YorkshireSeason

Clearly, effect systems, as we know them today, are very heavyweight, and not worth the effort in the small. That's not controversial. But we have to present the ideas to beginners somehow. Those complex types come into their own in (some) large-scale programs, and especially as large-scale programs evolve, as they are being changed by programmers other than the original authors. (Not all programming tasks may be suitable, see the article on Rust for games programming that's on the front page RN.) All that said, the whole point of the article, and the research on direct style effects is to make effect typing much more lightweight. Effect types as we do them today metastasise along the call graph, and that is a big problem (this is also why Java-style exception specifications are considered a mistake). Direct-style effects essentially use implicit arguments, as popularised by Haskell and Scala, to hide much of this complexity. Whether this experiment will succeed, or direct style effects suffer from other problems is unclear and we have to wait until we have enough experience with them. And that can only start, once there is a language that implements support for first class direct style effects.

The article suggests that this is coming to Scala, and I'm looking forward to being a guinea pig.

The purpose of effect handlers, direct-style effects etc, is to let the type-checker/type-inferencer do most of the reasoning about side-effects.

Using such techniques requires an upfront investment of learning how this works, but once that mountain is climbed, programming becomes easier, faster and less error prone in many cases.

The abstract concept here is liveness, aka "eventually something good will happen". In practise, liveness alone is insufficient because a locked up program/processor is indistinguishable from a very slow program/processor. So you really want bounded liveness, along the lines of "within X time units, something good will happen".

Every good book on compilers. I learned this from [1]. The (hard to read) original papers include [2, 3]. Interesting tidbit: Gary Kildall, one of the pioneers of abstracting dataflow analyses, later played a role in the (in)famous deal between Microsoft and IBM that became the starting point for the dominance of the former. The foundational theory behind this is abstract interpretation for which you have many introductions, including [5, 6], with the (hard to read) original being [7].

[1] https://cs.au.dk/~amoeller/spa/

[2] G. A. Kildall, Global expression optimization during compilation.

[3] G. A. Kildall, A Unified Approach to Global Program Optimization.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

[5] F. Nielson, H. Riis Nielson, C. Hankin, Principles of Program Analysis.

[6] X. Rival, K. Yi, Introduction to Static Analysis: An Abstract Interpretation Perspective.

[7] P. Cousot, R. Cousot, Abstract interpretation: A unified lattice model for static analysis of programs by construction or approximation of fixpoints.

I agree this is an interesting direction. IIRC the top (open) bitvector synthesiser works like this (albeit not with ILP).

Trouble with ILP is that it doesn't work on GPUs (as of April 2024) and on CPUs synthesis and other forms of learning are hopeless. That may change in the future ...

LLMs today still struggle to met specifications exactly, which is what synthesis is good at.

Survey propagation works primarily with random SAT instances, but isn't competitive with SAT instances that arise in industrial verification, where CDCL shines. Some gossip: survey propagation was proposed by Mezard, Parisi, and Zecchina [1], and G. Parisi won the physics Nobel price in 2021 [2].

[1] M. Mezard, G. Parisi, R. Zecchina, Analytic and Algorithmic Solution of Random Satisfiability Problems. https://aiichironakano.github.io/cs653/Mezard-RSAT-Science02...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Parisi

Unfortunately, Harrison's book, despite its many other merits, doesn't really treat CDCL (= conflict-driven clause learning), which is really what makes SAT solvers fly.

The children that Foucault has been referring to were not 21 year old men, as you know perfectly well, and as the Wikipedia article makes and the other links I gave make perfectly clear. And the German Greens also did not refer to 21 year old men, what they all were supporting was more something like the Kentler experiments [1].

What is "my own party" and what is "my own country", are you not making unwarranted assumptions?

Absent strong social pressure, humans tend to start having sex when they reach puberty. I doubt that there is even one human on the planet who does not have ancestors that had children at 13. Why is this relevant?

What is not acceptable, as you know very well, is genital mutilation of children without consent (children cannot give consent) that renders them permantently infertile and dysorgasmic. Stop defending child abuse!

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-exp...

Whoops, typo. "(1) it is a sex change operation ..." should be: "(1) it is not a sex change operation"

From the wikipedia article:

   "Michel Foucault argued that it is intolerable 
    to assume that a child is incapable of giving 
    meaningful consent to sexual relations."

"extraordinary rare" is still too much, and trivialises the issue. There is serious lobbying in place in many countries to make it happen more. As you know, the only acceptable rate is 0. One important stepping stone in getting this rate back down to 0 is to make it illegal tout court even for adult. There should not even be medical infrastructure for such mutilation.

Aside, your user name here is after an organisation founded by one of world history's worst mass murderers. Can I suggest to show empathy with his victims, and not use this term? Using it trivialises his crimes.

(1) it is a sex change operation, please do not misrepresent modern genital mutilation. Sex is a biological phenomenon to do with reproduction and, simplifying a small bit: there are two sexes, male and female. A man whose genitals are mutilated does not become a women (i.e. gains the ability to give birth to children).

(2) the purpose of modern genital mutilation for the mutilatee is to facilitate sex fraud, and for the mutilator is, one imagines, money.

