LiKao (u/LiKao) - Readit News

LiKao commented on Gaslight-driven development tonsky.me/blog/gaslight-d... · Posted by u/theodorejb

Bluestein · a month ago

> "513: Your Coding Assistant Is Wrong"

You made me chuckle. Well played. Great stuff :)

May I, simply, also suggest:

HTTP 407 Hallucination

Meaning: The server understands the request but believes it to be incongruous with reality.-

LiKao · a month ago

Yes, it should definitely be in the 400 space of HTML error codes. As 400 -> "You are incorrect" while 500 -> "We messed up".

LiKao commented on Let Kids Be Loud afterbabel.com/p/let-kids... · Posted by u/trevin

schwartzworld · 2 months ago

> I've raised three kids who have not had repeated meltdowns

Mazel tov. Unfortunately for parents who aren't you, the act of providing the "consistency" you're advocating for, often DOES require dealing with repeated meltdowns, or even just maddeningly repetitive questions of "why not". Children are born wild animals (not yours, of course), and raising them is the act of civilizing them.

If there's one thing that annoys me about other parents, its seeing or hearing about someone dealing with a difficulty that your kids didn't have, and then patting yourself on the back for being a better parent. Every time you explain something to your kids, they just got it and stopped bothering you about it? Trust me when I say, you are in the minority.

> meltdowns over hearing an ice cream truck

I know for a fact, it just wasn't an issue when I was a kid, or even in our neighborhood until this year, when the trucks started parking on our street after school. For many children, that is a time of the day when they are exhausted and unlikely to be reasoned with. Maybe it's a sign their parents are "inconsistent" or whatever, but I maintain that there is a difference between a truck stopping by once every hour or 4-5 times per hour, and also a difference between an ice cream truck at the park vs stopping on residential streets one by one every day. There's no other business that works this way, it's not like they have some fundamental right, and that's not even talking about the noise pollution aspect.

LiKao · 2 months ago

These "maddeningly repetitive questions" are exactly the internal issues that are being talked about. If they ask "why not" just let them ask.

It's not your job as a parent to 1) make sure your children are happy all the time 2) defend your decisions against all attacks.

I found that when children say "why not" repeatedly, they are actually saying "I am unhappy and want to find an argument to reconsider your stance". If you signal them that this is actually something to argue about, e.g. by repeatedly answering these questions, they will just play the game you are offering them.

I found that it's actually a good approach to only directly answer "why not" the first time, and to just answer it the second time by "I understand that you are unhappy about my decision. I have already explained it and will not explain it again. If you need help dealing with your unhappiness I will be there for you."

A lot of the maddening part of these questions is most often the parent not being able to deal with the unhappiness of the child. Once you accept that unhappiness is a natural part of life 1) this will be easier for you 2) you will model much better for your child how to deal with unhappiness.

LiKao commented on Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3... · Posted by u/oliverkwebb

seabird · 2 months ago

Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.

To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?

LiKao · 2 months ago

There is some research that goes in the opposite direction. I.e. that especially in german the lack gender in the word for girls ("das Mädchen") is actually quite problematic and can lead to girls not thinking they really have a gender before they grow up. At least up to a certain age, where children learn to separate between grammatical gender and social gender or biological sex.

LiKao commented on Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3... · Posted by u/oliverkwebb

Aziell · 2 months ago

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether it’s partly because people sometimes don’t really know how to describe what they’re feeling, so they end up putting those emotions onto objects. It kind of helps make sense of feelings that are hard to explain.

At the same time, I wonder if it’s always a good thing. Like, what happens if you lose or break something you’ve gotten really attached to? Could that make the anxiety worse?

Curious if anyone here has seen this or has any personal experience.

LiKao · 2 months ago

Yes, this is very common. Autistic people can easily go into meltdown if they loose an object that they assign emotional states to.

In severe cases it can be sufficient if the object is slightly moved to trigger a meltdown, and there are reports that support those exact thinking patterns.

LiKao commented on Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3... · Posted by u/oliverkwebb

_0ffh · 2 months ago

> I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects.

The paper says, they do!

The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.

LiKao · 2 months ago

Not at the same rates, but at higher rates than the general population and even stronger:

""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """

This is well known for many autistic people. "I put this thing there, and now it has to stay at that position, because otherwise it will be very sad."

The surprising part is not that autistic people do have empathy for inanimate objects (this is so well known, it's even covered in some diagnostic tests), but rather to find further confirmation and compare it to the general population. Mostly because this is surprising, as in general autism is related to empathy disfunction, so it is surprising to observe empathy at higher rates (see below).

However, as many researchers have pointed out that is exactely what would be expected. Empathy disfunction is incorrectly interpreted by many as "lack of empathy". But empathy means understanding and representing the emotional state of another living creature. Assigning emotional states to inanimate objects is by definition an empathy disfunction, because you are mentally representing something that is not there in the real world. Same with over-empathy that is reported by some autistics. Since these are over-representing the emotional states of others, this is also a disfunction (i.e. a mismatch between observed subject and the representation).

