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horizion2025 commented on AnduinOS   anduinos.com/... · Posted by u/TheFreim
newfocogi · 11 days ago
I made it half way down the page before I realized this wasn’t “ArduinOS”.

I can’t be the only one.

horizion2025 · 11 days ago
Same but then I saw "only 2 GB image"
horizion2025 commented on Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 2   gautiersblog.blogspot.com... · Posted by u/ajdude
nayuki · 14 days ago
> Another surprising feature of the BWT is that for reversing the permutation, no extra information is needed!

I think this is not true. The way I learned the BWT, after encoding, you need to store the index of the first character (which is a tiny bit of extra information). https://web.archive.org/web/20170325024404/http://marknelson...

horizion2025 · 14 days ago
I also think when looking at how BWT works, it is initially surprising it is invertible even with such little information as the first character. It appears a bit like sorting the letters and that certainly would require a lot more information to back into place. It is a bit magic even when you know the inversion algorithm.
horizion2025 commented on PuTTY has a new website   putty.software/... · Posted by u/GalaxySnail
horizion2025 · 15 days ago
Hi that sad. I remember years ago sitting with a colleague and we had to download putty. Then we found the usual page. There is always the concern if it is legit or a fake site with malware. But I remember my colleague saying "it has to be genuine, only a computer scientist could make such a primitive web site"
horizion2025 commented on Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?   seangoedecke.com/real-rea... · Posted by u/ingve
safety1st · 16 days ago
I'm pretty much a layperson in this field, but I don't understand why we're trying to teach a stochastic text transformer to reason. Why would anyone expect that approach to work?

I would have thought the more obvious approach would be to couple it to some kind of symbolic logic engine. It might transform plain language statements into fragments conforming to a syntax which that engine could then parse deterministically. This is the Platonic ideal of reasoning that the author of the post pooh-poohs, I guess, but it seems to me to be the whole point of reasoning; reasoning is the application of logic in evaluating a proposition. The LLM might be trained to generate elements of the proposition, but it's too random to apply logic.

horizion2025 · 15 days ago
I think you should drop the "stochastic text transformer" label you have probably heard applied, and instead think of them as neural networks that they are. Reason being that the term says absolutely zero about capabilities but creates a subjective 'reduction'. It's just a thought terminating cliché.

Let's for the sake of argument assume current LLM's are a mirage but in the future some new technology emerges that offers true intelligence and true reasoning. At the end of the day such a system will also input text and output text, and output will probably piece-meal as current LLM's (and humans) do. So voila: They are also "stochastic text transformers".

Yes LLM's were trained to predict next token. But clearly they are not just a small statistical table or whatever. Rather, it turns out that to be good at predicting the next token, after some point you need a lot of extra capabilities, so that's why they emerge during training. All the "next-token-prediction" is just a way abstract and erasing name of what is going on. A child learning how to write, fill in math lessons etc. is also learning 'next token prediction' from this vantage point. It says nothing about what goes on inside the brain of the child, or indeed inside the LLM. It is a confusion between interface and implementation. Behind the interface getNextToken(String prefix) may either be hiding a simple table or a 700 billion-size neural network or a 100 billion sized neuron human brain.

horizion2025 commented on A Global Look at Teletext   text-mode.org/?p=23643... · Posted by u/aqua_worm_hole
horizion2025 · 19 days ago
I think teletext is what triggered my interest in computers etc. It was one of my first experiences with anything computer like. When I was around 9 years old I was visiting my grandmother just the day she was having her new TV delivered. This must have been in the late 80s and we didn't have a computer or anything. I didn't care that much for the TV itself but then he the TV installation guy wanted to show this cool new thing "Tekst TV" (Text TV) as it was called here. It was like a completely new world opening. I sat the whole weekend playing with it. They had satellite TV in the complex she lived, so there were 20-30 channels and lots of cool graphics to explore. Back at home: No teletext, just 1-2 channels.
horizion2025 commented on C++ Coroutines Advanced: Converting std:future to asio:awaitable   ddhigh.com/en/2025/07/15/... · Posted by u/xialeistudio
spacechild1 · 2 months ago
Sure, but then you need one thread per socket, which has its own set of problems (most notably, the need for thread synchronization). I definitely prefer async + coroutines over blocking + thread-per-socket.
horizion2025 · a month ago
Java's new philosophy (in "Loom" - in production OpenJDK now) seems to be virtual threads that are cheap and can therefore be plentiful compared to native threads. This allows you to write the code in the old way without programmer-visible async.
horizion2025 commented on C++ Coroutines Advanced: Converting std:future to asio:awaitable   ddhigh.com/en/2025/07/15/... · Posted by u/xialeistudio
quietbritishjim · 2 months ago
I'm interested in this too.

