zetalyrae

31 ms·

331.
Why optical lithography will live forever(researchgate.net)
1 points by zetalyrae 5y ago|0 comments
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
In Common Lisp you can use FLET or LABELS to declare local functions. This works, but there really is no good solution: utility functions often just take up space and belong nowhere.
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
I think extracting functions is the way to go. I like it when a function's body reads like a sentence, when it's been broken down to the atoms of that conceptual level of abstraction. Forth code that achieves this can look very sa
334.
by zetalyrae 5y ago
Doubly so for building compilers, or compiler-like programs (a long chain of intermediate representations, with lots of little transformations from one to the next). Adding a new type of node, in a language with ADTs, leads to compile-time
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
von Neumann was probably the most intelligent person ever documented. He was probably frustrated that people couldn't see the machine code fully formed in their mind's eye :)
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
Yes, thank you, your code example is much better than mine. The simplifying potential of expression-oriented languages is huge. Alan Perlis said[0]: "symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept; seek it everywhere", and this is a gr
337.
by zetalyrae 5y ago
Ok it may not exist as a debate outside my own head :) To offer one argument: the problem with expression oriented languages is their generality, in that you can write "weird" expressions, e.g.: let x = [giant block of cod
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
For such a young discipline, it's amazing how much of software practice used to be standard operating procedure and is now all but forgotten. At one time Dijkstra had to actually argue for structured programming. No-one would take th
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
You can get quite far with a preprocessor that's completely unaware of the semantics of the code. Or that trusts the programmer to use the macros on constructions of the right type. Even parsing C "correctly" is a huge proble
340.
Soviet Ship Kosmonavt Yuriy Gagarin(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by zetalyrae 5y ago|0 comments
341.
by zetalyrae 5y ago
I wish alt text could have more internal structure. A string is not good enough: you can't separate the text into paragraphs, or have bullet points, or emphasize text or link to anything. Something closer to the figcaption[0] element t
342.
by zetalyrae 5y ago
Having to write type names when defining variables is a tradeoff between ease-of-writing and ease-of-reading. When reading code in e.g. a book or a patch, where semantic tooling is not available, it helps to know the type of a thing. My mai
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
And some people are still talking about the "hydrogen economy" in this era of ever-improving batteries and large-scale grid storage with pumped storage etc. Just build an assembly line for small modular reactors.
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
>Looking for prior implementations of this idea I’ve found magma (2014), where it is called doto. It is a macro for the cmacro[0] pre-processor Hey, that's me! I wrote cmacro. I'm glad someone has built a newer and better alter
345.
The Sigma Cognitive Architecture and System (2017)(sciendo.com)
2 points by zetalyrae 5y ago|0 comments
346.
Farallon Plate(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by zetalyrae 5y ago|0 comments
347.
by zetalyrae 5y ago
DNA/RNA is near-atomic level storage. There's redundancy in that there are multiple instances of each neuron|receptor|etc.
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
>The only proven way of using the LLVM platform competitively is to be part of its future: follow upstream closely, upstream most of your code, and actively participate in the platform evolution so that your competitors can't turn i
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
I stand corrected. But the point is that artificial neurons are computationally simple.
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
And if you need ab-initio quantum chemistry (or equivalent) simulations of every atom in a human brain, the timelines for both AGI and whole brain emulation get pushed far, far into the future. Assuming AGI requires about as much hardware a
351.
by zetalyrae 5y ago
True, but transistors are designed by humans (for now), so you have an upper bound on complexity as well as a certain degree of modularity. Whereas biology has no such limitations because evolution doesn't care about the understandabil
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
ANN neurons are Pitts-McCulloch neurons, an extremely stylized model of the 1940's understanding of neurons. Each neuron represents a dot product plus a function application. A biological neuron is 6e17 Daltons[0], so on the order of
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
>Also: if icc is going to go with LLVM as a backend, then what is the point of using icc at all? Why not just use clang? I assumed the icc secret sauce was in the backend: deep knowledge of how each and every single operation is implemen
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
Maybe with enough technology we can drill into one of the sunken tectonic plates[0] and find fossils there. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Plate#Farallon_Plate_...
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
I think about this often in relation to stromatolites[0]. The earliest evidence of life on Earth ranges from immediately after liquid water appeared on the surface to one billion years after, depending on whether or not you think the specif
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
I've often wondered about taking this one step further: rather than using the terminal to render ersatz graphics, building a plain-text based, conversational operating system. Something like a generalization of ed[0], not just for edit
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by zetalyrae 5y ago
You're correct. Which prompts the question: are there any passive cooling methods that work in high humidity? Maybe just sheltering underground.