There is another shitstorm around Rust – the just announced meme-effort to verify approximately 7500 unstafe functions in the Rust standard library. First of all, what a joke! I never thought there are that many of em. It is easily more than the whole SML, Ocaml and Haskell standard libraries combined. Or at least of the same order. If we want, however, to put memes aside for a while, the way to safety begins with the proper and sound principles, so the “unsoundness bugs” will never appear again. ...

DATE: <2024-11-20 Wed> Lets write a few paragraphs which will destroy the current LLM narrative (naive bullshit), while neither any single piece nor the whole article can be refuted. This is a high-level proper (classic Eastern) philosophy, which is many levels away from simple logical forms, but it still can be reduced to these, if one wants to. The Proper Philosophy isn’t dead, not even it is dying. It cannot, lmao. ...

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. ...

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 ...

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). ...

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? It is a “set” (a bunch) of observed (by the Mind), captured and properly generalized abstract notions – artifical abstractions of the mind (of an external observer), along with derived and/or discovered properties of these abstractions, including the notion of a Set itself, which is (a proper generalization of) how the Mind (of an observer) categorizes “stuff” it observes. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...