LeCompteSftware

The more important research is the kind that the economy doesn't especially benefit from, but which needs to happen in order to improve the quality of human life.

I had a job paid by the National Science Foundation, doing genomics research on children with extremely rare (sometimes unique) genetic diseases. We did publish papers, and Big Pharma can glean a little bit about how we handled the biomedical informatics of managing data across different highly specialized labs, maybe a researcher will incrementally improve GWAS across the field. But that research was important because actual human children were suffering and needed help.

I'm confused, does this comment have anything to do with the paper? This paper is about fueling a fire, not starting one.

No, it is partially falsifiable. LLMs clearly don't understand the concept of quantity. They fail at tests designed to assess number understanding in dogs and pigeons; in fact they are quite likely to fail these tests, because they are wildly out of distribution.

We don't know how to demonstrate actual understanding, but we sure can demonstrate a lack of it. When it comes to abstract concepts like "three" or even "more," LLMs have a clear lack of understanding. Birds and mammals do not.

I think part of it is Visual Studio Code doing most IDE things very well, creating a market niche for terminal tooling that handles the rest.

Certainly part of it is also people of my generation being nostalgic for the TUIs of DOS file managers and editors.

Surely the "universal grammar" is "every country adopting Western Arabic numerals, largely for commercial reasons, but also acknowledging that their indigenous systems kind of sucked in comparison." The fact that there are different languages truly means nothing, Arabic numerals spread much further than the Latin alphabet.

I really don't think this is evidence for "universal grammar" in any sense. It is evidence that we are all using the same very specific grammar for very specific cultural reasons.

You should see my reply to convolvatron below.

I don't think this is a correct formulation of the platonic representation argument:

  different models converge on similar representations because they are exposed to the same reality

because that would be true for any statistical system based on real data. I am sure the platonic representation argument is saying something more interesting than that. I believe they are arguing against people like me, who say that LLMs are entirely surface correlations of human symbolic representation of ideas, and not actually capable of understanding the underlying ideas. In particular humans can speak about things chimpanzees cannot speak about, but that we both understand (chimps understand "2 + 2 = 4" - not the human sentence, but the idea that if you have a pair of pairs on one hand, and a quadruplet on the other, you can uniquely match each item between the collections). Humans and chimps both seem to have some understanding of the underlying "platonic reality," whatever that means.

FWIW it's objectively false that numbers are a system humans created. That's almost certainly true for symbolic numbers and therefore large numbers ( > 20). But pretty much every bird and mammal is capable of quantitative reasoning; a classic experiment is training a rat to press a lever X times when it hears X tones, or training a pigeon to always pick the pile with fewer rocks even if the rocks are much larger (i.e. ruling out the possibility of simpler geometric heuristics). Even bees seem to understand counting: an experiment set up 5 identical human-created (clearly artificial) landmarks pointing to a big vat of yummy sugar water. When the experimenters moved the landmarks closer together, the bees undershot the vat, and likewise overshot when the landmarks were moved further apart.

And of course similar findings have been reproduced etc etc. The important thing to note is how strange and artificial these experiments must seem for the animals involved - maybe not the bees - so e.g. it seems unlikely that a rat evolved to push a lever X times, it is much more plausible that in some sense the rat figured it out. At least in birds and mammals there seems to be a very specific center of the brain responsible for coordinating quantitative sensory information with quantitative motor output, handling the 1-1 mapping fundamental to counting. More broadly, it seems quite plausible that animals which have to raise an indeterminate number of live young would need a robust sense of small-number quantitative reasoning.

It is an interesting question as to whether this is some cognitive trick that evolved 200m years ago and humans are just utterly beholden to it. But I think it requires jumping through less hoops to conclude that the human theory of numbers is pointing to a real law of the universe. It's a consequence of conservation of mass/energy: if you have 5 apples and 5 oranges, you can match each apple to a unique orange and vice versa. If you're not able to do that, someone destroyed an apple or added an orange, etc. It is this naive intuitive sense of numbers that we think of as the "platonic concept" and we share it with animals. It seems to be inconsistent and flaky in SOTA reasoning LLMs. I don't think it's true that LLMs have stumbled into a meaningful platonic representation of numbers. Like an artificial neural network, they've just found a bunch of suggestive and interesting correlations. This research shows the correlations are real! But let's not overinflate them.

