• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.

    Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.


  • At some point, reading kernel code is easier than speculating. The answer is actually 3. there are multiple semantics for filesystems in the VFS layer of the kernel. For example, XFS is the most prominent user of the “async” semantics; all transactions in XFS are fundamentally asynchronous. By comparison, something like ext4 uses the “standard” semantics, where actions are synchronous. These correspond to filling out different parts of the VFS structs and registering different handlers for different actions; they might as well be two distinct APIs. It is generally suspected that all filesystem semantics are broken in different ways.

    Also, “hobby” is the wrong word; the lieutenant doing the yelling is paid to work on Linux and Debian. There are financial aspects to the situation; it’s not solely politics or machismo, although those are both on display.












  • I think that the mistake is thinking that “smart” is a meaningful word. I’d encourage you to learn about the technology you’re critiquing and not listen to memetic bullshit from articles like the one we’re discussing. Consider:

    • AI/cybernetics/robotics (same field, different perspectives) is always only useful for specific tasks, never for general replacement of humans
    • Black-box treatments of machine learning are only done at the most introductory level and there are several ways to examine how e.g. a Transformers-based language model’s weights contribute to its outputs
    • We have many useful theories about how to learn functions in general, with machine learning as a special case

    This has happened before and it will happen again. I’m sure you’ve seen the phrase “AI winter” floating around.


  • This was a terrible article from a serial plagiarist who refuses to do work or cite sources.

    But at a fundamental level we still don’t really know why neural nets “work”—and we don’t have any kind of “scientific big picture” of what’s going on inside them.

    Neural networks are Turing-complete just like any other spreadsheet-style formalism which evolves in time with loops. We’ve had several theories; the best framework is still PAC learning, which generalizes beyond neural networks.

    And in a sense, therefore, the possibility of machine learning is ultimately yet another consequence of the phenomenon of computational irreducibility.

    This is masturbatory; he just wants credit for Valiant’s work and is willing to use his bullshit claims about computation as a springboard.

    Instead, the story will be much closer to the fundamentally computational “new kind of science” that I’ve explored for so long, and that has brought us our Physics Project and the ruliad.

    The NKoS programme is dead in the water because — as has been known since the late 1960s — no discrete cellular automaton can possibly model quantum mechanics. Multiple experts in the field, including Aaronson in quantum computing and Shalizi in machine learning, have pointed out the utter futility of this line of research.




  • I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

    As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.