jerf

There are a number of environments and languages that have the capability to reload things extensively at runtime. elisp is mostly nice because it is polished, but it isn't necessarily the "best". Erlang has a claim on being better at it, probably. And while most scripting languages are capable of it, that doesn't mean you can just drop one in and go necessarily. It helps to have an environment where that sort of interactivity is first-class and in constant use and testing, which is where the polish comes from.

First, "if one of the many many many different solutions aren't adequate for some reason" was there for a reason.

Second, no, it isn't. Pypy is really fast compared to Python. "Compared to Python" is just about the lowest bar there is, though. In absolute terms it is still only a medium-fast language runtime, and it comes with a lot of costs and tradeoffs.

That's the problem with Python. Lots of ways to take a very slow language and make it a medium-fast language with substantial tradeoffs, or make it a fast language with enormous tradeoffs. If you can handle the tradeoffs, fine. But if you can't you just need to switch to a language that is fast without anywhere near as many tradeoffs.

Write down the definition of a token. Write down the definition of a stock. If you look at them carefully you'll at least see a lot of overlap. For bonus points, write down not the actual definition of a token but the definition of a token its advocates want you to use; it is particularly this one that in my opinion is already what a share of stock is.

I can say you need to be careful. It sounds like you've written in to the definition of a "token" that it is "meaningless", and that is a philosophical overreach, not an accurate statement. As the reply chain correctly tried to point out, nothing stops the same process that turns your abstract, "meaningless" number that represents your shares of stock into a meaningful number from being applied to a block chain token. Our entire economy is made from top to bottom out of "meaningless" things given meaning by convention, law, and other forces. Getting too reductionistic leaves you confused about not just tokens but a lot of things.

And on the flip side, if you actually dig in to what a "share of stock" that "you" "own" is, it is already not "some fractional ownership that carries legal rights and a claim on assets" and is already more complicated, abstract, and partial than you think. Just as the token advocates want you to think of a token as something more than it is, the stock system is not in a hurry for you to understand what it is you actually hold, but it certainly is not simply some fractional ownership in the simple way you probably have in mind, and there are more exceptions and caveats and legal ways you don't really own it as much as you think already in the system. It's already more a mere "token", in the sense you originally meant, then you realize.

Stocks are already tokens. "Tokenizing" stocks makes no sense, if one assumes quite reasonably that "tokenization" involves giving token-ness to something that was not already a token. What it is is wrapping what is already a token in another token, mostly so the second token can get around the limitations of the first. But some of those limitations are incidental and can be eliminated at any time by the underlying token provider, mostly because nothing stops a conventional stock market from being tradeable 24/7. They already are if you're in the club anyhow, per all the "aftermarket" and "pre-market" trading you hear about around quarterly release times.

The rest of the limitations are regulatory, and if the wrapping token can get access to regulatory approval to do their thing, so can the stocks.

The whole thing feels skeevy as all get out to me. It feels like someone telling me that they'll be happy to hold my mortgage between me and the current holder. There is no good reason for that. Frankly there is already a disturbing amount of indirection in the way you don't actually own the stocks you think you do, but they're held on behalf of you on behalf of your broker at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. Adding another layer of indirection makes me worry about the motives of the people who are very excited about being that layer.

It also hung on for some time past when it made sense. My father had a 486/33MHz that had a "turbo" button. Turning off turbo could slow the clock down but it wouldn't do anything about the fact that the 486 is still fundamentally a better processor than either the 386 or the 286, running 2-3 times faster on the same instruction stream than a 386. So even with turbo off, the programs that was nominally supposed to help with still ran much faster than they were supposed to.

Prediction markets say they don't take positions.

The idealized form of a prediction market doesn't take positions.

This is a long, long, long way from "prediction markets don't take positions".

Plus they don't have to in order to create the effects I'm talking about. We've already seen plenty of what people are calling "insider trading", though it may not legally match the usual meaning of the term. All that is necessary is that it becomes clear over time that making bets is a sucker's game because the events aren't just ambiently happening but being forced by somebody with a lot of money to make. It isn't particularly important whether those bets are made by people who directly work for the prediction market itself.

Rust is not your only option. Nor is it automatically the best option, though it is certainly a solid option for a certain set of requirements. Go is a pretty decent match for a Python rewrite; superficially it seems like you're giving up a lot but under the hood they're philosophically more compatible than meets the eye in a lot of ways. But any static language that you have some other local reasons to prefer is going to blow its socks off in terms of performance. And "blow its socks off" is just for the naive translation of a conventional Python code base over to a new language. If your codebase is amenable to threading and can take advantage of multiple CPUs somehow, the result may blow Python's socks off twice over.

The problem is that Python just isn't going to go fast. There are some languages that may have had more resources poured into them to make them go faster in absolute terms, like perhaps Java. But I don't think there's a single language that has had so many ways of trying to make it go faster given so much effort over so many decades. It's really time to call it... if you have Python code and it's a performance problem, if one of the many many many different solutions aren't adequate for some reason, Python is not going to get any faster than it is today and you're going to have to move off of it.