"using periodic features with dominant periods at T=2, 5, 10" seems inconsistent with "platonic representation" and more consistent with "specific patterns noticed in commonly-used human symbolic representations of numbers."

Edit: to be clear I think these patterns are real and meaningful, but only loosely connected to a platonic representation of the number concept.

I think blaming America's problems on gerontocracy is correlation-causation confusion. The reason we have a gerontocracy is that ordinary rank-and-file voters are too cynical and individualistic to participate in politics.

I've seen a lot posts like this recently. This comment is coming from the perspective of someone who the author would consider "anti-social": I once reported my boss to HR for a racist remark, and then resigned in protest. By 2026 I have embraced being a somewhat Diogenesian outcast and progressive hall monitor. I lost friends over it.

So I find this post incredibly condescending, and it seems clearly directed at a few specific people this author had some sort of moral or political disagreement with. Which means the author is committing the exact sins he's inveighing against!

I will be a little more specific:

  assume they have no sane reason for doing or saying what they are doing or saying

Who exactly is assuming bad faith here? When I have a moral disagreement with someone it's rarely because they are ignorant or insane, it's because we have a fundamental difference in values. As a progressive, usually the person I disagree with is quite cynical and deeply rational. They might in good faith assume I am a bleeding heart who is also somewhat rational. Sometimes hearts are irreconcilable: a rich person I went to college with decided to become a for-profit landlord, so we aren't friends anymore. I simply think they're evil and won't associate with them. Stuff like that is always confusing and upsetting, often for both people involved; I am sure my landlord apostate friend didn't see what the big deal was. The author's "view from nowhere" posture is quite childish.

  assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral.

This is followed immediately by the author assuming malicious ignorance! "do not challenge or acknowledge the existence or influence of your assumptions, wholly trust your intuition and feelings"

  interpret others' actions in the context of your fears

This is just pure sneering judgment. It doesn't mean anything, it's just name-calling. "People disagree with me because they're cowards!"

  exploit your immediate network; when the obvious merits of your narrative are exhausted, present like-minded people with tastefully curated details of your interactions with detractors, to provide a more appropriate account that your supporters can rally around to crush any lingering threats to your narrative

Again there seems to be some very specific baggage here! Did he get in a fight on Twitter or something? Anyway, "your supporters can rally around" contradicts these people being "anti-social" and "isolating." Perhaps there are a large number of people who disagree with the author's values, and that's what he's really upset about. But rather than say "people disagree with me and I can't convince them otherwise" he is content to say "people disagree with me because they're antisocial cowards." This is itself antisocial and cowardly, isn't it? I think the author should be concluding "getting in fights on Twitter is bad for human souls."

  do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, especially those that you have never met or otherwise spoken to

It does not seem like he is granting any of these anti-social people any grace, just a wall of unforgiving judgment. If they admit they are irrational weaklings then maybe the author will allow them a tiny helping of grace, as a treat.

  do not seek to understand those you do not already understand

Indeed I get the impression the author doesn't understand me at all, and has no interest in doing so. It's a lot easier to just conclude I am a stupid coward.

It depends on what you mean by "almost perfectly aligned to the domain of relational databases" but by my standards I can't think of a single production database where that's true, in large part because it's not true for SQL itself.

- Tables are not relations. Tables are multisets, allowing duplicate rows, whereas relations always have a de facto primary key. SQL is fundamentally a table language, not a relational language.

- NULL values are not allowed in relations, but they are in SQL. In particular, there's nothing relational about an outer join.

In both cases they are basically unscientific kludges imposed by the demands of real databases in real problems. "NULL" points to the absence of a coherent answer to a symbolic rule, requiring ad hoc domain-specific handling. So this isn't a pedantic point: most people wouldn't want to use a database that didn't allow duplicate rows (the SQL standard committee mentioned a cash register receipt with multiple entries that don't need to be distinguished, just counted). Nullable operations are obviously practical even if they're obviously messy. Sometimes you just want the vague structure of a table, a theory that's entire structural and has no semantics whatsoever. But doing so severely complicates the nice symbolic theory of relational algebra.

