batman-farts's comments

https://github.com/smarr/RoarVM is the main thing that comes up when trying to learn about this, and it hasn't been touched in over 10 years. I have also seen people working on spawning child VMs to handle parallelism, though unfortunately I don't have links to those discussions immediately at hand. It seems like perhaps an unnecessarily heavyweight approach, too, not a canonical solution that you would want to use in production.

I assume that step 1 towards parallelism, at least on the image side, would be going through the class library and making sure everything is thread-safe. I'd love to know where one would even get started with that effort. The Roar project claims to support Pharo 1.2, which doesn't seem to be very far after they forked from Squeak, but obviously a lot has changed since then. And the challenge is that Pharo is still rapidly developing all the overhauled classes that distinguish it from Smalltalk-80.

Meanwhile, if I want to play with parallel image/REPL-based programming, I can go over to Common Lisp and, while lacking an equally coherent GUI, be able to load up bordeaux-threads and off I go.

My initial burst of enthusiasm was dampened by the big gap between the entry-level introductions (ProfStef tutorial, the introductory MOOC) and the sheer complexity of everything the image includes. I'm not a big-time Java developer, I certainly appreciate the elegance of the language and dev environment compared to, say, Python, but that huge list of packages and their Baselines in the left pane of the system browser makes it really difficult to tell where to get started. I attended an online Smalltalk meetup recently, and one of the veteran Smalltalkers there was preferentially rebasing his code on Cuis because he felt Pharo had become too heavyweight.

I also fear that leaning so heavily on a closed, corporate platform like Discord as the community hub may lead to tears in a few years. If you're leaning into the idea that "the community is the documentation," you're at Discord's mercy for community sustainment, on top of the already hairy problem of surfacing solutions from within the depths of a long-running discussion forum. Sure, running everything off of mailing lists + IRC like older open source projects do would be a clear step backwards, but being stuck with Discord has been a mild turn-off for me.

Finally, it's worth noting that development is spearheaded by folks in France and Latin America for whom English may not be their primary language. That doesn't affect their ability to do good work! It's totally worth reflecting on how something attempting to approximate natural-language programming in English ended up forked outside the Anglosphere! But I also feel like it'd be worth having an editor take a cleanup pass at future versions of the main ebooks. I've got both the books that Alexandre Bergel published through Apress, and they're both solid, but if the first-resort resources were up to the same standard, I think perhaps fewer people would come away with an unfavorable impression. Of course, that's over and above simply keeping them up to date as development progresses - I believe Pharo by Example is still on version 9?

No, sorry, I don't buy this assertion when it comes up. Everything I've seen, even from the most advanced image generators, has struck me as a logical follow-on from the "big data" trends of the 2010s. If you've ingested literally everything of a certain data type available on the internet, or even a significant fraction of it, it follows that you'd eventually be able to mix it all together and produce randomized outputs that seem novel.

It also elides the significant encoding of human feedback, a contribution that AI firms have typically been none-too-eager to highlight.

I could easily see him, or any other insider, setting themselves up administrating a recipient entity for contributions out of those “capped profits” the parent non-profit is supposed to distribute. (If, of course, the company ever becomes profitable at the scale where the cap kicks in.)

Seems like it would be a great way to eventually maintain control over your own little empire while also obfuscating its structure and dodging some of the scrutiny that SV executives have attracted during the past decade. Originally meant as a magnanimous PR gesture, but will probably end up being taught as a particularly messy example of corporate governance in business schools.

It's a bit sad that calculus remains the stereotypical example of difficulty in most curriculums. Throughout childhood, I remember it seeming like some sort of complex, inscrutable, untouchable phantom hanging in the distance at the far end of the high school math course progression.

If somebody had told me that calculus is how you transition between dimensions, or that techniques of integration would enable me to generate 3D shapes from 2D lines, I think I would have been much more motivated to progress rapidly in math, and much less discouraged when I hit the "hard parts." Those are the answers I tend to give today when somebody asks me, "why take calculus?" Demystifying it doesn't even have to be a wholly practical explanation, like deriving acceleration from velocity.

Segregating out the "hard stuff" doesn't even necessarily lead to great learning outcomes, either. At my high school, and it seems many others, the honors kids were put on the track leading to calculus while everyone else ended up in a dedicated statistics class. The honors kids were expected to pick up statistics through supplementary assignments in their laboratory science classes, and this same approach carried over into lower-division undergrad. As an adult, I feel like that approach has only given me cause to go back and seek out a firmer grounding in statistics.

Because the "AGI" pursuit is at least as much a faith movement as it is a rational engineering program. If you examine it more deeply, the faith object isn't even the conjectured inevitable AGI, it's exponential growth curves. (That is of course true for startup culture more generally, from which the current AI boom is an outgrowth.) For my money, The Singularity is Near still counts as the ur-text that the true believers will never let go, even though Kurzweil was summarizing earlier belief trends.

