creata

Clifford algebras are harder to philosophically motivate than complex numbers, so you've reduced a hard problem to a harder problem.

I hate when people casually move "between" Q and Z as if a rational number with unit denominator suddenly becomes an integer, and it's all because of this terrible "a/b" notation. It's more like (a, b). You can't ever discard that second component, it's always there. ;)

Why would we expect most real numbers to be computable? It's an idealized continuum. It makes perfect sense that there are way too many points in it for us to be able to compute them all.

> greatly lags Racket performance

This is a different implementation of Guile, though. Has Hoot (on, say, V8) been benchmarked?

It's the static site generator of vibe coded projects.

> I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games.

Then make them. What's stopping you?

In my opinion there's nothing wrong with it per se, but (a) it's still worth mentioning, because most people have the impression that Waymo cars are completely unassisted, and (b) it makes me wonder how feasible Waymo's operations would be if it weren't for global income inequality.

> It seems inevitable that they'll soon be used as the starting points for developing almost all video game environments.

Almost all video game environments? No way. That statement really needs to be qualified with the genres of games you're considering.

Functions are just a different kind of value. Needing to know the type of the values you're using when you use them isn't "nonlocal reasoning".

And it's not like curried function application involves type-driven parsing or anything. (f x y) is just parsed and compiled as two function calls ((f x) y), regardless of the type of anything involved, just as (x * y * z) is parsed as ((x * y) * z) in mainstream languages. (Except for C, because C actually does have type-driven parsing for the asterisk.)

Another way to look at it: languages like Haskell only have functions with one argument, and function application is just written "f x" instead of "f(x)". Everything follows from there. Not a huge difference.

Huh? Currying doesn't require any nonlocal reasoning. It's just the convention of preferring functions of type a -> (b -> c) to functions of type (a, b) -> c. (Most programming languages use the latter.)

> Even if a machine generates them.

That sounds wonderfully meritocratic, but in the real world, a machine generating it is a very strong signal that it's bullshit, and the people are flooding maintainers using the machines. Maintainers don't have infinite time.

> The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory.

That depends on what you're doing and who you expect to be reading your code, doesn't it? Sometimes what the human needs and what the computer/runtime needs are too far apart.

Don't these two situations (watching vote counts; understanding a complicated statistical argument that the vote is tamper-free) require the same kind of trust?

1. In both cases, everyone is theoretically capable of checking it themselves; they're theoretically zero-trust. In the former scenario, I'm theoretically capable of attending the vote count, and in the latter scenario, I'm theoretically capable of learning the statistics needed to verify the argument.

2. In both cases, most people cannot (or will not) practically check it themselves, and is trusting that someone they trust is doing the checking for them.

I'm not saying they're the exact same situation, but they both ask for a large amount of trust from most of the voters.

There's plenty of evidence of voter suppression in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

I don't know why so many people in this thread are asking this, but as has been said elsewhere in this thread:

* It does apply to most other internet systems.

* Things like banking fraud can be detected and remedied. Election fraud is much harder to detect and even harder to remedy.

* Voting requires anonymity. Most internet systems are not anonymous: you are identified by your IP address at the very least.

The specific comment by popalchemist you're referring to is actually fine (they're talking about voter suppression, which is a problem in the US), and isn't at all one of the claims that hintymad says people are making.

Australia, as far as I know, doesn't require voters to show identity documents, and they seem to take election integrity very seriously.

Maybe, but the election ink stuff feels a bit overboard.

> It cannot convince a normal person of the same.

But you don't need everyone to be convinced of it first-hand. You just need everyone to trust someone who is convinced of it.

For their upper house elections (which can have giant ballots), Australia uses computers in its counting, but there are humans in the process. [Here's a video from the Austalian Electoral Commission.](https://youtu.be/9AqN-Y25qQo)

> The most charitable interpretation is that this whole project (supposed problems with CBZ, the readme, the code) is the output of an LLM.

Do LLMs perform de/serialization by casting C structs to char-pointers? I would've expected that to have been trained out of them. (Which is to say: lots of it is clearly LLM-generated, but at least some of the code might be human.)

Anyway, I hope that the person who published this can take all the responses constructively. I know I'd feel awful if I was getting so much negative feedback.

Zip also has per-asset checksums, contrary to the comparison table.

And what's the point of aligning the files to be "DirectStorage-ready" if they're going to be JPEGs, a format that, as far as I know, DirectStorage doesn't understand?

And the author says it's a problem that "Metadata isn't native to CBZ, you have to use a ComicInfo.xml file.", but... that's not a problem at all?

The whole thing makes no sense.

venv and sandboxes are such categorically different things that painting it as a spectrum the way this article does is more misleading than helpful.

I also think the article shouldn't mention chroot. From the man page:

> In particular, it is not intended to be used for any kind of security purpose,

I guess it could be part of a sandbox, but there are better tools for that purpose.

(I'm not sure what point there is in giving feedback on an article that's almost entirely LLM-generated, though.)

Well, I'm not sure why that matters, but you can replace .html with .org in the URL and get the Org file.

Looking at the markup of some pages, such as https://orgmode.org/Changes.html , at least parts of the website seem to have been generated from Org mode.

> I'm hoping to replace it with Typst

This might be stupid but is there a reason you want to go through docbook and xsltproc instead of setting --pdf-engine=typst?

I don't think the lack of spec is holding Org back. Markdown came out in 2004; CommonMark came out in 2014. I think Markdown was already very popular by the time CommonMark came out.

The more obvious reasons are that Markdown was dead simple, unlike Org, and integrated into many popular products, unlike Org.

(Tangent: To be honest, I'm not sure why websites like Reddit opted for Markdown rather than text formatting buttons. It's a good thing, and I'm not complaining, but adding the standard rich text buttons (like the ones Reddit has now) seems like it would've been the more obvious move.)

> Transpiling to C is the worst possible way of trying to address these issues.

It's really not. Compiler writers, in your words, "write a whole bunch of machinery" so that the code has the intended semantics. It's not fundamentally that different to generating LLVM IR.

I never said every single language compiles via C. Sure, you're right, Zig and Rust generate LLVM IR instead (edit: iirc Zig is moving to their own backend, but I don't think that's relevant), and there isn't much reason not to target LLVM these days, unless you want to target niche platforms that LLVM doesn't support.

> It would be an undoubted improvement to be able to bypass that layer when it isn't useful, regardless of one's opinion on JS.

I will ask you clearly: you are asking for a lot of work from browser makers. What use cases, concretely, will that work actually enable?

If you hate the baggage of JS -- which is fair enough, there's a big mismatch between it and many other languages -- Wasm can be used for most of the heavy lifting, and it lacks that baggage. The JS only needs to be a little layer between Wasm and the browser.

But what will getting rid of that layer enable? What will it let people do that couldn't be done before?

I'm not trying to be mean, so I'm sorry if it came off that way.

> If someone wanted to replace C, would you suggest C as a C replacement?

If someone wanted to replace C, I would strongly suggest compiling something else to C, yes. That seems kind of obvious. It's how many programming languages that aim to replace C get their start.

To put it another way: I can see how [replacing JS as the interface that the human deals with] can be valuable goal, but why is [replacing JS so completely that it doesn't even exist as generated code] so valuable to you?

> with a bunch of stuff renamed

And a capability system and a brand new IDL, although I'm not sure who the target audience is...

> it's basically just regular assembly language

This doesn't affect your point at all, but it's much closer to a high-level language than to regular assembly language, isn't it? Nonaddressable, automatically managed stack, mandatorily structured control flow, local variables instead of registers, etc.