momentoftop (u/momentoftop)

momentoftop commented on Does current AI represent a dead end? bcs.org/articles-opinion-... · Posted by u/jnord

tomrod · 9 months ago

If this is new, then you're one of today's luck 10,000![2] Serious logical foundations take a lot of time and exposition to start from fundamentals. Dismissing them as non-serious because GP's argument failed to consider them is misguided, IMHO.

[0] The classic reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica -- over 1,000 pages, Betrand Russell

[1] https://cmartinez.web.wesleyan.edu/documents/FP.pdf -- a bit more modern, relying on other mathematics under the hood (like DRY reduces the base count), 11 pages

[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[3] Some reasonable review https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html

momentoftop · 8 months ago

Yes, as I said: systems such as Russell's encoded "1", "2" and "+" in such a way that the theorem "1 + 1 = 2" is non-trivial to prove. This doesn't say anything about the difficulty of proving that 1 + 1 = 2, but merely the difficulty of proving it in a particular logical encoding. Poincare ridiculed the Principia on this point almost immediately.

And had Russell failed to prove that 1 + 1 = 2 in his system, it would not have cast one jot of doubt on the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. It would only have pointed to the inadequacy of the Principia.

momentoftop commented on Does current AI represent a dead end? bcs.org/articles-opinion-... · Posted by u/jnord

hbn · 9 months ago

Anyone who says AI is useless never had to do the old method of cobbling together git and ffmpeg commands from StackOverflow answers.

I have no interest in learning the horrible unintuitive UX of every CLI I interact with, I'd much rather just describe in English what I want and have the computer figure it out for me. It has practically never failed me, and if it does I'll know right away and I can fall back to the old method of doing it manually. For now it's saving me so much time with menial, time-wasting day-to-day tasks.

momentoftop · 9 months ago

> Anyone who says AI is useless never had to do the old method of cobbling together git and ffmpeg commands from StackOverflow answers.

It's useful for that yes, but I'd rather just live in a world where we didn't have such disasters of CLI that are git and ffmpeg.

LLMs are very useful for generating the obscure boilerplate needed because the underlying design is horrible. Relying on it means acquiescing to those terrible designs rather than figuring out redesigns that don't need the LLMs. For comparison, IntelliJ is very good at automating all the boilerplate generation that Java imposes on me, but I'd rather we didn't have boilerplate languages like Java, and I'd rather that IntelliJ's boilerplate generation didn't exist.

I fear in many cases that if an LLM is solving your problem, you are solving the wrong problem.

momentoftop commented on Does current AI represent a dead end? bcs.org/articles-opinion-... · Posted by u/jnord

tomrod · 9 months ago

The proof that 1+1=2 is nontrivial despite it being clear and obvious. It does not rely on physicality nor experience to prove.

There are areas of utility here. Things need not be able to do all actions to be useful.

momentoftop · 9 months ago

There isn't a serious proof that 1+1=2, because it's near enough axiomatic. In the last 150 years or so, we've been trying to find very general logical systems in which we can encode "1", "2" and "+" and for which 1+1=2 is a theorem, and the derivations are sometimes non-trivial, but they are ultimately mere sanity checks that the logical system can capture basic arithmetic.

momentoftop commented on Monads are like burritos (2009) blog.plover.com/prog/burr... · Posted by u/ipnon

BriggyDwiggs42 · a year ago

I didn’t know anything about monads before, now I’m curious what the point of one is

momentoftop · a year ago

There's no point as such. They are a natural (non-leaky) generalisation of a recurring pattern in mathematics and software over which you can build some general theory and, in the case of programming languages such as Haskell, a general purpose library.

Haskell is one of the few languages that lets you write those general purpose libraries. In other languages, there's really no point talking about monads.

momentoftop commented on Lisp: Icing or Cake? dthompson.us/posts/lisp-i... · Posted by u/psj

anthk · a year ago

Malyon it's a ZMachine interpreter which works mostly fine.

momentoftop · a year ago

Playing "This thing all things devours" is one of the most profound gaming experiences I have had, and I happened to use Malyon. Why wouldn't I use the best text editor to play an inform game?

momentoftop commented on How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives cnn.com/2024/01/13/busine... · Posted by u/IronWolve

a-dub · 2 years ago

didn't terry gilliam make a movie about literal bugs in government computers ruining lives back in the early 80s?

momentoftop · 2 years ago

"Tuttle? His name's Buttle. There must be some mistake."

