lioeters

Wholeheartedly agree that this is a great educational approach, telling the story of an idea's development through history, the people involved, the major milestones, how the original spark was shaped, questioned, extended, and refined to its present form. I often find myself tracing an idea "backward" through time, to discover where it came from, who was influenced by whom, and learn so much from the journey.

This story usually explains why some concept is the way it is, whereas the typical presentation is to just give you the final form, without untangling the logic and its historical development. Also, starting from the original conception - like ancient Greeks or Indian philosopher, etc. - is much more relatable because one can see the "primitive" shape of an idea. And I mean primitive in the best sense of the term, thinking from first principles.

Extrapolating as "very" approaches infinity: "Let there be light!"

I assume you mean "Functional Reactive Animation" (1997) by Conal Elliott and Paul Hudak? While searching for this, I found a great collection of papers on this topic of Functional Reactive Programming in the Haskell language wiki. Most are by Elliot and/or Hudak. Good stuff!

https://wiki.haskell.org/Research_papers/Functional_reactive...

This feels related to many other topics and various strategies, like incremental parsing/compilation/computation, reactivity, CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data type) and distributed computing. About coordinating state changes, reconciling differences, managing dependencies and derived values.

@jitl, the "Data oriented signal library", dalien-signals, looks very interesting and useful, particularly for efficient UI rendering like large tables or maybe editors. I'll enjoy exploring it.

This morning I was reading a paper called "An enduring error" (2009) by Branko Grünbaum, regarding Archimedean polyhydra. From the introduction:

..Even more unexpected is the fact that many expositions of this topic commit serious mathematical and logical errors. Moreover, this happened not once or twice, but many times over the centuries, and continues to this day in many printed and electronic publications; the most recent case is in the second issue for 2008 of this journal. I will justify this harsh statement soon, after setting up the necessary background.

Amusing that the link to an article on ternary numbers was posted by Mr Triplett. (:

The article is well-written and illustrated. The technique described is used in llama.cpp for running language models like BitNet b1.58 whose weights are stored as ternary types.

..in which every single parameter (or weight) of the LLM is ternary {-1, 0, 1}

significantly more cost-effective in terms of latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption

The original paper on this technique was published in Feb 2024. (Also linked from the article)

The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits - https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17764

However, since then there have only been a few other models using ternary weights. I get the impression that there are factors not considered in the paper which make it less practical than it seemed.

"Gonna Die With My Hand-Written Proof in My Brain" - Recorded in 2027 and compiled in the Anthology of American Folk Mathematics (2052)

From Chapter 6 of "The City and the Stars" (1953) by Arthur C Clarke.

JESERAC SAT MOTIONLESS within a whirlpool of numbers. The first thousand primes, expressed in the binary scale that had been used for all aritmetical operations since electronic computers were invented, marched in order before him. Endless ranks of 1's and 0's paraded past, bringing before Jeserac's eyes the complete sequence of all those numbers that possessed no factors except themselves and unity. There was a mystery about the primes that had always fascinated Man, and they held his imagination still.

Jeserac was no mathematician, though sometimes he liked to believe he was. All he could do was to search among the infinite array of primes for special relationships and rules which more talented men might incorporate in general laws. He could find how numbers behaved, but he could not explain why. It was his pleasure to hack his way through the arithmetical jungle, and sometimes he discovered wonders that more skillful explorers had missed.

He set up the matrix of all possible integers, and started his computer stringing the primes across its surface as beads might be arranged at the intersections of a mesh. Jeserac had done this a hundred times before, and it had never taught him anything. But he was fascinated by the way in which the numbers he was studying were scattered, apparently according to no laws, across the spectrum of the integers. He knew the laws of distribution that had already been discovered, but always hoped to discover more.

He could scarcely complain about the interruption. If he had wished to remain undisturbed, he should have set his annunciator accordingly. As the gentle chime sounded in his ear, the wall of numbers shivered, the digits blurred together, and Jeserac returned to the world of mere reality.

https://git.raphaelforment.fr/BuboBubo/Cagire/src/branch/mai...

I was curious why/how someone would even think about arranging numbers in a spiral. The origin story is funny:

According to Martin Gardner, Ulam discovered the spiral in 1963 while doodling during the presentation of "a long and very boring paper" at a scientific meeting. These hand calculations amounted to "a few hundred points". Shortly afterwards, Ulam and collaborators used MANIAC II at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to extend the calculation to about 100,000 points.

The projects being worked on by the Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google are so fascinating. The book "What is Intelligence?" by the founder is brilliant and mind-opening. While reading the posted article and related topics, I rediscovered a rich collection of papers on Differentiable Self-organizing Systems.

https://distill.pub/2020/selforg/

I'd read through the whole site and all the papers there when they were published, and the questions they raise are, to me, some of the most interesting intellectual themes. Then I realized you're an author on most of the articles, as well as Michael Levin, whose research I've been deeply curious about, listening to his talks, reading his papers. It makes sense that there's a common thread and convergence, but also a pleasant surprise.

