pakl (u/pakl) - Readit News

pakl commented on Object-oriented design patterns in C and kernel development oshub.org/projects/retros... · Posted by u/joexbayer

pakl · 14 days ago

A few years ago Peterpaul developed a lightweight object-oriented system on top of C that was really pleasant to use[0].

No need to pass in the object explicitly, etc.

Doesn't have the greatest documentation, but has a full test suite (e.g., [1][2]).

[0] https://github.com/peterpaul/co2

[1] https://github.com/peterpaul/co2/blob/master/carbon/test/pas...

[2] https://github.com/peterpaul/co2/blob/master/carbon/test/pas...

pakl commented on Auth for B2B SaaS: it's not like auth for consumer software tesseral.com/blog/b2b-aut... · Posted by u/noleary

joseonjok · 2 months ago

I'm puzzled as to why this area is constantly seeing reinventing the wheels? I can name a few very mature (20 years in teh making) open source projects that pretty much lets you self host everything you might possibly need to handle all sorts of authentication schemes

It seems like if its not written in Javascript people have aversion to it and this "keep everything typescript" really makes no sense to me especially when you deal with the missio n critical nature of backends.

pakl · 2 months ago

In most B2B cases you really don’t want to self host authentication. Really.

There are plenty of identity providers out there who will worry about hashing passwords, resetting them, 2FA, etc. Most client businesses already have identities via one of those for all their employees (read: users of your APIs or apps).

Unfortunately nearly all of the open source solutions out there do exactly what you said, they start with (required) self-hosting authentication. Not helpful.

What’s more relevant to businesses is authorization using existing IdPs (shameless plug: https://github.com/DMGT-TECH/the-usher-server)

pakl commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher

lcuff · a year ago

Does anybody have a pointer to a good description of what Alan Kay means by messaging?

pakl · a year ago

See “call-by-meaning”: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2014003_callbymeaning.pdf

pakl commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher

toast0 · a year ago

> The call-by-meaning solution is to refer to functions (processes, etc) not by their name, but by what they do.

This seems like call by an even longer, more difficult to use name.

And it would seem to rely on a common language to describe functions/methods, which clearly we don't have or everyone would use the same names for things that do the same thing already.

pakl · a year ago

Think about it. A “meaning” in this usage is definitely not a longer name.

pakl commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher

recursivecaveat · a year ago

I always thought that the Alan Kay model is fundamentally misguided, in that it is explicitly inspired by cell biology and distributed computer systems, ie extremely hard problems. Basically all the hardest things to model, predict design, and debug are these kind of bottom up systems where all interesting behavior comes from the emergent runtime interaction of tons of tiny components. This works okay for cells because there is no programmer floating above the system trying to understand it and make specific changes, but until we start programming by natural selection I wouldn't describe it as a good paradigm for organizing behavior.

I much prefer my programs to have a sort of top down structure, more like a military instead of an economy. Obviously late-binding and dynamic behavior is many times necessary, but I would not lean in to it, in the same way I would not say, make all my variables global just because sometimes you need it.

pakl · a year ago

IMHO (from the viewpoint of a neuroscientist) the biological inspiration is quite measured and restrained in his work…

The problem he was proposing we solve is computing with heterogenous “machines”. This doesn’t preclude the regimented organization you are favoring, above.

Please see my other comment on call-by-meaning.

pakl commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher

smallstepforman · a year ago

Clear as mud. No matter how good Alan Kay is, he failed to properly describe messaging, as used in an Actor environment. He missed the Actor Programming model. Also the late Carl Hewitt failed to properly explain and implement a working Actor model. A shame, since there are many working Actor implementations in many languages.

pakl · a year ago

Actors solves a very different problem. Alan Kay was talking about enabling computing across heterogeneous systems.

pakl commented on Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMes... · Posted by u/mpweiher

pakl · a year ago

At Alan Kay’s Viewpoints Research Institute, the problem was phrased in a more concrete form and a solution was provided — “Call by Meaning”[0].

The most succinct way I have found to state the problem is: “For example, getting the length of a string object varies significantly from one language to another... size(), count, strlen(), len(), .length, .length(), etc. How can one communicate with a computer -- or how can two computers communicate with each other -- at scale, without a common language?” [1]

The call-by-meaning solution is to refer to functions (processes, etc) not by their name, but by what they do. VPRI provided an example implementation in JavaScript[0]. I re-implemented this -- a bit more cleanly, IMHO -- in Objective C[1].

[0] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2014003_callbymeaning.pdf

[1] https://github.com/plaurent/call-by-meaning-objc?tab=readme-...

pakl commented on My Python code is a neural network blog.gabornyeki.com/2024-... · Posted by u/gnyeki

pakl · a year ago

There exists the Universal (Function) Approximation Theorem for neural networks — which states that they can represent/encode any function to a desired level of accuracy[0].

However there does not exist a theorem stating that those approximations can be learned (or how).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theo...

pakl commented on The Symbol Grounding Problem (1990) [pdf] cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ie... · Posted by u/rfreytag

aaroninsf · 2 years ago

TL;DR you ground symbols by connecting them to non-linguistic features in your network. In specific, to the sensorium; but also: to utility.

Things have names, but things are what we perceive about them and largely about what we can and do, do with them.

This is what any agent embodied in an environment must do and do do.

Many of the criticisms about LLM will evaporate for multi-modal models, as they become multimodal, and gain (or infer from) agency.

pakl · 2 years ago

If you think about it, for embodied agents symbol grounding isn’t really the “problem”.

Rather, embodied agents start with reference and indices. The hard problem is actually ungrounding — which takes work — to eventually get to things that approach what people typically think of “symbols”.

pakl commented on What Is Social Status? robkhenderson.substack.co... · Posted by u/jger15

pakl · 2 years ago

In an anthropological framework, social capital can be built up and exchanged for other forms of capital (including economic capital). There are even brokers who have the role of facilitating these transactions[0].

[0] https://bertrandlaurent.substack.com/p/monday-converting-soc...