Coroutines in Python are fantastically useful and allow more reliable implementation of networking applications. There is a complexity cost to pay but it's small and resolves other complexity issues with using threads instead, so overall you end up with simpler code that is easier to debug. "Hello world" (e.g., with await sleep(1) to make it non-trivially async) is just a few lines.

But coroutines in C++ are so stupendously complicated I can't imagine using them in practice. The number of concepts you have to learn to write a "hello world" application is huge. Surely just using callback-on-completion style already possible with ASIO (where the callback is usually another method in the same object as the current function), which was already possible, is going to lead to simpler code, even if it's a few lines longer than with coroutines?

Edit: We have a responsibility as senior devs (those of us that are) to ensure that code isn't just something we can write but that other can read, including those that don't spend their spare time reading about obscure C++ ideas. I can't imagine who in good faith thinks that C++ coroutines fall into this category.

horizion2025 · a month ago
As to the complexity: It is complex because it is very low-level. In JavaScript (using that as an example but I suspect Python is the same) they build in async/await keywords such that they are in cahoots with the Promise class. C++ takes a different path where there isn't a built-in Promise class, rather it provides you lower-level primitive you can use to build a Promise class. You can build a library around it, and it will be as simple as in other languages - both for the awaiter and for implementing libraries that you can await on :) But I agree it is really complicated. I remember once in a while thinking "ah it can't really be that complicated" only to dive into it again. It doesn't help that practically any term they use (promise, awaiter etc.) is used differently than in all other contexts I've worked. If you just expect it will be as easy as understand JavaScript async/await/promise you are in for a rude surprise. Raymond Chen has written co-routines tutorials which span three SERIES. Here's a map of those: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210504-01/?p=10...

As for how we got to here without:

1) Using large number processes/threads 2) Raw callback oriented mechanisms (with all the downsides) 3) Structured async where you pass in lambda's - benefit is you preserve the sequential structure and can have proper error handlign if you stick to the structure. Downside is you are effectively duplicating language facilities in the methods (e.g. .then(), .exception() ). Stack traces are often unreadable. I. 4) Raw use of various callback-oriented mechanisms like epoll and such, with the cost in code readability etc. and/or coupled with custom-written strategies to ease readability (so a subset of #3 really)

With C++ couroutines the benefit is you can write it almost like you usually do (line-by-line sequentially) even though it works asynchronously.

Dead Comment

horizion2025 commented on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says   nytimes.com/2025/07/10/wo... · Posted by u/xbryanx
ionwake · 2 months ago
I found this comment insightful but I feel I must itirate ( maybe its not needed), that it is not "clear" if leadership were ignorant, as you said, ( though Im sure you are part right ), I have read that it was malicious leadership trying to protect their own asses as per another comment.
horizion2025 · 2 months ago
What I've seen so far suggest they were just ignorant and victims of confirmational bias etc. You can see that when they won some cases they wrote internally something to the effect of "Final we can put to rest all those concerns about these cases blablabla". So it became self-validating. Also the courts and defense lawyers didn't manage to the see the pattern and in the huge numbers of such cases. Each defendant was fighting their own battle. Also, a mathematician from Fujitsu gave "convincing" testimony they didn't have any errors. A lot was down to lack of understanding of how technology works. The fact that xx millions of transactions were processed without errors doesn't preclude that there could be errors in a small number, as was the case. In this case sometimes coming down to random effects like if race conditions were triggered.
horizion2025 commented on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says   nytimes.com/2025/07/10/wo... · Posted by u/xbryanx
horizion2025 · 2 months ago
A big issue is that the British post office could itself act as the prosecutor. Other entities reporting a crime need to convince the public prosecutor before there even is a case, but due to hundred years old traditions the Post Office had the right act as its own prosecutor. Effectively the same problem as in the LLoyd's scandal where LLoyd's effectively was its own regulator.

u/horizion2025

KarmaCake day36July 11, 2025View Original