So the article builds strongly on the false equivalence between empathy disfunction and lack of empathy.

LiKao commented on Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3... · Posted by u/oliverkwebb

mjburgess · 2 months ago

I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system:

The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.

At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.

Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.

I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.

LiKao · 2 months ago

Interesting that you use some kind of schizophrenia axis.

There is actually some scientists that hypothesize schizophrenia and autism are exact opposites of each other. It's call the predictive coding hypothesis of autism.

In essence the predictive coding hypothesis assumes that large parts of our brain function like a modern video codec. Always predicting the next states and reducing information by only picking up on prediction errors that need to be encoded separatedly.

Under this hypothesis schizophrenia arises, if there is a very strong predictive coding and very little influence of the prediction errors. You hear voices out of noise, because your prediction mechanism tries to encode these noises as something sensible.

On the other hand in autism you have very little prediction and high external influence (i.e. the normal information reduction doesn't take place).

There are some studies that try to pick up the prediction vs. error components in simple cognitive tasks that support this idea.

LiKao commented on A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design (2024) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36... · Posted by u/smitty1e

pchangr · 3 months ago

Feminism, in my understanding, advocates for gender equality. It doesn’t deny differences among genders but addresses the flaws in the system that unfairly punish or prioritizes one gender over other. And achieving gender equality sometimes requires gender specific accommodations. I.E. Feminism would promote gender specific accommodations so that it becomes equally accessible for all genders.

Having said that… I don’t know why your comment is flagged but I can tell you that your first sentence is written in a way that already makes it difficult to understand what you want to express.

It also feels a bit snarky to me.

LiKao · 3 months ago

Both is true depending on who you ask. That distinction between "men care about objects while women care about people" can be researched at early childhood.

There are very vocal feminists who claim this is a direct sign of strong socialization beginning at early childhood and who claim this effect would completely disappear once we stop socializing gender roles in our society this way.

There are also very vocal feminists who claim that these are two different gendered perspectives and we should have both perspectives.

Yes, this might seem contradictory at first, but it really isn't as much. Feminism advocates for both woman who have grown up under the current socialization as well as new born children, and tries to find ways to do a more fair socialization.

LiKao commented on A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design (2024) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36... · Posted by u/smitty1e

miav · 3 months ago

Guys, the author presents an overall reasonable argument and I think it's more useful to engage with it in good faith than going "so it's all my fault just because I'm a man?" - no one's implying that.

At its simplest, the point is that much of programming language design is done with a masculine perspective that values technical excellence and very little feminine perspective that focuses more on social impact. Most, including myself, have a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss this argument since at first glance it appears to trade off something known useful for something that's usually little else than a buzzword, but upon further reflection the argument is sensible.

The theme of forsaking technological perfectionism in favor of reaching whatever end goal you have set is widely circulated on this forum and generally agreed with. Those of us that work as software engineers know that impact of your work is always valued more than the implementation or technical details. It's thus reasonable that when building programming languages, the needs and experience of the users should be considered. Not override everything else, but be factored into the equation.

I know if I were to write a programming language I'd probably focus on pushing the boundaries of what's technologically possible, because I find it fun and interesting. But I would have to agree that even if I did succeed in doing so, the actual impact of my work would probably be lower than that of Hedy - the author's language. Hedy is not novel technologically, but the fact that it makes it meaningfully easier to learn programming for significant numbers of people is real, undeniable impact.

Lastly, I want to note that the author's argument for underrepresentation of women in PL cannot be reduced to "those nasty men are keeping us out". Humans are tribal and any group of humans is bound to form complex social structures. Those are going to affect different people in different ways, linked paper investigates the effect on those structures on specifically women because the topic is close to the author. Whether you care about low numbers of women in PL design or not, the dynamics that have led to that being the case are worth investigating and are quite interesting on their own.

LiKao · 3 months ago

I would rather dismiss her point on the basis, that from my perspective this may be true for a small niche of academics that focus specifically on programming language formalisms.

When I studied programming language during my university time, this was really focused on formal approaches, so it is true there. But that is how this field of studies defines itself, and that should be considered their right.

Once you look outside of this narrow field, you can easily find a lot of projects and endeavors that cover exactly what she is requesting in that article.

* The rust compiler focuses a lot on more understandable error messages (a topic specifically covered) and even recommendations that make picking up the language easier.

* C++11 standardization also focused a lot on usability and how to improve hard to read error messages.

* Scratch is explicitly designed to look for alternative approaches to programming.

* Programming in other languages has been around for a long time.

In school we were taught a German version of Logo. I don't buy her argument that her language research was dismissed purely because it wasn't hard enough. We simply have anything we need to understand how we could do a programming language in another language. Replace a few lexer definition, and then re-define the whole stdlib in another language. There is simply nothing novel about this. I really hope her research on language covers a lot more than just this.