That's the point I'm getting at: there isn't really a "domain" limitation for relational algebra, it's more that there's a fundamental tradeoff between "formal symbolic completeness" and "practical ability to deal with real problems." Eventually when you're dealing with real problems, practicality demands kludges.

There's a contradiction here that needs to be untangled:

  There are many examples of models that enable coherent systems within specific domains:

  - Type systems in programming languages catch many logic errors and interface misuses

  - The relational model in databases enables programmers to access incredible scale and performance with minimal effort.

  [...]

  So coherent systems are great: everyone should just buy into whatever model will most effectively do the job. Right? Unfortunately, the listed models are all domain-specific–they don’t generalize to other contexts. And most modern internet software is not domain-specific. Modern applications typically span a wide variety of domains, including web and API serving, transaction processing, background processing, analytical processing, and telemetry. That means that trying to keep a system coherent limits what that system can ultimately do. As one implements more capabilities, application requirements push us outside of a single domain, forcing us to reach for components with a different internal model. So, bit by bit, our system fragments.

The problem of course is that type systems and databases are not meaningfully "domain-specific." They aren't technical magic bullets but they separately provide real value for the use cases of "web and API serving, transaction processing, background processing, analytical processing, and telemetry." So then why hasn't the industry settled on a specific type system? Why do database vendors (and the SQL standard) keep breaking the relational model in favor of something ad hoc and irritating?

I believe the real problem is that software is symbolic and the problems it solves usually aren't. Writing an application means committing to a certain set of symbolic axioms and derivation schemas, and these are never going to encapsulate the complexity of the real world. This relates to Greenspun's 10th rule:

  Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Or in a modern context, C++/C# and managing a huge amount of configuration data with a janky JSON/XML parser, often gussied up as an "entity component system" in game development, or a "DSL" in enterprise. The entirely equivalent alternative is a huge amount of (deterministic!) compile-time code generation. Any specific symbolic system small enough to be useful to humans is eventually going to go "out of sync" with the real world. The authors hint at this with the discrepancy between SQL's type system and that of most programming languages, but this is a historical artifact. The real problem is that language designers make different tradeoffs when designing their type system, and I believe this tradeoff is essentially fundamental. Lisp is a dynamically-typed s-expression parser and Lisp programs benefit from being able to quickly and easily deal with an arbitrary tree of whatever objects. In C#/C++ you would either have to do some painful generics boilerplate (likely codegen with C#) or box everything as System.Object / void pointer and actually lose some of the type safety that Lisp provides. OTOH Idris and Lean can do heterogeneous lists and trees a little more easily, but that cost is badly paid for in compilation times, and AFAICT it'll still demand irritating "mother may I?" boilerplate to please the typechecker. There is a fundamental tradeoff that seems innate to the idea of communicating with relatively short strings of relatively few symbols.

This sounds like Godel incompleteness, and it's a related idea. But this has more to do with cognition and linguistics. I wish I was able to write a little more coherently about this... I guess I should collect some references and put together a blog at some point.

Kind of incredible that this comic was published 10 years ago and people still use the same dumb arguments online: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Any honest reader knows "we don't use AI" means "we don't use LLMs to generate content." It does not mean "all the software we use is AI-free" and it certainly doesn't mean "we don't use ML."

Comments like yours are only meant to muddy the waters and mislead people. There is nothing compelling about Mister Gotcha. It is pure bad faith. I am so sick of it.

I think / hope this is purely satirical, because I have no idea what else I am supposed to take from this:

  Hi, I'm Ben.

  I got sick of everyone in my inbox sounding like AI.

  So I built Sinceerly.

  I tested Sinceerly by cold emailing 5 Fortune 500 CEOs.

  4 CEOs replied. Of those replies, each was under 10 words. 2 replies had typos. One reply called me Larry (my name is Ben).

  LMK what you think.

Yes, you're dead on:

  Rui Takenaka, an elite-level player who has won and lost matches against Ace, said in comments provided by Sony AI: "When it came to my serve, if I used a serve with complex spin, Ace also returned the ball with complex spin, which made it difficult for me. But when I used a simple serve - what we call a knuckle serve - Ace returned a simpler ball. That made it easier for me to attack on the third shot, and I think that was the key reason why I was able to win."