(3) if believe someone at that age is mature enough to understand the implications of modern genital mutilation, you will have to face the question why you trivialise it. Your writing here may, directly or indirectly lead to more modern genital mutilation. Speech has consequences.

Lobotomy was generally not voluntary on the part of the patient [...] curious how you feel about other forms of body modification

In what sense can children consent to genital mutilation, since they do not understand at all human sexuality and the human sex drive, since the have had absolutely no experience with it? Virtually all other forms of body modification are also not legal for children.

Please do not trivialise genital mutilation as 'culture war'.

Did you actually read the french (and german green) petitions?

https://web.archive.org/web/20050404190912/http://www.decadi...

Here is the letter from the well-known intellectuals:

https://www.dolto.fr/fd-code-penal-crp.html

They were not just about making the age of consent equal for gay and hetero sex. They were also pushing for lowering and abolishing the age of consent altogether. You can see this as a 'submarine'. From the wikipedia article:

   "Michel Foucault argued that it is intolerable 
    to assume that a child is incapable of giving 
    meaningful consent to sexual relations."

I went through a similar learning trajectory.

I think one has to experience it oneself though, my friends and relatives who never left the suburbs pity me for my restricted living space, and don't believe me when I tell them live is easier with less baggage and it a walkable center of town. I suspect they think I'm rationalising an inability to afford a suburban McMansion.

building a high trust society is more culture than demographics

This is the kind of question that benefits from a probabilistic analysis: does ethnic homogeneity, on average, help or hinder building and maintaining a high trust society?

Many conflicts in world history have an ethnic dimension. Many substantial social cleavages, even if they are not ethnically based, over time may evolve an ethnic dimension. For example some religions have an ethnic dimension, most religions require members to marry only within the own religion etc. Moreover, people are more likely to procreate with people they spend a lot of time with. So even linguistic differences can lead to ethnicisation, since it's easier to socialise with people you can easily communicate with.

It seems save to say that ML has been moving further and further away from what neuroscience suggests, and towards efficient execution on fast GPUs and TPUs. That's in part b/c neuroscience is currently not equipped to explain how human high-level intelligence works.

EU should have its own leading-edge chip foundry.

Yes, "should". But it is unclear that the EU has the organisational capability to pull it off. The last few decades have seen the EU loosing it's technological edge in more and more fields, the more the EU makes (funding) decisions in science and technology. Whether there is causation or just correlation is an interesting question, see [1] for a recent discussion.

planned obsolescence of compilers

Which planned obsolescence? Intel is backwards compatible at least to the x86 from 1978 (?). And I think even back to the 8080. IBM mainframes might still be System/360 (1964) compatible, although I have not checked recently.

Given the RISC-V extensions and profiles tend to proliferate, and indeed that there is a competitive advantage in pushing your own extension, there is an often articulated fear that the RISC-V might fragment faster than those controlled by a single vendor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971577

Exactly.

Advanced computation platform for open science based in data

I'd be interested to learn how the salary compares with a FAANG job in SV.

Why not have two large economic superpowers

We are getting there: China and the US.

Europe has been highly Americanised

This is very true and also very interesting. One underappreciated effect of this is the speed of diffusion of ideas originating in the US.

Generalising and simplifying a great deal, it takes a couple of years, maybe 2-3 for an idea to become normalised in English speaking European countries, and then another few years before the idea becomes normalised in the non-English speaking countries. This has the effect that Europeans are always late to the party and that hampers competitiveness, b/c the US and China have already moved on. A really amusing instance is EU research funding. Cloud computing became a EU-fundable research theme when Amazon had commercialised AWS already.

Linus Torvalds has been living in the US for a long time and is a US citizen. If [1] is accurate, the top Linux kernel contributor is Chinese, and almost all significant Linux contributors are outside of Europe. Arm microarchitecture is often designed in Austin, TX according to friends of mine at Arm. ASML and Zeiss are great, but, as a European, rather than gloating, I look, with great sadness, at the trajectory over the last half century, and see that the number European technology world-leaders has been steadily decreasing.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/

Microbiology is a STEM subject, a 'hard' science, where you have fairly stringent criteria for evaluating the reproducability of truth claims.

Fields that lack reproducability, replace this (i.e. truth) by community consensus which is enforced, in parts, by threats.

Nice work!

How did you debug it? Did you run it against the 'official' RISC-V models Spike [1] or Sail [2]?

[1] https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-isa-sim

[2] https://github.com/riscv/sail-riscv

How much are you willing to bet?

It is valuable to point out connections with existing work, if only to avoid reinventing the wheel, and properly stand on the shoulders of gigants: אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ‎ (there is nothing new under the sun).

The claim of formal equivalence is restricted to "linear transformers". The tone of the comment seems to suggest that S.'s claim is slightly ridiculous. Can you point out a concrete technical shortcoming of the paper?

Neural networks are merely generalized methods used to translate data.

That's true of all computation!

To see this, consider lambda-calculus, which is a calculus of functions (i.e. things that convert inputs into outputs). The computational equivalence of lambda-calculus with Turing machines was one of the early computability theory.

Quite possible. Neither Faeser, vdLeyen nor Arne Schönbohm are technical, so they will simply push whatever their side is trying to achieve. The EU is also pushing hard for backdoors into all messaging platforms, and Faeser / vdLeyen do what the EU wants.