She also does a very bad bait-and-switch when she suddenly replaces the meaning of the word "hard" in the middle of the article. Initially she clearly used "hard" to refer to difficult, then later she suddenly switches hard in the sense of "hard" sciences, i.e. sciences based on formalisms and empirical research instead of discussions and opinions.

I agree with her a lot of research is missing from non-technical hard sciences (I would consider large parts of psychology a hard science, although it lives at the border of the two worlds). There is some research on the psychology of programming, but this is definitely under-researched. Also usability studies of programming languages are not well established.

In a lot of cases, however, I don't think this is actually something we can really do research on. I have a strong background in psychology, and I don't think we actually could study the impact of different paradigms. If you pick participants that already know programming, they will be highly socialized with the dominant paradigms. If you pick novices you will have to control what they learn over years until they become fluent in the studied paradigm. This isn't feasible and raises sever ethical concerns. Or you don't control it, make short time studies, in which case the results will just not carry any meaning.

Overall for me the article raises some really valid concerns about programming language research and CS in general, but I think she took a really bad turn in describing these as gender based issues. What I would see as the reason for these issues lies in completely different areas and are only very remotely related to gender.

LiKao commented on 0.9999 ≊ 1 lcamtuf.substack.com/p/09... · Posted by u/zoidb

bardan · 3 months ago

0.3... is just the decimal representation of 1/3. So:

0.3... = 1/3

0.6... = 2/3

0.9... = 3/3 (= 1)

LiKao · 3 months ago

But you are assuming 0.3... is the representation of 1/3. We don't have to make this assumption, it's just the one we are usually taught. Math doesn't really break from making different assumptions, quite the opposite.

Let's make some different assumptions, not following high school math: When I divide 1 by 3, I always get a remainder. So it would just be as equally valid to introduce a mathematical object representing this remainder after I performed the infinite number of divisions. Then

1/3 = 0.3... + eps / 3

2/3 = 0.6... + 2eps / 3

3/3 = 0.9... + 3eps / 3

and since 0.9... = 1 - eps, we get 3/3 = 0.9... + eps = 1

It's all still sound (I haven't proven this, but so far I don't see any contradiction in my assumptions). And it comes out where 0.9... is not equal to 1. Just because I added a mathematical object that forces this to come out.

Edit: Yes, I am breaking a lot of other stuff (e.g. standard calculus) by introducing this new eps object. But that is not an indicator that this is "wrong", just different from high school math.

LiKao commented on 0.9999 ≊ 1 lcamtuf.substack.com/p/09... · Posted by u/zoidb

quchen · 3 months ago

It baffles me how there are still blogposts with a serious attitude about this topic. It’s akin to discussing possible loopholes of how homeopathy might be medicinally helpful beyond placebo, again and again.

Why are hyperreals even mentioned? This post is not about hyperreals or non-standard math, it’s about standard math, very basic one at that, and then comes along with »well under these circumstances the statement is correct« – well no, absolutely not, these aren’t the circumstances the question was posed under.

We don’t see posts saying »1+2 = 1 because well acktchually if we think modulo 2«, what’s with this 0.9… thing then?

LiKao · 3 months ago

I still think that the distinction is very important. With standard math (e.g. real numbers) we obviously have 0.9999... = 1 and this is actually very easy to prove using the assumptions that you are taught during high school math.

However, in higher math you are taught that all this is just based on certain assumptions and it is even possible to let go of these assumptions and replace them with different assumptions.

I think it is important to be clear about the assumptions one is making, and it is also important to have a common set of standard assumptions. Like high school math, which has its standard assumptions. But it is just as possible to make different assumptions and still be correct.

This kind of thinking has very important applications. We are all taught the angle sum in a triangle is 180 degrees. But again this is assuming (default assumption) euclidean geometry. And while this is sensible, because it makes things easy in day to day life, we find that euclidean geometry almost never applies in real life, it is just a good approximation. The surface of the earth, which requires a lot of geometry only follows this assumption approximately, and even space doesn't (theory of relativity). If we would have never challenged this assumption, then we would have never gotten to the point where we could have GPS.

It is easy to assume that someone is wrong, because they got a different result. But it is much harder to put yourself into someones shoes and figure out if their result is really wrong (i.e. it may contradict their own assumption or be non-sequitur) or if they are just using different assumptions. And to figure out what these assumptions are and what they entail.

For this assumption: Yes, you can construct systems where 0.9999... != 1, but then you also must use 1/3 != 0.33333... or you will end up contradicting yourself. In fact when you assume 1 = 0.999999... + eps, then you must likely also use 1/3 = 0.33333 - eps/3 to avoid contradicting yourself (I haven't proven the resulting axiom system is free of contradiction, this is left as an excercise to the reader).