It seems like the human players might be playing in a way that tacitly overestimates their AI opponents' intelligence and underestimates their skill. AFAIK the SOTA Go AIs are still vulnerable to certain very stupid adversarial strategies that wouldn't fool an amateur (albeit they're not something you'd come up with in normal play, more like a weird cheat code). I wonder if this could get ironed out with a bit more training against humans vs. simulation.

"Even for OS kernel code" is doing a lot of work. What you really mean is "legacy C code" and yes, since about 6 months ago these systems have gotten reliable enough that they are basically superhuman at identifying buffer overflows / etc. A remarkable number of these bugs are fixed by adding a (if (length > MAX_BUFFER) {return -1;}), just the classic C footguns. Even as a huge LLM skeptic I am not too too surprised that these systems might be superhuman at finding tedious tricky stuff like this.

At the same time, a lot of these bugs were in places that people weren't looking because it's not actually important. This kernel code had already been a longstanding problem in terms of low-effort bot-driven security reports and nobody had any interest in maintaining it. So this was more LLM-assisted technical management than LLM-assisted security, it finally made a situation uncomfortable enough for the team to do something about it.

Another example: Mythos found a real bug in FreeBSD that occurs when running as an NFS with a public connection. But... who on earth is doing that? I would guess 99.9% of FreeBSD NFS installations are on home LANs. More importantly, Anthropic spent $20,000 to find this bug. Just think in terms of paying a full-time FreeBSD dev for a month and that's what they find: I'd say "ok, looks like FreeBSD has a pretty secure codebase, let's fix that stupid bug, stop wasting our money, and get you on a more exciting project."

I do think anyone who has a legacy open-source C/C++ codebase owes it to their users to run it by Claude/Codex, check your pointers and arrays, make sure everything looks ok. I just wish people were able to discuss it in proper context about other native debugging tools!

Yeah :/ For a larger program you can pay the readability toll once, via a syntactic form that expands the general vector/arithmetic operations to the fixnum versions, e.g. used something like

  (define (heap-permute! perm j callback)
    (with-context 'fixnum ;; same trick works with 'flonum for 64-bit floats
      (let ([n (length perm)]) ;; actually fxvector-length
       (let generate ([k (- n 1)]) ;; actually fx-
         (if (< k j) ;; fx<
           (callback perm)
           (begin
              (generate (- k 1)) ;; fx-
              (do ([i j (+ i 1)]) ;; fx+
                ((>= i k)) ;; fx>=
                (if (even? (- j k)) ;; fxeven?, fx-
                (swap perm j k)
                (swap perm i k))
                (generate (- k 1)))))))) ;; fx-

Sorry if I borked the indentation. I have been working on stuff like this, and more general macros around dependency injection and inversion of control (e.g. you could write this macro to take the type as a parameter and generate code optimized for 'bigint or 'rational). Maybe check back after the summer :)

And BTW I misspoke earlier, of course Chez is AOT rather than JIT. From one approach it's sort of a hybrid: really fast on-the-fly AOT kinda looks like JIT, tongue-in-cheek you could say "NoT compilation" (nick-of-time). But proper JIT of course has huge advantages. If you reeaaaallly wanted to sabotage readability, Chez makes it easy to invoke the compiler at runtime, so along with the C FFI I think you could hack together some sort of JIT. But wow, what a mess that would be! You'd better be getting a PhD thesis out of it :) And if the performance is that critical you'd be much better off with F#.

No, us scientific folks shouldn't go around needlessly poking people's spiritual bubbles. It's rude and disrespectful, and it almost never actually matters. Who cares if someone thinks they spoke to Jesus when they had a heart attack? Leave them alone.

I could have phrased it better, but the emphasis is on "fuzzy"! There isn't any evidence for any of this, it's pre-scientific.