"Mistake? Ha! We don't make mistakes."

Proceeds to drop ceiling plug through ceiling.

"That's bloody typical. They've gone back to metric without telling us."

momentoftop commented on Lovecraft and Me – How cosmic horror gave me hope (2020) yalereview.org/article/lo... · Posted by u/bikenaga

nextaccountic · 2 years ago

What I find most disturbing is that it makes more sense than most creation myths, at least from my modern point of view; and it paints humanity hanging by a thread, like 20th century fears of being hit by a supernova, or a meteor, etc (of course we had apocalyptic themes through all of history though)

Or rather, anyone that had a dream with a person that said "don't wake up, or I will die" can relate

momentoftop · 2 years ago

I love the idea of hanging by a thread, of complete existential and cosmic precarity. To again quote the opening of Call of Cthulhu, science will reveal "our frightful position [in reality]". I like the fact that, for Lovecraft, the answer to such terrifying revelations is mostly to draw the curtains and ideally brick up the window and insist "nothing to see here." The opening quote offers that as one solution, but it's recurrent in his stories. It's what the protagonists end up doing in the Dunwich horror mentioned in the blogpost.

momentoftop commented on Lovecraft and Me – How cosmic horror gave me hope (2020) yalereview.org/article/lo... · Posted by u/bikenaga

ndsipa_pomu · 2 years ago

As a longtime Cthulhu cultist, I've always thought that the mythology is much more interesting that Lovecraft's actual writing. I consider Alan Moore's Providence to be the ultimate interpretation of Lovecraft's mythology.

momentoftop · 2 years ago

I'm the opposite. One of the things I love about Lovecraft is how oblique the mythology is in his writings. I don't know much about Azathoth, save that he's somehow "Lord of all Things", while being a "Blind Idiot God." That seeming contradiction is tantalising and the last thing I want is to see it fleshed out.

It's fear of the unknown, after all, not fear of the things that have detailed wiki pages.

momentoftop commented on Lovecraft and Me – How cosmic horror gave me hope (2020) yalereview.org/article/lo... · Posted by u/bikenaga

bouvin · 2 years ago

I am a longtime devotee of Lovecraft. For a deep dive into the man's life, I direct your attention to the Voluminous podcast [1], which covers a bit of H.P. Lovecraft's extensive correspondence. He was a fascinating character, simultaneously infuriating, repugnant, intellectual, sympathetic, and kind. When he wrote at his best, he was exceptionally good.

I lean more towards the belief that what was created between Lovecraft and his friends regarding their shared universe while Lovecraft was alive is superior to what came later. Subsequent revisions introduced elements like order, good vs. evil, etc., which, in my opinion, are fundamentally at odds with the incomprehensibility of cosmic horror.

These days, of course, Cthulhu seems more suited to a pair of plush slippers.

[1] https://www.hplhs.org/voluminous.php

momentoftop · 2 years ago

The article mentions ST Joshi a few times, who I think deserves credit not just as the foremost scholar of Lovecraft, but possibly for bringing attention to Lovecraft in the 60s and 70s. I thoroughly enjoyed his "Decline of the West", which pores over Lovecraft's correspondences trying to get a broad handle on his philosophy and aesthetics. He strikes me as a pretty complicated individual, with his early bigotry and his later slightly less malignant cultural chauvinism always being at odds with his cosmicism. And I think his nostalgic, escapist fantasy might generally have been at odds with his uncompromisingly scientific realism, perhaps contributing to his somewhat bitter and bleak view of the sciences (each straining in their own direction).

(I once owned one of those cute green Cthulhu plushies)

momentoftop commented on OCaml: a Rust developer's first impressions pthorpe92.github.io/ocaml... · Posted by u/qsantos

ReleaseCandidat · 2 years ago

>... linked lists are slow and inefficient with modern CPU caches, and you should almost never use them

You should not use them most of the time in functional languages (like OCaml and Haskell and...) for this reasons either, it's just that (almost) all examples for beginners use them because they are "easier" than for example trees.

Oh, by the way, OCaml does not have significant whitespace (but e.g.F# and Haskell do).

momentoftop · 2 years ago

You use them all the time in Haskell and OCaml. Cache locality isn't such an issue. You're not mallocing linked list nodes. You allocate by a pointer bump of the minor heap, and if the GC copies your list into the major heap, it's going to copy the list elements together.

You also use recursion all the time, and no, recursion is not generally straightforwardly optimised into iteration unless you're doing trivial tail recursion.