The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.
One day I was at a restaurant explaining process control to one of my disciples. I was mentioning how we have to kill the children (child processes) if they become unresponsive. Or we can even set an alarm for the children to kill themselves. That the parent need to wait (wait3) and acknowledge that the child has died or else it will become a zombie.
The look of horror the woman sitting across had was unforgettable. I tried to explain it was a computer software thing but it was too late, she fled terrified, probably to call the police or something. I didn't really want to stick around too long to find out.
Almost feels like a right of passage when you inevitably google something like "kill self" (in reference to killing the current process) and get a popup telling you about suicide resources.
Zombies can't be killed for they are already dead; they can only be reaped, by waiting on them. (This is why init inherits orphans, so it may reap them when they eventually die.)
> We also assume that this is the meaning behind the daemon.co.uk, host to many United Kingdom web sites
Not sure if it was the origin of the company name, but the domain was demon.co.uk not daemon. E.g. I had pretence.demon.co.uk with them for a few years.
I find the “a la mode” vs “au jus” discussion right under the daemon one very interesting!
I wasn’t familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it up and “a la mode” is an American culinary expression, meaning “served with ice cream”. And “au jus” is also an American culinary expression, meaning “gravy” or “broth”. Now, even though they are both derived from a French expression that is a prepositional phrase with à (meaning with), it does not matter any more when they were borrowed to English.
“A la mode” became a new adverbial expression meaning just that: “served with ice cream”. You can have pie a la mode = pie served with ice cream, but obviously not *pie with a la mode = pie with served with ice cream.
And “au jus” became a noun expression meaning “broth” or “gravy”. And you must say sandwich with au jus = sandwich with gravy and can’t say *sandwich au jus = sandwich gravy.
What is extremely interesting here is that it bothers the prescriptivist who wants language to be a certain way he feels it is supposed to be, also the author on that webpage.
Yeah, I was hanging out with someone recently who kept using "au jus" like "sauce", i.e. "you could make that with an au jus" , "ooh yeah that would be so good with an au jus on the side!" or similar ...
Ha -- I read the title and said to myself, "gotta be Maxwell, right?" The jolt of pleasure I get from being right about things like this is unreasonable.
I remember learning about Maxwell's Daemon through the Apple II game Dr. Maxwell's Molecule Magic, in which you take the role of the daemon. You must toggle the barrier on and off in order to trap enough gas molecules at high enough pressure to launch a rocket ship. Once you think you have enough, you can then launch the rocket to see how well you did. If you were successful, the rocket would blast off the screen and an image would show of an astronaut on the moon saying "Hi, Mom!" (Speech was provided via PWM through the Apple II speaker.)
Eleven-year-old me was easy to entertain. Especially if rockets, robots, or science was involved.
Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion:
> Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work.
I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon?
It seems to come from measuring the particles at all. One result is that the demon has to store information about the particles, and erasing that information to free up memory increases the entropy of the gas/demon system.
It probably (if the calculations are right) is unable to actually do much of anything useful (because it's too complex to avoid being extremely correlated with the rest of the universe ("embedded")), and even if it could it wouldn't be better than a standard ASI in most real-world situations.
That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do without crazy hypothetical physics.
Readit News
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep.
T E C H N O L O G I C
…
T E C H N O L O G I C
It’s almost like these commands were all made by nerd teenage boys.
One day I was at a restaurant explaining process control to one of my disciples. I was mentioning how we have to kill the children (child processes) if they become unresponsive. Or we can even set an alarm for the children to kill themselves. That the parent need to wait (wait3) and acknowledge that the child has died or else it will become a zombie.
The look of horror the woman sitting across had was unforgettable. I tried to explain it was a computer software thing but it was too late, she fled terrified, probably to call the police or something. I didn't really want to stick around too long to find out.
Dead Comment
Not sure if it was the origin of the company name, but the domain was demon.co.uk not daemon. E.g. I had pretence.demon.co.uk with them for a few years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Internet
I wasn’t familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it up and “a la mode” is an American culinary expression, meaning “served with ice cream”. And “au jus” is also an American culinary expression, meaning “gravy” or “broth”. Now, even though they are both derived from a French expression that is a prepositional phrase with à (meaning with), it does not matter any more when they were borrowed to English.
“A la mode” became a new adverbial expression meaning just that: “served with ice cream”. You can have pie a la mode = pie served with ice cream, but obviously not *pie with a la mode = pie with served with ice cream.
And “au jus” became a noun expression meaning “broth” or “gravy”. And you must say sandwich with au jus = sandwich with gravy and can’t say *sandwich au jus = sandwich gravy.
What is extremely interesting here is that it bothers the prescriptivist who wants language to be a certain way he feels it is supposed to be, also the author on that webpage.
Also, I think I will risk opening my eyes now.
Amazing.
Deleted Comment
Eleven-year-old me was easy to entertain. Especially if rockets, robots, or science was involved.
- [2023] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283067 (24 comments)
- [2022] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069163 (127 comments)
- [2018] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299583 (46 comments)
- [2011] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691752 (45 comments)
> Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work.
I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon?
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Criticism_an...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#Criticism_...
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-pha...
With 'entropy' being an obsolete term for (lack of) information, and
> “classical thermodynamics” is a contradiction in terms.
That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do without crazy hypothetical physics.