My statement is an opinionated position on how we should direct our research efforts and ascertain what is plausible: the behavioral similarities between humans and cats are much more relevant to the question of consciousness than the behavior similarities between humans and Claude, because cats are obviously conscious and that's not true for Claude. The fact that there are almost no behavioral similarities between cats and Claude suggests to me that "Claude might be conscious" is just a ridiculous statement not worth engaging with, even at the level of pre-science. At the very least, the burden is on Amanda Askell and Dario Amodei to explain why nonhuman animals are irrelevant to the question of Claude's consciousness. They have not offered anything like that; instead they seem fully ELIZAed by the chatbot, high on their own supply.

I didn't say I was a formal biological naturalist according to Searle, I put myself in one of the four boxes the parent comment offered. Please read my comment in context.

Your response is too condescending to engage with. You should have assumed I know what neuroscience is. Please don't ever email me about anything.

The problem with robots is, again, humanity has yet to build a robot with the intelligence of a cockroach, or apparent conscious agentic behavior of a nematode. If I see such a robot I will update my views on machine consciousness. I don't think either of us will live that long.

The problem with the "computational functionalist" argument is that a) there's ZERO evidence other animals brains are computational, that is begging the question; and b) pretty much any embedded system is a device that reacts to its environment in a way that requires computation, and none of them have anything close to the psuedoconsciousness of a bacteria. let alone an insect. Point a) is the more important one: only humans have meaningfully Turing-complete brains. Other animals might be hardware-capable but they'll never be trained to correctly execute a program, nor does their own intelligence seem especially amenable to being described by a classical symbolic algorithm - e.g. animals are very good at object identification, quantity discrimination, causal reasoning, and we don't have anything close to a symbolic algorithm for any of these[1]. Computation is linked to the ability to communicate symbolically, and most animals do not regardless of intelligence. The idea that "the brain is a computer" has always been a poetic description, not a scientific fact. It is more correct to say humans have the ability to think computationally because we think symbolically. Again, maybe someone can identify that animals do think symbolically even if they don't communicate that way, or (somehow) we will have a non-symbolic theory of computation. Perhaps a beautiful symphony. Absent either of these two things, "the chimpanzee's brain is like a computer" is simply not scientific.

The supposed "sense/think/act cycle" is just you begging the question again, applying a computational aesthetic in place of understanding; this time it's blatantly false. Animals do not have a "cycle": sensing is an act and processing senses is a thought. Thinking is an act and many animals can perceive themselves thinking (demonstrated in crows and chimps). Dogs think very deeply while they smell, and the manner in which they sniff (tentative whiff versus greedy huffs) is itself an act requiring thought. Most importantly: even in animals, thoughts can be totally disconnected from actions and senses. Actually this might be the most major difference between a pigeon and Claude: their thoughts and actions are not directly tied to environmental stimulus, whereas Claude can only think and act according to a short-term context provided by a human. You can fake an agentic loop with a prompt, but it's not convincing agency the way a nematode has convincing agency. It's just a chatbot in a loop. If you expose it to real sensory data like a webcam, the agentic behavior becomes even more brittle and unconvincing. It's just nothing like an animal.

[1] I know there's work being done on formal causal reasoning, I thought this monograph was interesting: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/3451/Actual-Causal.... I am not convinced by it. The funny thing about these causal theories... they don't have a causal explanation :) :) :) The argument works by going through cases until you agree it works, empirically, possibly after complicating things further by patching out oversights and inadequacies. Very amusing. Causality is a tough nut to crack!

As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since Alan Turing! And it's not a coincidence that humanity has yet to build a robot which is convincingly smarter than a cockroach.

If you grant that humans are conscious, then surely domestic cats are as well. It is simply irrational to talk about Claude's "consciousness" without actually engaging with this: cats, humans, pigeons, fish, etc etc all share some common features we associate with consciousness (I don't mean sensory awareness, I mean the fuzzy cognitive concept). Claude really does not. In fact Claude doesn't even have much in common with uncontacted hunter-gatherers! Claude imitates the solipsism of formally educated human philosophers.

It is uncharitable and curmudgeonly but totally scientific to dismiss people in camp #3 as unserious and not worth engaging with: they ignore scientific criticism and don't provide any themselves, it's just a mishmash of sci-fi-adjacent philosophy. There's nothing "functional" about ignoring animals and there's nothing scientific about waving your hands and saying "computationalism." That's certainly how I feel. I know this isn't a very nice comment. But I am so sick of AI folks thinking they can ignore animals and still have an honest conversation about machine consciousness. It's just sci-fi ghost stories.

