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pvillano commented on The largest zip tie is nearly 4 feet long and $75   thedrive.com/news/youll-h... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
giardini · 5 days ago
Can I buy one for a belt? I'm periodically needing to add another notch to my belts and this seems a good replacement! Maybe another few colors, please?
pvillano · 5 days ago
Columbia also makes an infinitely adjustable belt https://www.amazon.com/Columbia-Mens-Boys-Military-Belt/dp/B...
pvillano commented on Typechecking is undecidable when 'type' is a type (1989) [pdf]   dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/... · Posted by u/zem
penteract · 7 days ago
Decidability of a type system is like well-typedness of a program. It doesn't guarantee it's sensible, but not having the property is an indicator of problems.
pvillano · 5 days ago
But like, of all the expressive power vs analyzability trade-offs you can make, there's a huge leap in expressive power when you give away decidability.

Undecidability is not a sign that the foundation has cracks (not well founded), but it might be a sign that you put the foundation on wheels so you can drive it at highway speeds, with all the dangers that entails.

It's not a trade everyone would make, but the languages I prefer do.

pvillano commented on Julia   borretti.me/fiction/julia... · Posted by u/ashergill
pvillano · 6 days ago
My [interpretation? fanfic?] is that Julia is like a carnivore, and humanity is not it's first prey. Every creature that eats, eats to steal the disentropy of it's meal. Plants can steal order from sunlight, and certain microbes can steal order from thermal vents, but carnivores, herbivores, and decomposers steal order from the work of other organisms. The improbability of living is sustained by arranging stolen amino acids into one's own proteins, powered by the toppleing of sugar towers back into a jumbled mess.

Julia does not reassemble amino acids like earth life does. But it does absorb disentropy from it's prey. The extreme specificity of an interstellar spacecraft, it's contents and occupants, is absorbed by Julia, so that it can move, grow, and attract more prey.

pvillano commented on Typechecking is undecidable when 'type' is a type (1989) [pdf]   dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/... · Posted by u/zem
pvillano · 7 days ago
This stack exchange answer talks about the importance of decidability in type checking

https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/2072

My interpretation

Decidability is of academic interest, and might be a hint if something is feasible.

But there are (1) ways of sidestepping undecidability, e.g. A valid C++/Rust program is one for which the typechecker terminates in x steps without overflowing the stack

And (2) things which are decidable, but physically impossible to calculate, e.g the last digit of the 10^10^10 th prime

What matters is being able to reject all incorrect programs, and accept most human written valid programs

pvillano commented on Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?    · Posted by u/blahaj
mbb70 · 25 days ago
I explored the space of valid Spelling Bee puzzles and found out the lowest scoring puzzle is (x)bejkou with 14 points.

Hoping they do it for April 1st one year.

pvillano · 21 days ago
jukebox? jeux is found by my solver, although I'm not sure Sam would include it. I'm working on a site for solving Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Strands, etc.

What was your algorithm? Compute a bitset for every word, for each word with 7 unique letters, check against every other word if it has a subset of those letters? Surely there's a better than O(n^2) way

pvillano commented on Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?    · Posted by u/blahaj
nkg · 23 days ago
Not today, but the day before I launched my 2nd attempt at making chocolate from cocoa pods. The 1st time, the fermentation failed and I just got rotten seeds in a pot.
pvillano · 22 days ago
That's super cool. Good luck!

~I watched a video series where someone did the techniques in isolation in reverse order and I thought it was a good idea. That way you're always learning on perfect ingredients. i.e. buy chips and learn to temper, then buy roasted nibs and learn to refine, then buy dried and learn to roast, then buy pods and learn to ferment and dry.~

pvillano commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)    · Posted by u/david927
pvillano · a month ago
words.saej.in

A site for filtering word lists and solving word puzzles

Anagrams, regular expression search, and a crossword helper, as well as several NYT word games.

pvillano commented on “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”   mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11585... · Posted by u/cod1r
NetMageSCW · a month ago
How is “this system doesn’t deadlock” not the same as the halting problem?
pvillano · a month ago
Deadlock is literally a halting problem.

We can't know for every possible program if it halts or not, but the complexity of programs we can determine is increasing as tools and techniques get better

pvillano commented on “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”   mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11585... · Posted by u/cod1r
maxwells-daemon · a month ago
I work at Harmonic, the company behind Aristotle.

To clear up a few misconceptions:

- Aristotle uses modern AI techniques heavily, including language modeling.

- Aristotle can be guided by an informal (English) proof. If the proof is correct, Aristotle has a good chance at translating it into Lean (which is a strong vote of confidence that your English proof is solid). I believe that's what happened here.

- Once a proof is formalized into Lean (assuming you have formalized the statement correctly), there is no doubt that the proof is correct. This is the core of our approach: you can do a lot of (AI-driven) search, and once you find the answer you are certain it's correct no matter how complex the solution is.

Happy to answer any questions!

pvillano · a month ago
Is anyone working on applying these techniques to formal verification of software?

My limited understanding of Rust is that it applies a fixed set of rules to guarantee memory safety. The rules are somewhat simple and limiting, for ease of understanding and implementation, but also because of undecidability.

Programmers run into situations where they know that their code won't cause memory errors, but it doesn't follow the rules. Wouldn't it be cool if something like Aristotle was integrated into the compiler? Any code for which a proof of correctness could be written would pass/compile, without having to add more and more rules

pvillano commented on A4 Paper Stories   susam.net/a4-paper-storie... · Posted by u/blenderob
n4r9 · a month ago
Fun article. I liked the bit about how the size of A0 can be uniquely determined from abstract constraints. But I'm not convinced that the "Measuring Stuff" section involves anything more than memorising the exact dimensions of A4. I don't see how it applies the stuff about preserved ratios.

Nitpick: typo in the dimensions for A3.

pvillano · a month ago
On one hand, you could do the measuring section with any standardized rectangle. On the other hand, any excuse to talk about metric paper

Letter paper, credit card, banknote, business card, etc.

u/pvillano

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