prionassembly

This is a review of sorts I wrote about Accelerando. It discusses the sex stuff to an extent I haven't seen in this thread

https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/09/01/sallies/

Is anyone doing something like using LLMs to generate Prolog (or Cyc, or some appropriately complex, brittle knowledge representation GOFAI)?

Every time I think "oh Jean-Yves Girard".

Besides being perhaps the logician of note of the 20th century (against considerable "competition"), he's become an important philosopher in the 21st. I think he realizes he's become a philosopher, although it would seem (from private correspondence) that he doesn't find philosophy all that important, let alone that he's such an important one.

The recommended book-length treatment of Girardian ideas is "The Phantom of Transparence". The TED talk version is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc3pgZxU-Cg

I often tell people to watch the video even if they don't know one "euh" of French. There's something about the energy in it that already conveys so much.

----

I can't honestly evaluate the other, minor Girard because of the homonymy. It's unfortunate.

I mean, putting a bullet to someone's head can extirpate a brain tumor they hadn't been alerted to before, while leaving a grateful person owing you kudos. What if?

There's some point in which good faith rules apply, probably even in court (although not decisively). Presumably Redis Labs works with the developer community and, critically, promotes the technology, which adds great value in terms of network effects. This is sort of the situation with Mozilla.org/com, right?

(Say you like something like Elm -- wouldn't it be better to have a relatively closely aligned commercial entity that puts significant and effective effort in making it widely used, which in turns makes it easier to find an Elm job or sell Elm-like solutions as a consultant).

Counterexample: Gilles Deleuze's "Empiricism and Subjectivity".

The interesting tidbit here is that congresspeople, both leaders and small fry types, were parroting a line that went "if we don't pass this censorship law, the Supreme Court is going ahead and dropping an even bigger hammer".

The Supreme Court kneecapped Lula in the late 00s and early 10s, arrested his lead cadres and led to his party's decay -- until Lula himself was arrested. They did this by importing theories by German theorists that were never part of our law intellectual traditions, let alone our laws. Then in the late 10s they started arresting bloggers for insulting the Court -- directly, taking on police powers. Now they're with Lula, and further expanding their sweeping powers. I'm scared to even post this. I mean, much of Congress is scared -- they've got people there by the balls.

I think people are annoyed about the idea of having to know R, Python and Julia. So we stick to our guns with Python even if Julia is possibly better. Heck, if I'm ever learning another language, it's Janet then Rust. Or Type/Javascript if life ever throws me thataway. To paraphrase: stop trying to make Julia happen.

Also the Julia community is lovely, but R folks are so smug about tiny things like (the admittedly very fine for its applications) ggplot2. Also: have you heard SAS or Stata users telling you they can run neural networks using their built-in matrix languages? Yes we can! Yes we can!

Do you have physical brightness buttons? Do you have any more gradual transition hacks?

Our 2-yr old doesn't have access to phones at all -- except perhaps when he grabs one that's lying around; but then he expects it taken from him. But he's so taken with TV that we plan screen time in reverse: start at dinner time and subtract how much time we want him to be there. Our whole approach to tantrums is having something else lined up rather than just shutting things off and leaving a void. I'm fascinated by your methods.

Wait. I have an API key. Is GPT-4 available already?

Not as an engineer, but as some kind of high-ranking advisor, yes. Like the "Chief of Theory" in Don deLilo's Cosmopolis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVRpA-_jzV4

PG becoming a Lacanian.

Gitmate (much stronger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)

Are they comfortable in warmer weather though.

This is exaggeratedly mean.

I can sort of correlate this, well, expression, with a political view. State it more crisply.

I think the generic question is how to handle regret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

Eh. If you get ahold of a bucket of true geniuses, best thing you can do is not even give them goals and just feed them until Nobel prize/Manhattan Project level work surfaces. As you go down the scale, crisper and crisper goals are needed. This isn't an absolute either; I've been both the smartest man in the room, bogged down by scrum poker and similar inanities, on the one hand, and (elsewhere) someone with a vague understanding of the work needing some supervision to even add value to the team.

Man, I was expecting constraint linear programming.

Debt is one of those "gradually, then suddenly" things.

I wrote a Python script (it's so shoddy and easy to recreate I won't even share) that will (1) look for definitions as words/expressions between asterisks (2) look for dependencies (words that should be defined beforehand) and (3) produce paragraph-paragraph graph -> minimum spanning tree -> toposort.

The plan is to take five-ish years of blog material that's nearly unreadable to people who haven't followed it from the beginning and produce ordered text.

A toast to dang's health.

openseas.com

Someone else will be able to give a scientific explanation, but the sun is just different at heights. I used to have famiy both in La Paz and Quito and just 15 days in one of those places -- dressed for cold --made me as brown as two months going to the beach in coastal Brazil.

Wolfram, Taleb,...

How can I learn to build tensegrity sculptures? Is it something impossible to do without schooling or master-apprenticeship?

Sound is inherently air in motion.

- The humidity in air changes its density and therefore the transmission of wiggly energy. Temperature probably does too, and there's always Doppler effects from running across the house.

- I tried to have phone calls in an empty house and people couldn't understand me, now almost all the walls are floor to ceiling with books and people don't understand me either over Zoom. You push wiggly energy, some of it comes back (or it destroys the building's structural foundations? I can't talk that loud).

- And there's also the whole issue of resonant frequencies. I know the resonant frequency of my head and can use it as reference to sing in tune if unaccompanied; I'm also able to entertain my child by finding the resonant frequency of corridors, elevators and so on. You can learn it too, just try to hum until one note is much louder and maybe rattles some bolted-on things. OF COURSE THE RESONANT FREQUENCY OF AN ENCLOSED ENVIRONMENT CHANGES HOW MUSIC SOUNDS, jesus. It changes how the same song sounds in different keys.

- And there's the issue of having absolute pitch, which, my dad tells me, ruins listening to music in the kitchen.

We're thriving, just in a different work/life balance proposition. Of course, sterilizing entry-level engineers would lead to much higher overall productivity + zuckerbucks for shareholders. Maybe we need to have that conversation.

Deming statistics are a cargo cult. Try running some (Monte Carlo style) simulations; I did these many moons ago and they don't work at all.