chiply

Haha, this is very true. Symbolic AI is dead for the most part, but I feel like it was an issue of labor scale. There weren't enough code fluent humans to embed all the knowledge. I do think symbolic AI will see a resurgence though. I could see it being a part of enrichment to current models. I don't think it's the case that we'll see diminishing returns THEN reach for symbolic AI. I think that adding a symbolic layer could greatly enhance their effectiveness today and make the models cheaper (by being performant with fewer params and therefore cheaper to run and serve). You already kind of see clues of this as creating graphs / ontologies as part of a RAG or retrieval phase are proven to improve performance of these AI models in specific domains.

At the same time, back then the thought was that symbolic AI was the answer, and for sure Hofstadter's understanding of intelligence, and the emergence of consciousness from matter, had everything to do with symbols. He's talked about this, very interesting, although this is not a 'feel good' artifact from the Hofstadter canon lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6e08RnJyxo&t=227s

Yeah, I think the story is that Penrose saw an illusion in an Escher print that encouraged him to create the Penrose Triangle, his dad Lionel created the Penrose staircase, and then sent a copy of these in the paper "Impossible objects..." to Escher, who then used the staircase in "Ascending and Descending" and others. It's kind of cool that they cite eachother in these works as inspiration here. I bet Escher could have made an interesting print of them pointing at one another in some kind of impossible object.

And apparently neither Penrose nor Escher knew about Oscar Reutersvärd's work! Oscar got robbed lol.

Author here. I think in general this is sound advice, but in Emacs it is an incredibly convenient utility. I use them all the time. Mostly simple things like wrapping function definitions, or even other macros that wrap function definitions. Most of my lisp experience is in Emacs where the config layer is essentially exposed through an elisp API. In that context, I find myself using macros a lot. But if I was building some software from scratch, like say a data processing system, I can't immediately think of scenarios where I would define macros.

Worth mentioning in Elisp that even if you don't define your own macros, you use them more often than you would think. defun, unless, def-custom, etc (more examples in the blog post) are all macros. The fact they look and feel like non-macros like special forms and built in functions implemented in C is part of what makes elisp so cool to me. There are plenty of homoiconic languages, but you rarely feel the distinction between program and data in elisp, and macro-supporting lisps in general.

This is unreal. This is also a fascinating read https://horwitz.ai/model-atlas. it's linked in the tool but i missed it at first glance.

I love this take because I had exactly the opposite idea. I thought the combo of remarkably simple text (not even wrapped) with incredible, full width visualizations was chef's kiss. I really like the balance there personally, but I hear you. Does your browser have Reader Mode or something like that? I don't use those tools personally, but I believe they will recast the text parts into something that renders optimally for reading (ideal font size, number of characters per line, etc....).

I love EWW! It's incredible. If you mostly use the browser for reading, you'd be surprised how much EWW actually renders. It is true that a lot of JS sites won't play nice in EWW, but I find that's quite rare, and it's easy to just switch to a chromium browser in those cases. It's my main driver for reading on the web.

Dude that milkman joke made me cackle out loud.

It's hard to draw a direct analogy there, but I feel like it echoes the same sentiment.

A soapbox I have is that GHA workflows are scripts that could run on your machine without any of the YAML stuff. Who gives a flying about the DAG or the logs? Which, by the way, if you're willing to walk to the milk store to buy your milk, could be recreated in a much more testable and maintainable way without any of the YAML bs that GHA prescribes....

But DAGs are pretty, and logstreams showing up in a browser application instill trust (for reasons that fly far above the head of yours truly). So people go for that. Pretty DAG, nice logstream; therefore, deliver my milk. All of a sudden.... The CI/CD platform is having its merry way with your SLAs, contract abidements, and hotfix deployments.

What a time to be alive.

Not to rail on the South Park thing, but the blast radius of this issue also reminds me of the episode where the internet dried up.

If this bs with GitHub continues, Parker/Stone will have to make a GitHub episode. How seen would we all feel if that happened?

I feel for you.... This is not a position you should be put in.

There's always the escape hatch of running you GHA workflows locally, but unfortunately, despite the existence of packages like `act`, there is no way to fully recreate the GHA runtime locally. Tons of the special YAML syntax just can't (more accurately, "just doesn't") get interpreted by those local actions runners.

We never went this route, but at my old org, I always advocated for considering GHA to be wrapper around a single bash script (or whatever script you want to run), as a means of completely breaking out of the GHA hellscape that is programming in YAML, who's turing-completeness is pretty dubious.

Unless you have things set up this way, you (the client of GitHub) would have to completely redesign your CI on the fly, run it locally, and then figure out how to get the D compliment of the I to work in a way that is auditable. Fat chance for most teams I bet.

Thank god you're dealing with a batch scenario. Silver lining for sure. Still, embrace the anger.

What makes my blood boil is that there's millions of DEVs literally crying at the moment worrying about how GitHub's failure to be responsible will put their jobs in jeopardy.

