dasyatidprime

See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.

I've ha-ha-only-serious described ZZT-OOP as “object-disoriented concurrent INTERCAL” before. The #zap/#restore and #lock/#unlock commands rhyme somewhat with INTERCAL's ABSTAIN/REINSTATE (or IGNORE/REMEMBER, seeing as keeping important state implicitly in the program counter is a pretty important technique in ZZT), and sending a ‘message’ is basically remote GOTO.

Bonus points for using an extended editor to put normally-impossible values in stats fields to exploit different engine behaviors.

I can't load the thing, but the idea reminds me of the trope of adolescents playing early FPSes and making maps based on their homes and schools, for good or for bad…

I can't personally vouch for whether top AIs have broadly exceeded (median) human ability here, but as far as bounties go (or even just fixing things in existing projects), what I usually hear about involves a lot of maintainers auto-rejecting AI-assisted contributions because they are AI-assisted, with the charitable reason usually being that it's necessary to have some kind of attention gate or else they get flooded out. (To be clear, this seems like a reasonable response to me; the existing structure often wasn't made to handle that kind of influx, and the spectrum of current-day AI includes a ton of lower-quality models and harnesses that will be cheerfully overconfident. The meta signal can be ruined even if there is also high-quality stuff that people who know how to get it can get!) This plus popular anger over AI developments seems to mean that people who do successfully use AI to find bugs have a lot of incentive to not publish anything or try to get it upstreamed because they'll immediately come under fire. Highly reputable people and organizations sometimes use their existing clout to vouch for AI-assisted bug reports for prominent projects, but a lot of others just quietly adopt the AI fix in their own tree and give up on sharing it.

This could just be from a classic issue that comes up with organic intelligences. Where do people most commonly see ‘touch’ used, after all? It's very common to see it in build processes, used only on empty files, whereas using it to update the timestamp of a file with contents is more obscure (I don't know if I've ever seen it in the wild, personally). If you asked random developers “what does ‘touch’ do?”, and they weren't primed to think unusually carefully about it, you might well get something around creating empty files as the dominant answer, via extrapolating from a biased pile of examples rather than going to an authoritative source.

In natural language, this leads to semantic drift. In programming languages, semantic drift leads to bugs.

“generally”? I live in an area of the USA where AFAIK bicycles are officially dual-mode and allowed to be on both roads and sidewalks, and have been on both sides of pedestrian/bicycle encounters on sidewalks in the past, without any major issue.

From the article it sounds like the Pennsylvania legislature has already considered the case of delivery robots specifically and decided that they should go on the sidewalk, though to what degree that reflects the popular will is unknown to me.

For the broader field I tend to use the term “character-cell art”.

If when you say “a human” you mean this is because you expect LW to be full of AI-generated text, their policy requires that chunks of language-model-written text go into special content blocks which are headed by the name of the model and rendered in a distinct sans-serif font, so that it can be used when it's useful while making it easier for readers to filter out. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nQWavk9mnwcv6ScMR/new-lesswr...

Something seems strange about this publication. They're doing a lot of talking about machine perfection in music, but some of the articles have big chunks that read as 100% AI on Pangram, mainly “The Shame Machine” which is itself primarily about generative AI. However, I didn't observe that in the OP here, nor on the most recent post “The Climate Crisis Has A Music Problem”. Was that an early approach that's since been abandoned, or a dubious meta joke for that specific article, or what? And then the rest… clearly they have a thesis they want to keep harping on, and as someone with musical experience I'm empathetic with what seems to be the main throughline of it, but the Substack as a whole reads as being heavy propaganda for their particular certification, which is a scammy feel.

Aside: in Unicode we now have ″ and ′ for that. Also the triple variant: ‴

I agree with an overall thrust of “C++ is overcomplicated and has many moving parts and a lot of implicit stuff happening in the background that makes it difficult to understand”. But I do want to briefly note that Lisp environments have macro expansion steppers for a reason too.

I think “indoctrinate” is more likely.