Ok, then the other thing you're missing is that distributors also get a chunk of the ebook. You said ebooks have "no middlemen" but that's blatantly false, Amazon is the emperor of ebook middlemen. I suppose publishers could try selling ebooks directly but then they lose the Kindle platform + Amazon's reach, so Amazon charges for that service. They are a middleman.

Sure, it's easy to evaluate anything if you make up plausible-sounding numbers about it.

The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.

No, it seems saunas have very low relative humidity except for briefly after you splash the hot rocks. "Relative" is the key term there: the absolute humidity is high, but the hot air can accept much more H20 and it will suck moisture off your body. So it is a dry environment according to humans.

According to this company plus some sketchy math I just did, the relative humidity can swing between 15% and 40%: all over the place, but generally pretty dry. https://www.vaisala.com/en/blog/2024-12/can-you-handle-heat-...

Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

With the obvious preface of "thoughtlessly adding." Of course it's not a real law, it's a tongue-in-cheek observation about how things have tended to go wrong empirically, and highlights the unique complexity of adding manpower to software vs. physical industry. Regardless, it has been endlessly frustrating for people to push AI/agentic development by highlighting short-term productivity, without making any real attempt to reconcile with these serious long-term technical management problems. Just apply a thick daub of Claude concealer, and ship.

Maybe people are right about the short-term productivity making it worthwhile. I don't know, and you don't either: not enough time has elapsed to falsify anything. But it sure seems like Fred Brooks was correct about the long-term technical management problems: adding Claudes to a late C compiler makes it later.

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

The problem is that if you're wealthy enough to hire someone to do your errands, those errands likely aren't very mundane - the exception is a socialite giving their friend a low-effort job, but executive assistants are paid well because their jobs are cognitively demanding.

OTOH a lower-middle-class Joe like me really does have a lot of mundane social/professional errands, which existing software has handled just fine for decades. I suppose on the margins AI might free up 5 minutes here or there around calendar invites / etc, but at the cost of rolling snake eyes and wasting 30 minutes cleaning up mistakes. Even if it never made mistakes, I just don't see the "personal assistant" use case really taking off. And it's not how people use LLMs recreationally.

Really not trying to say that LLM personal assistants are "useless" for most people. But I don't think they'll be "big," for the same reason that Siri and Alexa were overhyped. It's not from lack of capability; the vision is more ho-hum than tech folks seem to realize.

Let's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.

Yeah I didn't want to burst anyone's spiritual bubble earlier, but I had a very similar experience one time when I smoked salvia divinorum: there was an eerie and overwhelming purple light, sort of like a "fluorescent" UV bulb, and the Ministers of The Universe pulled my life history in front of me, something something ALL OF SPACE AND TIME WAS-

I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.

Naively this is quite surprising, but the devil is in the details. With the exception of Lean I'd point out they're all fairly close: Chez being 2.5x slower than C++ is not ignorable but it's also quite good for a dynamically-typed JITted language[1]. And I'm not surprised that F# does so well at this particular task. Without looking into it more closely, this seems to be a story about F# on .NET Core having the most mature and painless out-of-the-box parallelism of these languages. I assume this is elapsed time, it would be interesting to see a breakdown of CPU time.

I don't think these results are quite comparable because of slightly differing parallelism strategies; I'd expect the F# implementation of just spinning off threads to be more a little more performant than a Rayon parallel iterator, which presumably has some overhead. But that really just shows how hard it is to do a cross-language comparison; Rust and C++ can certainly be made faster than the F# code by carefully manipulating a ton of low-level OS concurrency primitives. This would arguably also be little misleading. Likewise Chez and Haskell have good C FFI; does that count? It's a tricky and highly qualitative analysis.

[1] FYI, one possible performance improvement with the Chez code is keeping the permutations in fxvectors and replace math operations with the fixnum-specific equivalent - this tells the compiler/interpreter that the data are guaranteed to be machine integers rather than bigints, so they aren't boxed/unboxed. I am not sure without running it myself, but there seems to be avoidable allocations in the Chez implementation. https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug/objects.html#./objec...