RustyRussell (u/RustyRussell)

RustyRussell commented on Where did all the starships go? datawrapper.de/blog/scien... · Posted by u/speckx

giorgioz · 7 days ago

Some new sci-fi books among the stars:

We are Bob Red rising Murderbot

RustyRussell · 7 days ago

You're writing this from a dystopian future where punctuation is banned? :)

For those like me who still require parsing assistance :

- We are Bob

- Red Rising

- Murderbot

RustyRussell commented on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time data.stackexchange.com/st... · Posted by u/maartin0

0xfaded · a month ago

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...

I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.

People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.

It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)

Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

RustyRussell · a month ago

On the other hand, I once implemented something to be told later it was novel and probably the optimal solution in the space.

An AI might be more likely to find it...

RustyRussell commented on Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB github.com/HarryR/z80ai... · Posted by u/quesomaster9000

boznz · 2 months ago

Great work. What is your timeline to AGI ?

RustyRussell · 2 months ago

I'm thinking early April?

RustyRussell commented on DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020) crockford.com/dec64.html... · Posted by u/vinhnx

RustyRussell · 3 months ago

A goid friend of mine worked on decimal floating point for IBM Power chips (I think it was Power 7 which had hardware support).

Anyway, he insisted on calling it just "Decimal Floating". Because there was "no point".

RustyRussell commented on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets signal.org/blog/spqr/... · Posted by u/pluto_modadic

RustyRussell · 4 months ago

I want signal to act as a transport bus. In particular, I want to give certain contacts permission to ask my phone for its location, so I can give my wife that ability without sharing it with Google.

Signal has solved the identity part, now encourage others to build apps on it.

(2fa via Signal would be better than SMS, too, though I know this may be controversial!)

RustyRussell commented on RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

timbray · 6 months ago

The tests for the go code at https://github.com/timbray/RFC9839 are in effect test vectors.

RustyRussell · 6 months ago

I want to implement this. My code is in C.

How does this help me check my implementation? I guess I could ask ChatGPT to convert your tests to my code, but that seems the long way around.

RustyRussell commented on RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

RustyRussell · 6 months ago

Did anyone else find the use if ABNF annoying?

  unicode-assignable =
   %x9 / %xA / %xD /               ; useful controls
   %x20-7E /                       ; exclude C1 controls and DEL
   %xA0-D7FF /                     ; exclude surrogates
   %xE000-FDCF /                   ; exclude FDD0 nonchars
   %xFDF0-FFFD /                   ; exclude FFFE and FFFF nonchars
   %x10000-1FFFD / %x20000-2FFFD / ; (repeat per plane)
   %x30000-3FFFD / %x40000-4FFFD /
   %x50000-5FFFD / %x60000-6FFFD /
   %x70000-7FFFD / %x80000-8FFFD /
   %x90000-9FFFD / %xA0000-AFFFD /
   %xB0000-BFFFD / %xC0000-CFFFD /
   %xD0000-DFFFD / %xE0000-EFFFD /
   %xF0000-FFFFD / %x100000-10FFFD

I mean, just define ranges.

Also, where are the test vectors? Because when I implement this, that's the first thing I have to write, and you could save me a lot of work here. Bonus points if it's in JSON and UTF-8 already, though the invalid UTF-8 in an RFC might really gum things up: hex encode maybe?

RustyRussell commented on Interactive Programming in C (2014) nullprogram.com/blog/2014... · Posted by u/ofalkaed

RustyRussell · 7 months ago

Andrew Tridgell's KnightCap did this differently: it's a network chess server, and it would dump its data to a file and re-exec. The trick here is that it would keep the (network) fds open for zero downtime. IIRC he used a Perl script called datadumper to gen the code marshal/demarshal the structures.

This has the advantage that reboots can be handled fairly seemlessly too (though there will be reconnections then of).

RustyRussell commented on The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production utkarshkanwat.com/writing... · Posted by u/Dachande663

tomhow · 7 months ago

[stub for offtopicness]

RustyRussell · 7 months ago

2015? Title is correct, this is a typo

RustyRussell commented on I write type-safe generic data structures in C danielchasehooper.com/pos... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

el_pollo_diablo · 7 months ago

Not to mention that they insist on calling every entry of the list a "list head", which makes no sense (hysterical raisins, maybe?). The structure is made of a uniform loop of entries, one of which is used as the actual head & tail, or entry point into the structure.

RustyRussell · 7 months ago

Yes, it's terrible, and the fact that their list_add takes parameters backwards from what one might expect, with no types to catch mistakes!

See https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/list/_...