Just wanted to express my appreciation for the work you and your cohorts are doing, how it's pushing the boundary and depth of our collective understanding. I don't have a question per se, but I feel that this area of inquiry seems both underappreciated by the general public and at the same time fairly open to those outside of academia - what might be called experimental mathematics and exploratory computer science. Maybe there's room for "popular-science" type authors, to explain how cool (ha) these ideas are, to translate the technical material to more digestible language for a wider audience.

I love that this is a site solely dedicated to the subject of interesting Diophantine equations, written by two mathematics PhD students. Going deep on a narrow focus, I respect that approach.

The article itself feels a bit long without a satisfying payoff at end. But then again, the journey is entertaining even for a non-specialist, and the lack of a strong conclusion is due to the unsolved problem of the Riemann hypothesis. The open-ended question is probably irresistible for some personality types that can't stand the suspense and demand a resolution.

Perhaps a way to strengthen the ending is to explain why the question of the distribution of prime numbers is worth solving, and what are the larger implications.

If anyone prefers not to use a mobile phone for this purpose, it is possible to use an application such as Authenticator (fox Linux).

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Authenticator

There are disadvantages to this, but for some people the requirement of a phone for 2FA is inconvenient or unacceptable.

The personal computer moment for AI

Georgi Gerganov, the author of llama.cpp, is the real hero here.

https://llama.app/

This mania can also be called "herd behavior" or "crowd psychology". There was that book a while ago about the intelligence of crowds, but far more common is the stupidity and insanity of crowds. Business and politics are mainly driven by it, but the tech industry routinely falls to hype, trends, and decades-long mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.

Just can't seem to please those hipsters with refined taste for microbrewed quantized noise. It's not real dithering unless it comes from the Dideren region of northern Germany. Oh won't you fly, free bird, yeah..

Click. Couldn't resist your lucky charm, pjmlp (9).

Weird, I see yellowapple (1).

Against Mind-Blindness: Recognizing and Communicating with Diverse Intelligences - King's College London Neuropsychiatry Research & Education Group - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHkFmUwW0kM

No Atkinson?

He's an old-school hacker in the best sense of the term. Living in an off-grid cabin in the Oregon mountains, programming the Apple Writer, flying down to Cupertino on a little private airplane with his bicycle in the back. Much underappreciated but I suppose he prefers it that way, staying low key. Respect.

Ooh, I'd read this article before, but didn't realize Joel Yliluoma is Bisqwit. He has a YouTube channel on technical topics including: making your own terminal emulator, NES emulator, 3D engine, Tetris, programming in raw assembly. https://www.youtube.com/c/Bisqwit

As long as powerful people profit from war, humanity will never be free of its curse. Those who engineer war will ensure the world is traumatized by the horror, generation after generation; so that nations, governments and politicians are subservient to their bottomless greed.

The proposed plan for peace has an enormous blind spot: look up. The demons harvest their wealth and power from cultivating this hell on earth. Look at them, preparing another world war, a blood bath and slaughter of sacrificial lambs. It is no accident that the etymology of the word "holocaust" is a ritual animal sacrifice in fire, an offering to the gods of the underworld. War is human sacrifice for the rulers, old men who declare that the youth must fight and die.

Browser extension: Hacker News Enhancement Suite

I don't get how every post you make gets exactly 8 upvotes immediately.

In every, single, new comment.

(I don't really care, I just noticed it now. I honestly enjoy many of your comments.)

Ceci n'est pas une pipe. (:

Literally a comment I wrote then decided not to post.

The best LISP is the one you create yourself. You learn so much about programming by implementing your own language, and LISP is brilliant for this purpose thanks to its simple syntax and homoiconicity (code is data, data is code). It's also a great way to learn a new existing language, like Rust or Go, by writing a LISP interpreter with it.

Related: Classical Sorting Algorithms as a Model of Morphogenesis: self-sorting arrays reveal unexpected competencies in a minimal model of basal intelligence - https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05375

Here's a Lex Fridman interview discussing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr1sNYY2t9A

I'm a fan of Michael Levin's work, a biologist and philosopher riding that edge between genius and mad science. In the interview he mentions how behavioral psychology may be a useful tool in studying the behavior of algorithms and other phenomena typically not associated with having a mind of its own.

I really wish it had more industry buy-in, in terms of funding and community participation. The language has so much to love about it, and even the typical criticisms - some deserved, some not - can be improved or solved over time because it has solid design and foundation. Like most well-built systems, there's a single person (or few people) with coherent vision driving the development, in contrast to C++ and other "design by committee" style projects.

Such a helpful comment, much appreciated.