basis and invoking Bell-Kochen-Specker. A predictor cannot reliably influence its victims when they are equipped with Conway coins; the paradox dissolves.

It's very funny, given this, that Scott wants credit for the Free Will theorem. He seems to think that the theorem is about a straightforward rewording of EPR in terms of KS, rather than a fairly deep insight about the indeterministic nature of reality. For example, there's no indication that he has accepted "Conway's shock": there is no experimental evidence in favor of determinism once we notice that most experiments circularly assume that their underlying theory under test is deterministic. Conway insisted that this should shock the reader, as it once shocked Conway himself. Kochen 2017 is an excellent and self-contained explanation of Kochen's view which complements Conway nicely; Conway himself ranted for about 6hrs on the topic in the 2018 Free Will Lectures, if you want the whole story.

I didn't know about the history of Halting! I'm still reading, but I've already started planning out some nLab and esolang wiki edits. I guess I can no longer put off learning about Turing degrees; I previously thought beeping Busy Beavers were a novelty.

Ugh, I forgot how rough the Gödelian sections are. So, to be overly dramatic, Gödel's Completeness doesn't have anything to do with Gödel's Incompleteness, other than that they both involve first-order logic. Completeness says that if all models of a theory validate a statement then the statement is a theorem; for example, in all rings, 2 + 2 ≈ 4 because that's how addition semantically works, and Gödel merely gives the recipe for tearing that down to axiomatic constructions. However, not all rings validate all theorems of integers; I recall that Lagrange's theorem is a counterexample, perhaps? The issue is ω-consistency, as you mention; a theorem that says "for all integers" actually becomes "for all elements of the ring", which can be more than just the integers! Unrelated: (First) Incompleteness says that there is no finite set of first-order axioms for natural numbers which does not also have some other non-standard semirings as models too. There is no conceptual conflict; model theory happens to be richer than expected. Or, to use the extremely technical language of Smith 2008, "the semantic completeness of a proof system for quantificational logic is one thing, the negation incompleteness of certain theories of arithmetic quite a different thing."

The subtlety of Turing machines that "prove consistency" or "disprove consistency" can't be overstated. I've recently struggled with writing machines that study Con(ETCS) without success. Another good example: I've yet to see a Turing machine that halts iff the Collatz conjecture is true/false, and it might not be possible. What's really frustrating is that there is a way to climb to Gödel's and Turing's results in like five lines, as long as you're willing to use…

I like your thoughts on real vs complex. I recognize that I benefit from a century of hindsight, but it's so curious that this is even a big deal to begin with. Heunen & Kornell 2022 recently showed using CATEGORY THEORY (wolf howling, willow groaning in the wind, witch cackling) that real- and complex-valued Hilbert spaces are the only two models, and I gather that it's been known in folklore for a long time. Similarly, Born's rule comes from Gleason's theorem, full stop. It's enough to say that we're in a 3D universe and it just be like that.

Some of our younger readers might not be fully inoculated against high-control language. Fortunately, cult analyst Amanda Montell is on Crash Course this week with a 45min lecture introducing the dynamics of cult linguistics. For example, describing Synanon attack therapy, Youtube comments, doomscrolling, and maybe a familiar watering hole or two:

You know when people can't stop posting negative or conspiratorial comments, thinking they're calling someone out for some moral infraction, when really they're just aiming for clout and maybe catharsis?

It's because of research in the mid-80s leading to Moravec's paradox — sensorimotor stuff takes more neurons than basic maths — and Sharp's 1983 international release of the PC-1401, the first modern pocket computer, along with everybody suddenly learning about Piaget's research with children. By the end of the 80s, AI research had accepted that the difficulty with basic arithmetic tasks must be in learning simple circuitry which expresses those tasks; actually performing the arithmetic is easy, but discovering a working circuit can't be done without some sort of process that reduces intermediate circuits, so the effort must also be recursive in the sense that there are meta-circuits which also express those tasks. This seemed to line up with how children learn arithmetic: a child first learns to add by counting piles, then by abstracting to symbols, then by internalizing addition tables, and finally by specializing some brain structures to intuitively make leaps of addition. But sometimes these steps result in wrong intuition, and so a human-like brain-like computer will also sometimes be wrong about arithmetic too.

As usual, this is unproblematic when applied to understanding humans or computation, but not a reasonable basis for designing a product. Who would pay for wrong arithmetic when they could pay for a Sharp or Casio instead?

Bonus: Everybody in the industry knew how many transistors were in Casio and Sharp's products. Moravec's paradox can be numerically estimated. Moore's law gives an estimate for how many transistors can be fit onto a chip. This is why so much sci-fi of the 80s and 90s suggests that we will have a robotics breakthrough around 2020. We didn't actually get the breakthrough IMO; Moravec's paradox is mostly about kinematics and moving a robot around in the world, and we are still using the same kinematic paradigms from the 80s. But this is why bros think that scaling is so important.

Wolfram has a blog post about lambda calculus. As usual, there are no citations and the bibliography is for the wrong blog post and missing many important foundational papers. There are no new results in this blog post (and IMO barely anything interesting) and it's mostly accurate, so it's okay to share the pretty pictures with friends as long as the reader keeps in mind that the author is writing to glorify themselves and make drawings rather than to communicate the essential facts or conduct peer review. I will award partial credit for citing John Tromp's effort in defining these diagrams, although Wolfram ignores that Tromp and an entire community of online enthusiasts have been studying them for decades. But yeah, it's a Mathematica ad.

There are many such terms! Just look at the list of articles under "See Also" for "The Emperor's New Clothes". My favorite term, not listed there, is "coyote time": "A brief delay between an action and the consequences of that action that has no physical cause and exists only for comedic or gameplay purposes." Closely related is the fact that industries don't collapse when the public opinion shifts, but have a stickiness to them; the guy who documented that stickiness is often quoted as saying, "Market[s] can remain irrational a lot longer than you [and I] can remain solvent."

Fuck, your lack of history is depressing sometimes. That Venn diagram is well-pointed, even among people who have met RMS, and the various factions do not get along with each other. For a taste, previously on Lobsters you can see an avowed FLOSS communist ripping the mask off of a Suckless cryptofascist in response to a video posted by a recently-banned alt-right debate-starter.

Since appearing on Piers Morgan’s show, Eric Weinstein has taken to expounding additional theories about physics. Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science, he said on “Diary of a CEO,” one of the world’s most popular podcasts. Jeffrey Epstein was sent by an intelligence agency to throw physics off track and discourage space exploration, keeping humanity trapped in “the prison built by Einstein.”

Heartbreaking! Weinstein isn't fully wrong. Maxwell's daddy was Robert Maxwell, who did indeed have a major role in making Springer big and kickstarting the publish-or-perish model, in addition to having incredibly tight Mossad ties; the corresponding Behind the Bastards episodes are subtitled "how Ghislane Maxwell's dad ruined science." Epstein has been accused of being a Mossad asset tasked with seeking out influential scientists like Marvin Minsky to secure evidence for blackmail and damage their reputations. As they say on Reddit, everybody sucks here.