It's just a pity that the creepy doomer weirdos so thoroughly squatted the term "rationalist." It would be interesting to see the perspective on these people 100 years hence, or even 50. I don't doubt there will still be remnant believers who end up moderating and sanitizing their beliefs, much like the Seventh Day Adventists or the Mormons.

I can agree on one point: if I want 3D acceleration to Just Work on Linux and I'm muting my inner Stallman, the Nvidia binary drivers have always enabled thtat for me. But on the gaming side, I definitely get the feeling that a bit of Microsoft syndrome is starting to set in at Nvidia: we're by far the market leader, so you'll take what we give you. DLSS is constantly pumped in their marketing (and by reviewers, who are sometimes adjunct marketers) as a no-brainer upscaling solution that you don't need to ever turn off. But I've had two games (Death Stranding and Marvel's Midnight Suns) crash repeatedly and unpredictably with DLSS enabled, then run happily stable once DLSS was turned off. I only even became aware of the Marvel game because it was advertised in their Game Ready! driver update, but both the drivers and the game clearly weren't ready. In that particular case, it was also primed to devolve into a circular firing squad between Nvidia, Epic providing Unreal Engine, and the game developer as to who implemented what wrong... something I think we'll probably continue to see.

As far as overpricing goes, I think the pushback (and AMD's pricing advantage) will definitely come on VRAM. I was only able to get a 3080 10GB close to MSRP when the GPU shortage started to abate, and people are already reporting that it's maxing out that amount on Diablo 4 at 1440p ultrawide max settings. Yes, there's been inflation, Moore's Law isn't what it used to be, and it had been years since I had bought a discrete GPU, but that doesn't change the fact that I've paid a premium price and I'm not future-proof for 4K or ultrawide, either of the two popular monitor upgrade paths. The bulk of this can be attributed squarely to Nvidia's desire to maintain market segmentation and profit margins. If AMD really can close the yawning CUDA gap on the software side and start to force more commoditization in the GPU market, it can only be a good thing.

I say this as someone still driving a pre-emissions-control diesel VW: Volkswagen had long been positioning themselves as the market leader for diesel passenger cars in the US. Nobody else was doing as much to offer diesels across their lineup, or push them as the "green"/economical option. And they have been the biggest manufacturer in Europe for a long time, so it makes sense that the EU came down on them like a ton of bricks too.

There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where their diesels, along with Mercedes, got pushed out of California and CARB-compliant states. The opinion among diesel enthusiasts was that this was intentional on the part of CARB not just over NOx concerns, but also to help the market for hybrids grow. Otherwise, given the TDI's at-the-time superior highway mileage and the then-prevailing diesel prices, the VW diesel would have presented as the superior option to the Prius for a lot of people.

During this period, there was still a lot of pent-up demand for the VW and Mercedes diesels in California. Any car coming from out of state with at least 8,500 miles on the odometer was considered a "used car" and could be registered no matter the powerplant, so there was quite a cottage industry of putting that much mileage on brand-new out-of-state diesels and then turning them around on LA or SF Craigslist. The market here was primed to buy VW, but VW cheated to get in a position to sell new "CARB-compliant" diesels again. I'm not surprised that the prosecutors went after them disproportionately.

Yeah, I think this can only be a criticism of "democracy" in an extremely narrow sense. Much of the situation is still determined through litigation, not legislation, whether in court or in front of the state water resources board. My mom worked for a water attorney, and I lived and worked in ag in an irrigation district that had an active case in front of the water board. In both cases, the billable hours were endless, and in the latter case, winning a defense in front of the water board was enough to get the lead attorney a promotion to senior staff lawyer at another irrigation district.

Plus sheer cashflow, not votes, is what's driving a lot of the more water-intensive ag in the dry southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The Resnicks (Wonderful pomegranate juice/almonds/pistachios, Cutie citrus, billionaire LA residents) are essentially agribusiness investors rather than hands-on farmers, and most emphatically DO NOT have senior water rights for most of their operations, but they DO have the cashflow to buy water off of more senior rights holders, and they have the nationwide distribution on the other end to keep that cashflow going. Whether that continues to be sustainable, or their heirs want to keep it up... we shall see. In the meantime, it is a perfectly reasonable business decision as a senior rights holder to fallow your land or otherwise curtail your use, and sell your allotment down the aqueduct. Fresno State has the California Water Institute which publishes a great deal of informative studies and policy papers: http://www.californiawater.org/publications/ They've noted in the past that transactions like this essentially carry no tax or infrastructure maintenance fees. That's one policy change that could easily be voted into place.

Even setting aside the financial cost considerations other commenters have expressed, getting voters behind a wholesale change is a big project. The water situation simply hasn't started to bite hard enough for the bulk of the state's urban population. I'm often skeptical of ballot initiatives and the necessarily shallow marketing campaigns that accompany them, and a ballot initiative to reform the pre-/post-1914 water rights system would need an absolutely huge, multi-year educational push and likely multiple failures and retries at the ballot box. That's not to say it's impossible, as things are noticeably changing. These days, I live over the hill from Coalinga, which almost ran the hell out of water last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/coalinga-california-faces-th...