And fingers crossed for you my friend. We're at 5+ hours at the time of this writing.... You're batch job may still have a chance!!!

Time to rant... This is absolutely unreal.

Even self-hosted runners are impacted.... How can that be?

The cost of this globally has got to be in the hundreds of millions to companies that use CI/CD through GitHub Actions. What if prod is broken and GitHub actions is stalling the deployment of your hotfix? What if this makes your organization miss and SLA and diminish user trust? What if this makes you miss a release that you were contractually obligated to meet? This is happening during peak dev hours on a Thursday (not that it would be acceptable at any other time).

I don't understand how a service this critical to the global technical infrastructure can fail like this at all, let alone for more than a few hours. Like where's the backup generator for crises like these? You can't even use self-hosted runners? WTF? Like how can you not bring your own backup in a crisis event like this?

Not that Microsoft has a good reputation, but holy moly, you'd think they would prepare from something inevitable like this.

Unreal. Even self-hosted runners are impacted.... How can that be? The cost of this globally has got to be in the hundreds of millions to companies that use CI/CD through GitHub Actions. What if prod is broken and GitHub actions is stalling the deployment of your hotfix? What if this makes your organization miss and SLA and diminish user trust? What if this makes you miss a release that you were contractually obligated to meet? This is happening during peak dev hours on a Thursday (not that it would be acceptable at any other time).

I don't understand how a service this critical to the global technical infrastructure can fail like this at all, let alone for more than a few hours. Like where's the backup generator for crises like these? You can't even use self-hosted runners? WTF?

This is nuts. I remember there was chatter about kicking the tires of the canvas patch in Emacs with DOOM. This is sick. I hope people reading this post understand that this is DOOM the video game, not doom the emacs distro. Well done!

Just stumbled across this. It's just Emacs docs defined elsewhere but with a modern UI, great organization, and wonderful features.

Was reading this after exploring the tree-sitter package. It's amazing how long this ideas take to be fully implemented in the mainstream. This is a fascinating idea for any one who's into text editors!

This post is about Hyperbole's HyWiki package for knowledge management.

I've been doing a deep dive into knowledge management and PKMSs, and in my research I've found that HyWiki offers the best of all words. It has a truly unique behavior compared to other PKMSs that allows it to obviate the bookkeeping involved with linking your notes together, and allows your curated knowledge to propagate into the rest of your Emacs, not just your siloed notes vault.

"Emacs can draw line-level indicators in the built-in fringe and margin, the thin gutters beside the buffer text. The fringe gives you a single monochrome mark per side, and the margin can technically hold more, but getting several independent sources to share one line cleanly is surprisingly hard to pull off in the plain text rendering that the margin uses out-of-the-box.

svg-margin (code on GitHub) fixes this by rendering indicators as SVG in the window margins, so any number of independent "providers" present text, icon glyphs, and clickable markers side by side on one line. Like my svg-line package, it overlays SVGs onto built-in UI components (the margin in this case) by leveraging Emacs's built-in SVG support. My personal config channels many sources to it, including VC, flycheck, evil marks, Org elements, whitespace indicators, and live symbol occurrences."

"Learning Emacs is not about scouring through documents and memorizing facts.

Those who use Emacs fluently know that the real skill is knowing how to ask Emacs about Emacs. The answer to any question you might have about Emacs lives behind just two keys: M-x and C-h. If you internalize those, plus a handful of command prefixes for the auto-discovery commands, Emacs will teach you whatever you need to know, on demand."

"Rendering an Emacs status bar as an SVG image, like with my svg-line package, really is several times heavier than the native text engine. The skeptics were right. But it doesn't matter in practice: even a fully-repainted 3000-pixel ultrawide bar holds ~77 fps, and a thin inline animation rasterizing a fresh frame every tick runs at 130–520 fps. To put that into perspective, this is still well above the high frame rates that even applications like video games target. More than enough for a text editor if you ask me!"

This is awesome! I was literally just thinking about this yesterday.

Do you feel like this will diminish Bluesky in any way? I wonder if having 2 models for interaction (twitter style + thread style) will muddy the waters at all? It does sound like they're doing their best to make the hybrid work "You don't always have to visit a community's homepage to get the latest posts, though. They will automatically appear either on your Discover feed or a special feed for them".

Do you think Twitter / X should also do this?

I don't have anything sophisticated to say about this, but I know the footnotes are critical. There are some plot points in there. They are also an important aspect of the book's structure and the methodology of reading the text. I'd say skipping the end notes would be a disservice to the reader as they would miss so much.

Something I want to do is read the footnotes alone in 1 whack and see what that experience feels like. I haven't done this yet, but I feel like it could illuminate exactly how much of what I latently remember about the novel is located in the footnotes.