Aren't you talking about how expressions are evaluated in #if there? An expression form that shows up in a macro that is then embedded in normal C code just becomes part of the C code that could potentially get evaluated with C rules at compile time; it's not inherently evaluated at preprocessor time.

if table --warble farble; then :; else table_ec=$?; echo "Garble warble farble! :(" >&2; exit $table_ec; fi

Works in dash/bash/zsh at least; not 100% sure whether the behavior of $? on the command in an if test is mandated by POSIX and/or portable. Note that you can't replace the empty then-branch with a negated condition because the negation also eats the return code.

Also, absolutely correct propagation is essentially impossible (but usually not useful anyway), because some errors might be unexpected signal exits or inability to find the command in the first place, and those will get punned onto other nonzero exit codes. I forget the exact conventions OTTOMH but generally they're in the high half (≥128).

They wrote “if and why”.

If there were definitely no legal encumbrances, surely they'd want to keep shipping the version with the proprietary codecs in, because that would make them a superior option for users who need those? AFAICT someone upstream thought that having the toggle to avoid patent issues was important, which if true nixes the idea that VA-API just gives you an automatic unencumbered route and you don't have to worry about it after that.

I'm not really sure what actual claim you're making regarding the relevance of “pro-patent views”, but I might interpret it as something like “Red Hat is more likely to play it safe, whereas less IBM-enculturated distributions are more likely to bet on interpretations that let the users take on the risk”. Which I think is probably true; for instance, https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xqn20n/comment/iqbmv... describes how other distributions chose differently and moved to re-enable the proprietary codecs by default. (Some of them seem to be based in friendlier jurisdictions, mind. I'm not completely sure where BMD is, and I'm not sure how much it matters given they want to sell worldwide, but their full corporate name resolves most strongly to Australia: https://opengovau.com/business/30098098287 and Australia doesn't seem to exclude software from patentability: https://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/patents/what-are-patents/what...)

Anyway, if that's what you meant, I don't think that distinction is nearly as applicable to the situation with Resolve. BMD isn't a producer of a Linux distribution containing a broad variety of stuff, where “users happen to do stuff with the open source software we provide that violates some patents” can maybe be waved off as not their responsibility. BMD is very obviously directly operating in the commercially-distributed professional video tooling market, so codec licensing will be something they have to deal with as a keystone part of their business. Adding something to their software to actively enable people to do professional-style encoding for those codecs without the patent licenses would be playing with fire.

That doesn't sound right to me at all. I'm pretty hazy on the specifics of VA-API, but I wasn't under the impression that the graphics hardware carries 100% of the decode implementation nor had codec licenses attached to it, and this Phoronix article from 2022 describing Fedora having to back off from having accidentally shipped H.264 via VA-API without appropriate licensing seems to be evidence in the direction I expected. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API

Do you have any information on how the actual patent licensing is set up for Vivaldi? I wasn't able to find much on it, though I see the note in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vivaldi that it “automatically downloads” the relevant files, which is at least suggestive that they can't just redistribute the binaries normally. The other closest thing I was able to find was https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef/issues/3559 which describes a specific proprietary_codecs option in CEF, which is not quite the same thing but ought in some sense to be related… the way they describe having to set ffmpeg_brand=Chrome normally for that to be available doesn't sound promising?

I would be moderately surprised if whatever arrangement is going on there allows full use of the codecs for video editing software and not just for consumer decode of Web resources.

This is one of the the cases where “the language model won't necessarily respect IP law” is really relevant. Individual users may be able to get away with this because they're too scattershot to sue, and users in some jurisdictions may actually be fine regardless, but broadly, the patent licensing around things like H.264 is not something BMD can afford to ignore. AFAIK the biggest reason Google was pushing WebM in the first place was because they, a huge corporation, were balking at being under the thumb of the MPEG LA!

I appreciate that it can be confusing for users that patents can still apply to techniques where implementations exist that are both libre and gratis from a copyright perspective, but this has been an issue for Linux-adjacent software distribution for ages—like, see how Debian used to put certain stuff that was encumbered by patents in the US but not in other jurisdictions in special “non-US” repository sections, that sort of thing. It's not Black Magic's doing that the codec space is like this. I wish people wouldn't make so many mocking assumptions sometimes.

I'm not an experienced video editor, but I don't think the bulk of video editing involves generating new content on the fly except for narrow cases like adding titles, which is where an AI would easily be able to lean on scripting the existing tooling. There's a ton of grunt work involved in fixing up cuts and figuring out where everything is and so forth.