I find that the main reason I come here is for information/background chatter about various open source projects and the trends behind them. In other words, fairly granular technical news interspersed with general interest science and math stories. Slashdot used to fill this need for me, but it seems like it fell off in editorial quality and comprehensiveness after changing hands so many times. Plus the commentariat over there seems to have thinned out, as well as skewed older and more bitter, the last few times I’ve visited.

I do appreciate a site where I can learn just as much from the commenters as I can from the stories, and this place definitely still provides that. But I also agree that the YCombinator/VC connection means that too much of the content here uncritically rides industry hype waves (crypto, AI… what’s next? Some kind of applied biotech? Asteroid mining?).

What are some good alternatives? Phys.org is great for general science but there isn’t always a lot of CS crossover.

It's not always people with industry jobs taking these part-time positions; there's a whole subculture of "freeway flyers" who are teaching at multiple community colleges, and sometimes lower-division classes at private universities, while trying to break into a full-time position. A few years after I was in his class, one chemistry professor I really enjoyed burned out from doing this and disappeared from all his classes in the middle of the semester. The replacement professor apparently wasn't at all prepared to step in, and the students had to petition the dean to have their grades thrown out and retake the class.

That's obviously the worst-case scenario I encountered, but I heard other tales of people like a math professor shuttling back and forth between Merced and Contra Costa counties every week. A biology professor I had was making a go of it doing half the week at Contra Costa campuses and half the week at USF, and told me her situation was not at all uncommon, even in the Bay Area. There's definitely a precariat associated with keeping the community college system going, which is a damned shame because it's the most accessible rung on the ladder. Perhaps the state will be able to do something about this, but it's understandably wise to be skeptical of statewide education initiatives in California.

As a Lisp neophyte, I've been watching the Clozure CL situation with some interest -- I really want to give it a try, especially the macOS/Cocoa bindings, but my only Mac at the moment is an M1. A couple of specific questions I've been wondering about:

1) Does the port require a rewrite of the compiler? It seems like it was only ever released for 32-bit ARM, not even generic ARM64? How much of that work can carry over to an Apple Silicon port?

2) Will the announced rewrite of Core Foundation in Swift and/or the transition to SwiftUI put the CCL Cocoa bindings at risk of obsolescence anyway?

My current job doesn't demand much coding out of me, so I feel lucky that I'm able to focus my personal learning efforts on interactive development environments like Lisp and Smalltalk, and grateful that solid free implementations are available in any event. If somebody does start up Apple Silicon CCL crowd-funding, I'd be in for at least $100.

These days my 5950X can get through some of the big scary packages quite rapidly. Firefox is done in about 8 minutes, a new point release of Rust seems to take about 15.

I still haven’t decided whether or not I should be embarrassed that I mainly bought a 16-core CPU to run Gentoo.

Well, this stinks. For a point of reference, I had it activated for about 2 years and directed the donations to Federation of American Scientists - not a huge name in the nonprofit space, but well-established and well-respected. According to the impact page, my orders during that time (including some big ticket stuff, about half the parts for a high-spec gaming PC) generated a grand total of $35.22, and FAS has received $1,150 during their participation in the program. I’m glad I could help pay for what’s probably less than one month of their hosting costs…

It was something of a psychological hook for me, that a few pennies from each order would go to support content I appreciated. I did mentally kick myself when I forgot to place an order through the smile.amazon.com portal. I’ll probably end up giving a bit more consideration to other online retailers now, although every time I’ve ordered online from Walmart lately has been a complete disaster.

Interesting that LIDAR is one of the sensors used to monitor the helium cells. One thing that isn't clear: is there any appreciable helium loss through their fancy triple-layer skin? Or can this just be filled once with helium from the factory and then forgotten about for the life of the airship?

I did not know, but am not surprised, that Palladium takes Thiel funding. That greatly clarifies this article’s purpose for me. It seemed odd to see another think piece about the NFT trend when it has already largely burned itself out, but Davis here is acting as something of a “party whip” for Thiel’s nascent political movement. The message of the article is much more aimed at the people being described in the article than it is at you or I: be less like these insipid Twitter personalities, be more like JD Vance and Blake Masters.

Thank you for your advice! Might you have any idea when I will be able to use ShartGPT, so that I can restyle my written English to seem as though I am having a sudden, uncontrolled bowel movement while writing?

For a certain sort of prospective law student, I’m sure this makes Stanford even more appealing. You’ll be able to learn from not one but two professors who helped their own son cop a federal plea deal!

I always figured this had to be the case. OPENSTEP 4.2 ran just fine on x86, why give that up?

“Tweets” and “blogs” sounded stupid, too, but they got bludgeoned into our collective consciousness. If you step back and think about it for a second, “blogging” sounds like something you might do in the bathroom.