"This is the sixth post in my series on Emacs completion.... This one coins a term for a special case, Incremental Suggesting Read (ISR), where the candidate set produced by incrementally typed input is a suggestion, rather than a literal completion of that input. The ability to generate inferred matches in addition to literal matches vastly expands the scope of what a 'completion' system can do. Two conceptual sources supply the suggestions: 1) semantic retrieval and 2) generative synthesis. This post is more speculative than useful, so carry that pinch of salt with you as you watch the video or read this post."

Sierpinski Christmas cards is next level! Whoa, that site is beautiful! Thank you for sharing that, I'm going to be having a lot of fun with this today!

Ah this is a good catch! I think "higher power" would fit way better given how I framed this sentence. Ennet's members aren't surrendering to substance (they've already done that). Like you said, once in the halfway house, they're surrendering to the "higher power". AA groups, as the book covers, are conspicuously religious, and I know a lot of the AA passages were informed by DFW's research at AA meetings and his own experience in recovery. I'm going to change this line.

Oh thanks! That'll be great to see :). Edit: feel free to drop a link here or send to me when it's ready, I'd love to read it! My contact info is in my blog!

This is such an interesting story, and very much in line with DFW's writing in IJ.

I think this reality is something many folks are still in denial about. Like, how many times do you see an add depicting some translucent person's distorted cervical spine, referencing 'devices' in all their various forms as the cause. The entertainment / devices we use every day are literally causing morphological changes in our bodies. That's so dark, and I think loads of people simply choose not to think about it. Is ignorance bliss? Maybe for those hypnotized by the various 'entertainments' in their lives. But for people like yourself, who actually witness it, I'd say Infinite Jest is a useful, cautionary tale.

I'm not sure I agree.

A more solid prophecy would be InterLace and the teleputer (analogous to streaming and smartphones, respectively).

I do think the Entertainment is a solid prophecy of doom scroll / infinite scroll, which is now showing up in basically every application.

The videophony chapter is also especially prophetic when you consider the prevalence of things like filters. I actually noticed the other day on a Google Meet that there is a 'touch up my appearance' feature. Wild.

This one is a lark, but one funny thing, although very different from ONAN (Mexico + USA + Canada), is that we're kind of witnessing an 'ONAN' world cup (all the matches are in these exact three countries). Again, obviously different from ONAN in Infinite Jest, but I thought that was funny.

I'm not sure he predicted the internet, as you mentioned, as the internet was invented in the 60s. If you meant the world wide web, that was created in 1989, popularized in 1990. IJ came out in 1996, so my instinct is that DFW knew about the internet/www when he wrote the book.

As a rule-of-thumb, I'd say if you've made it past the introduction of each vertex I describe in the article (Ennet, ETA, Wheelchair assassins), you're good to bounce around and play the chaos game in that way. Put another way, if you know Hal, Gately, and Marathe/Steeply; then I'd say you're good to hop around.

Even still, I strongly recommend reading it sequentially. But my first read through, I did skip ahead to some interesting passages other folks had written about, and that re-invigorated my interest in the novel. DFW's voice is so idiosyncratic and interesting. That's what kept me coming back.

So in general, I'd say there's maybe 1-2 spoilers, but nothing major. If you want truly 0 spoilage, I wouldn't read it, but if you can tolerate some very minor stuff, you're likely safe.

If you're on page 600 though, there's no spoilers.

Edit: and yes, DFW presaged a lot with this book! Especially around how entertainment has evolved and the negative impact it has. The 'doom scroll' feature is literally called 'infinite scroll' in the software industry. Scary stuff :-/

This is really helpful, thank you! This post was one of my first with relevant, 'real' images, and I really like how it came out relative to the generated stuff. Besides, I feel like image generation has lost its way since DALL-E got deprecated. I've bookmarked these resources!

"rambling stoner conversation". Lol, you've clearly made it to Ken Erdedy's section, which is literally that. That's a brief passage in the book, and honestly one of the hardest parts to read.

I'd say there's a lot of groundwork laid in the first 60 - 100 pages or so. After that, I honestly don't think it would be harmful to cherry pick interesting passages from the book. You could research interesting sections of the novel and target those for a first pass read through, then maybe later read it sequentially. There aren't really plot spoilers as the book is somewhat plotless.

Even still, I'd recommend the first read through be sequential. My first read through was, but I also skipped around a little bit. My favourite thing about DFW is his writing style. Also might help to whet your appetite for his voice by reading something like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which is a hilarious anecdote and commentary about his trip aboard a cruise liner.

In general, I'd say the best advice is to free yourself from the burden of 'understanding' the novel on your first read through and just enjoy the chaos. Besides, there is so much ambiguity in the novel that, even if you do crystallize some understanding, there's likely many alternative interpretations. That's where the re-reads get really fun.

This is a good point. The banner image is something I've been doing on all my articles, and it's creating the wrong perception. I'm probably going to stop adding these. All my other content is software engineering related, and I've started adding more visual content like diagrams, screenshots, and YouTube videos. So I probably don't need to lean on the banner images anymore, and it seems like they're doing more harm than good!

Edit: I actually went ahead and removed the banner image from this post. Thank you for pointing out this signal!