Oh! My Firefox dictionary doesn’t have “shoggoth”.

Sometimes folks need a reminder that the Sun is an eldritch being, an elder one whose very presence scorches us and whose shrieking gibberish is blessedly quelled by the vast gulf of space, in order to appreciate the apt analogy of cosmic horror. Other times it’s more useful to think about a soggoth as, say, several hundred tons of artfully-arranged FOOF. Peace be with you, Mr. “it’s a computer doing math.”

I had to go digging for it, but previously, on Mastodon, I posted this video from “The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest”. I don’t know if this is where Yud got the idea, but it’s where I picked it up as a kid along with stuff like DNA-based computing and mind uploads. Similar stuff has been on the air ever since Carpenter’s version of The Thing in 1982, and there’s even older deeper sci-fi roots. Yud gets no more credit than Lovecraft.

I didn’t realize we had a #BigYud Fediverse tag. I gotta use that more often. Also ping @Soyweiser@awful.systems @scruiser@awful.systems to enjoy this.

You don’t have to release anything. Most of my flakes are on private storage in my homelab, including my homelab configuration, and I don’t feel any obligation to contribute anything upstream right now.

Don’t let them take the Nix language from us. Focus on what’s important: nixpkgs can be forked trivially and everything will continue to work, because that’s the point of Nix. They can’t disempower us other than by insisting that we don’t have voices on their committees.

I’ve thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.

Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a “cult”, watch how much more they flip out at being called a “high-control group”. It’s a very good disarming technique.

I’m not sure if they’re a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; I’d read that fanfiction too.

You got Schmidhuber’d! A Gödel machine would fit the bill. Nobody’s built one yet, but the hard part – proof search through something like Metamath (particularly Metamath Zero) – is long-since solved. It wouldn’t take over the world, though; it would just sit in a corner and get really good at maths over the next few centuries.

That’s 100% my weird late-night word choices. You can reuse it for whatever.

I agree with your sentiment, but the wording is careful. Scaffolding is inherently temporary. It only is erected in service of some further goal. I think what I wanted to get across is that Yud’s philosophical world was never going to be a permanent addition to any field of science or maths, for lack of any scientific or formal content. It was always a farfetched alternative fueled by science-fiction stories and contingent on a technological path that never came to be.

Maybe an alternative metaphor is that Yud wanted to develop a new kind of solar panel by reinventing electrodynamics and started by putting his ladder against his siding and climbing up to his roof to call the aliens down to reveal their secrets. A decade later, the ladder sits fallen and moss-covered, but Yud is still up there, trapped by his ego, ranting to anybody who will listen and throwing rocks at the contractors installing solar panels on his neighbor’s houses.

He’s talking like it’s 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it’s not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he’s lining the floors of hamster cages.

In enterprise computing, “smart contracts” are called “database triggers” or “stored procedures.” They’re a nightmare, because they’re very hard to reason about or maintain, and they’re prone to unexpected and spooky effects.

It occurs to me that the situation’s even more dire than this single-node description. If everything’s in one database, then yes, a smart contract is effectively a stored procedure. But it can be worse! Imagine e.g. an MMORPG where city centers or dungeons are disconnected from the regional map to prevent overload. A smart contract might need to synchronize data between two databases, e.g. a dungeon and a surrounding region, to maintain correctness.

Why are techbros such shit at Lojban? It’s a recurring and silly pattern. Two minutes with a dictionary tells me that there is {seldikca} for being charged like a capacitor and {nenzengau} for charging like a rechargeable battery.

Fuck this hyperreal composition. Dalí is spinning in his grave.

Paraphrasing Santayana, we must understand why people become fascist, or else we will not understand how to prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes of dehumanization and black-and-white reasoning which characterize their piss-poor attempts at logic.

Yeah, Lix is good. It’s not what it claims to be, but just being a CppNix fork is enough.

So, I’m not developing in secret. My code is here, in my rpypkgs flake, and as the .packages.${system}.reguix attribute of that flake. One would probably want this Cachix cache if they’re on amd64 and want to avoid building PyPy or CPython. (Upstream discussion about this bootstrap path is here.) I’ll send out a more serious round of invites once the lexer, parser, compiler, and evaluator can actually handle a real-world evaluation.

For posterity: Hi! I’m linking this to you because you’d like to contribute to Regiux. Cool! You need to know RPython, a dialect of Python 2.7 used to specify interpreters. In a nutshell, RPython is statically-typed with lots of metaprogramming, somewhere around Java or Haskell. You write a Python 2.7 program, it gets imported into memory, and then the RPython toolchain compiles from memory into C, optionally generating a JIT compiler. For a gentle explanation, check out Brown et al doing Brainfuck (1, 2); if you’d like to see what high-performance RPython looks like, check out my DIVSPL interpreter or my take on Brainfuck.

While the author is being a bit of a tool, they’re right about one thing: everybody who jumped the gun prior to the board announcement is now left with an ostrich-sized amount of egg on their face and no obvious path towards reconciliation other than eating a very large omelette. In particular, Jake and the Aux team don’t have an obvious technical roadmap, which is a serious problem for a nixpkgs fork; also, I feel bad for Xe, who has left the community entirely and condemned themselves to pre-Nix distros. Pride leads to hubris leads to self-flagellating blogposts.

…I say, as I continue quietly working on my own reimplementation of Nix…

This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that’s not an actual ancap position?

On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that I’m mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It’s difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.

That thread from Paul is such an eyeroll. “Community”, says the VC-funded startup-builder. But it really does show how far out into the wilderness Dorsey has gone; not even his startup bros want to follow.

I guess. This doesn’t really match my experience at all, though; in particular, Nix was slow to evaluate back when we all used nix-env, and I’m not sure why flakes would matter much to evaluation performance. It reminds me of Hugs; surely at some point we should invent a GHC instead.

I’m still waiting to hear about how Lix will achieve faster evaluation. I’m worried that they don’t actually have such a plan, and are hoping that Rust will magically speed things up.

Can’t believe that doofus doesn’t know about T-Mobile. I find that their profile includes several red flags: invited by the sock, no articles submitted, only comments sporadically with opinion-only short jabs, profile is not filled out after months… I’m not saying that they’re a sockpuppet, but they don’t seem like part of the community.