Peter Elias, who invented the Elias gamma, delta, and omega codes, died at home of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Phil Katz, creator of ZIP, died from alcoholism and was found dead amidst liquor bottles and suitcases of sexual paraphernalia. Now it is our turn to study compression.
Sad. Little, Big is great (just reread it recently) and have been meaning to reread Engine Summer. as well.
3 genres of AI projects:
1) Calendar App (the 8 F/OSS calendar apps weren't enough)
2) Mouse Ovulation Calendar, a niche app for professional mouse breeders
3) Framework for Everything Including Calendars, Time and Space (200 pages of AI generated gibberish, 2 pages of code)
to achieve re-use or proper decomposition of code - not to mention ludicrously subsidized token expenditure and an attitude to other people's IP that could best be described as "cavalier" if not actively criminal.
There's also a good deal of AI promotion talk that's just plain management bullshit - the excuse du jour for layoffs.
It's like getting mugged and having someone stop by and talk to us about how this "challenged our self-worth as people who had money in our wallets 10 minutes ago".
RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116788957437281634
I have seen reasonable people speak in favor of this thread, but I find it deeply, deeply awful. To be clear, I believe that the author is operating in good faith, but this seems like an unbelievably premature deployment of psychologizing a situation that feels fraudulent through and through.
My disgust at AI is not "because it challenges my identity as someone who writes code". It's because it doesn't do what it says on the tin and largely derives its power from our abject failure ...
My eldest son was running a D&D campaign with his friends, but when they came back from a lunch break, he found that he had been replaced in role of Dungeon Master:
tempted to nickname my oven the Slor and see how long it takes my family to have me committed.
Many zucchinis and za'atars knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, i can tell you!
Unprecedented terminology wins happening over at Qualcomm
Another SMTLIB2 question: is there a way to save out and restore solver state that isn't push/pop? I have a case where we have potentially thousands of solves - say producing states x000 ... x999 and y000 ... y999 and would sometimes like to be able to be in a context where, say, we have all the assumptions we've figured out about x123 and y846. Have you seen this @regehr ?
🎶 I heard there was a secret ISA,
That made all my performance nicer,
And I don't really care 'bout downclocks, do I?
It goes like this, an affine flip, a vpermb, a double shift,
The baffled eng invoking GFNI 🎵
Does anyone have the "Big Assembly" or "SuperCoder" benchmark sets? These seem cool (big sets of inputs for superoptimizers) but I don't see any way to download either.
@regehr might know?
Lucius Shepard (extremely good SF author, albeit with a few oddities - a bit too horny for my tastes and rather prone to writing short stories whether he's writing a novel or short stories) set Life During Wartime in a US invasion of South America, and opened with this banger:
it's truly amazing what LLMs can achieve. we now know it's possible to produce an html5 parsing library with nothing but the full source code of an existing html5 parsing library, all the source code of all other open source libraries ever, a meticulously maintained and extremely comprehensive test suite written by somebody else, 5 different models, a megawatt-hour of energy, a swimming pool full of water, and a month of spare time of an extremely senior engineer
The answer to "where's all the software" is "nowhere, because these things are just getting used to cheat on assignments and build amateur-hour demos and prototypes". They are really not that far advanced from simple plagiarism. For student assignments and boilerplate they work well, but if examples aren't in the corpus they're rubbish.
needless to say, I am being helpfully corrected over this observation by a horde of the Bad App's dumbest users, the majority of whom couldn't software engineer their way out of a wet paper bag
oof have been raging out on the Bad App about this one
weirdly, those in possession of the Magic Software Generator are letting others use it and posting huge losses, rather than, idk, making bank selling software. It's curious.
Poor old Chuck.
Just recently went down a Faith No More Wikipedia k-hole after the Guardian article on their keyboard player.
A fine, mature article that managed to discuss how Roddy Bottum* was, or at least claimed to be, the first out gay man in rock without ever using the words "nominative determinism".
* the name he was born with, to be clear
SMTLIB2 folks: is there a good way of mechanically estimating the cost of a doing an assert ahead of time based on some sort of mechanical trick? In the theory of bit-vectors, we have everything from bvand (easy) to bvmul (!) and bvdiv (!!?). Quantifier-free answer OK.
@regehr seen anything like this?
I think of this quote when I think about the idea of AGI meaning "human and artificial intelligence have reached functional parity". Many effects of AI will help achieve this; unfortunately, most function by lowering effective human intelligence (e.g. hollowing out education).