And to bring up a likely reason: my impression is that H.264 and AAC still have active patents that apply to the major implementations, and those are not licensed gratis for all uses, and that applies more heavily to the encoding side. Raspberry Pi used to (and might still, I don't know) offer add-on license keys to unlock certain video codec support for what I assume was a similar reason. A lot of individual Linux desktop users just do their small-scale FFmpeg runs under the radar, but commercial software delivery is different.

With proprietary operating systems, the commercial entity behind the OS can negotiate for licensing. Some commercially-associated Linux distributions have efforts in similar directions, like Fedora for instance has some special secondary-repo stuff around H.264 support, but that's at minimum much more fragmentary as a target for an application developer concerned with the legalities.

My impression is that one of the social effects of domain names being cheap and easy to get (at least among many vaguely technologist-adjacent cohorts) is that failing to invest in a 2LD for a new thing winds up seen as tacky, sort of an “if you weren't willing to invest enough to put a cover on it then what does that mean for whether it's any good” thing (you could see it as a counterparty good-faith deposit versus attentional costs if you like). In some cases this goes down to the level of individual publications. Additionally the way social technology has wound up around URLs seems to mean that both longer URLs and artificially shortened ones wind up losing secondary reach in unpredictable ways. I'm not that fond of this trend but I can see ways it winds up making sense in context. I don't know how widespread it is.

That doesn't follow. I'm pretty sure they're talking about the effect of nominal wage stickiness: you're not constantly renegotiating your rate, so when there's fluctuations in relative value, it matters what unit the original number is denominated in. Compare with the case of a US expat being paid a steady salary in USD and converting to the local currency to make purchases, if you want an example with a similar mechanic but very different intuitive feel and practicalities.

(I'm not sure they're right about the overall effect though.)

A single SQLite ‘connection’ can be ATTACHed to multiple database files (which appear as separate prefixed schemata, but you can do things like joins across them) and it seems to work properly if some are read-only and some are not!

For those interested in the history of alternatives to port numbers: Chaosnet[1] in LispM/ITS times used names for describing which service was being requested. On the TCP side, a spec for requesting services by name has existed since 1988: TCPMUX[2], using a short initial handshake after connecting to port 1. Just never caught on AFAIK.

[1] https://chaosnet.net/protocol#application_layer [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1078

TeX uses -- (double hyphen) for producing an en dash and --- (triple hyphen) for an em dash, and that's pretty darn longstanding and well-established. And FWIW, the English writing conventions that I learned use em dashes as punctuation without an adjoining space—like this—but allow en dashes surrounded by spaces as an alternative – like this – so I frequently see spaced double hyphen used as the ASCII equivalent of dash punctuation and interpret it as the latter. I've never personally heard of double hyphen for em specifically, only either as en specifically or as a sort of ambiguous whatever-dash.

There is an ISBN URN namespace, but I don't know whether anyone maps it to anything. https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn

I don't have experience with the Fedora version specifically, but forum/email bridges tend to run into problems with differing expectations of the medium. This is even more true if it's not clear from the beginning that other users are experiencing the same conversation completely differently. For a viscerally annoying example, imagine someone posting “bump” to a mailing list.

I use a layout with an AZERTY-style shifted digit row for coding (and for everything else). A quick check of one C++ codebase I've been working with shows ~20× as many instances of digit-row symbols as digits (18× for QWERTY digit-row symbols, 27× for those in my layout), though C++ is unusually symbol-heavy. A couple of ECMAScript repositories show 3× or 10×. On some Common Lisp, digit-row symbols are 5× as common as digits for my layout and 22× for QWERTY (almost entirely because QWERTY parentheses are terrible). I don't expect to see a lot of code where numeric literals are more common than type modifiers and operators and such… most of the times numbers are being manipulated in code, they're not being typed in directly as digits but going through comparisons and arithmetic and such, and that's symbols.

FWIW, the common utility library Serapeum offers ‘op’ which it claims is from GOO, which is quite similar as a short positional function utility macro without being a reader macro that has more potential for character clashes: (op (> _ 0)). (But don't let that stop you from recreating it if you wanted to do so for educational purposes!)