There is a meaningful HN thread once in a while, due to being populated by the actual ex-googlers and facebookers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40818809 First of all, FB approach is “The Worse Is Better” all over again. If you write a quick crap to be replaced by something else very soon, the meme of “Move Fast and Break Things” (which is a polite name for “Just Pile Up more and more Crap, who cares LOL”) will “work” in the short run Otherwise it is guaranteed to accumulate all sorts of “technical debt” (a polite wording for “now costly or impossible to fix early quick idiotic and incompetent decisions”) – just look at Shittereum and ask shitalik – the champion of quick incompetent decisions....
Structural pattens
What is a pattern? A properly captured by the Mind (of an external observer) into a named abstraction “frequently emerging arrangement”. There are obvious weather patterns, seasonal patterns, social patterns, and so on. The most “concrete” emergent patterns are the “structural patterns” – rivers, trees, proteins, biological species. The most fundamental structural patterns has been captured as abstractions: linear sequences trees (acyclic directed graphs) tables (lookup tables) More abstractions has been derived...
A puke from too many bullshit YouTube videos.
Recently I have poisoned myself by watching some talking heads on YouTube. The topic was “something something structural system design”. There is a “correspondence” (not a true isomorphism, but still) between the structural patterns in molecular and cell biology and patterns in a pure functional code – an augmented Lambda Calculus. Both “systems” are heavily constrained by the execution environment (molecular structures of cell biology is the code and the data, the Universe (in a particular locality) is the runtime)....
Patterns everywhere
Just like Max Cohen stated in “Pi”, there are patterns everywhere. Not, however, because of mathematics (which he called “the language of the Universe”), but, and this is crucial – prior to it. Having the maths “after” Reality (What Is), not “prior” to it, like “esoterics” (or rather plain idiots) put it is the only proper philosophy (of the ancient East), which puts everything into their right places. What mathematics is really?...
L. Tao on LLMs
I am being systematically cancelled on HN (as if I am a fucking russian – I am NOT – or something), but sometimes it feels ridiculous. LLM don’t “do maths” by definition (which in this context is the code). LLM “predict” the next symbol after “2+2=” and separately and independently (in principle) predict token-by-token of why that is true. There is absolutely no “reasoning” or “understanding” of any kind whatsoever, just as a parrot would do....
The "quant" memes from books and movies.
Who haven’t seen the famous meme-movies about the markets? “The Big Shot”, “The Margin Call” and, of course, “The Wolf of Wall Street” (in which, remarkably, there were no mathematical models involved – just plain old bullshitting). And, when we saw that guy, the second place on a math Olympiad, we probably felt a pang of pain and regret. That could have been me. Math, it turns out, is not that complicated after all....
Dopamine hacks
Psychology is a very serious “thing”. Some unfortunate people spend most of their “energy” struggling with their own (unwanted. overwhelming) emotional states, like tension, /anxiety stress and so on. We cannot change ourselves. but we can accept what we are and try to develop (Know Thyself, you know) and apply some hacks, just like that “Emotional Intelligence” meme. Acknowledging and accepting ourselves as we are is the first necessary (but not sufficient) step....
Attention Is All bullshit.
Once again I tried to through This meme video. Once again with the same results. I have seen these social patterns many times before – when people begin to use ill-defined, anthropomorphic and purely abstract concepts to construct familiar analogies and to invoke intuitions, so everything seems “right” and “logical”. Abidharma uses abstract terminology to produce a seemingly coherent system. It started from very reasonable abstractions of The Buddha, which illustrated his ideas with abstract notions like pealing off layers of an onion (to find literally nothing in the center) or a mixture of spices using for cooking, but very quickly went all to pure abstract bullshit....
Vedanta
It is time to publish some more results. Type-level reasoning A function application - corresponds to /Modus Ponens/ A specialization, an instance of it. > ($) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b > ($) f x = f x Reversed order of agreements, still the same /Modus Ponens/ > (|>) :: a -> (a -> b) -> b > (|>) x f = f x "Multi-argument" is just /currying/ -- ~* ->*->*-> *~ Same, but with an explicit /abstraction barrier/ (and /lifting/) > (>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b > (>>=) ma f = undefined -- has to be defined for each particular type (an instance) Notice that this is essentially a type-signature of ~fmap~, > fmap :: f a ->(a->b) -> f b with a reversed order of arguments and a specialized function....
On Python
Python is eating the word. When I type “Python” on the Library Genesis search prompt I’m getting some 300 pages (7628 files found | showing results from 1 to 25). This has to be bullshit. Arguably, the mass hysteria has started when MIT switched from the classic MIT Scheme to Python as its main teaching language. The AIMA code at Berkeley has been ported from Common Lisp to Python at about the same time....