If you need high performance code, Python is simply not the right answer and you're going to have to skill up. Or accept what you have, which you'll have to decide if that's a viable option. If it's fast enough I don't advocate switching casually. But if it isn't, there isn't a realistic prospect that you're going to wake up in a year or two to a 30x-faster Python. I wasn't terribly convinced by that claim back in the early 2000s, but it hadn't really been tested yet. It has been tested now.

On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work.

Who wins in the market?

It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.

It depends on what you get picked up by. My ancient email address picks up all kinds of spam. I'm not sure where the Korean comes from at all. Nor am I sure why this particular woodworker thinks I am certain to buy their woodworking plans on the 842nd email when the first 841 haven't worked. I am a rather classical nerd on this point... not completely incompetent when it comes to home repair, but certainly not doing woodworking for fun on the weekends, and have no idea what signal I showed at any point that convinced someone the contrary might be true.

And then my wife has a completely different spray of spam. The amusing thing to me is that for both of us, while some of it is clearly a matter of what we're doing, she also has weird random stuff on those occasions I am tasked to find what happened to some email, and it's completely different weird random stuff.

I don't know what I did, but this election I've also been getting hammered by spam texts. I hadn't before. Not only that, it is as the author of this piece mentions, rather widely targeted. Messages that are clearly sent from the presumption that I agree with their politics despite very much not doing so... you know, the scare texts where they send "If you don't donate to us immediately the opponent is going to DO X IMMEDIATELY" and you're all like, my gosh, we should be so lucky that X would actually happen immediately but no, that's not actually going to happen. Clearly completely mistargeted. Which leads me to think even the ones I nominally wouldn't hate could well just be random luck too. And for me at least, this was a single change... from nothing last election to every single side and every shuckster trying to push poll me from every direction at once.

There is a long, long, long history of gambling houses that are based on gambling on specific outcomes being unable to resist dipping into the revenue stream they can get from fixing the outcomes. Once the outcomes are fixed (even only probabilistically), they can tilt the house take in their favor.

It is true that, abstractly, this is a bad idea in the long run for many reasons. However, it's a good idea in the short term. It's a really good idea in the short term, at least from a superficial analysis. And we can expect that someone is going to do that superficial analysis. It only takes one in the entire industry.

A simple glance at history in this space says that the odds that someone is going to do this are for all practical purposes 1. The only question is whether it is already happening, and with high likelihood the correct question is how much it is already happening. It always starts small and they get bolder and bolder. None of this is subtle. None of this requires some sort of careful read of history carefully parsing out a tiny hint here and a whiff of a suggestion there. It's the completely obvious and repeatable strange attractor for gambling at this scale. As is the fact this will eventually blow up in some sort of scandal, after which it will end up heavily regulated again, until another generation or two goes by and forgets why gambling was fenced off.

Most of the cycle has happened once already within my personal lifetime. Major League Baseball had a pretty bad blowup in the late 1980s. Although as with some other vices, the fact that it is sitting there, in your pocket all the time, hooked up to Skinner-box mechanics in real time, is a new twist.

For bonus points society can also get to rediscover why simply banning it has never been all that successful either. Fencing it off seems to be the stable outcome that minimizes damage.

In the meantime the name of the game is to stay clear of the blast radius, and if you are a pro-social type, to try to figure out how to help the people who will get badly, badly hurt in the meantime until society puts the pieces together again.

Last I checked (a few weeks ago, but things have been moving faster lately), the four-color theorem remains "computer proved". There has been work done on it since the original proof that has successfully simplified it, in the sense that those proofs involve less grinding through cases than the original. But it still involves grinding through more cases than can be sensibly labelled a "human comprehensible" proof, with some sort of insight into the problem space. It's still just a big set of cases being checked, and a useful final result, but no insight given in the proof.

This seems like an interesting test case to build up for AI models.

It is used all over the place in ways you don't even realize. "not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical" is a particular corner of the market that is visible and full of PHP, sure, but you don't see the huge masses of PHP code running that doesn't expose a .php on the end of the URL.

Only a few curmudgeons at this point are claiming there is nothing, nothing whatsoever, to AI.

The question is really about the fate of the current build out. For those of us who have extensive experience with AI, which is to say, those of us here, because we are probably the only people not only using it day in and day out but potentially using multiple sessions of it all the time, I think it's not so surprising that it isn't necessarily immediately radically transforming every industry everywhere. Even as it has rewritten the minute-by-minute process of doing my job entirely, it hasn't actually changed my job all that much at the higher level and it's hard to assign much more than a 2x or a 2.5x overall improvement to it once I account for all the Amdahl's Law issues that come up from the parts that have not been so amenable to acceleration.

And without unit testing, continuous integration testing, pull request review, the fact that the AI is building code which is itself a highly reviewable artifact rather than just doing whatever directly, and all the many many guard rails we've built up in our industry that happen to be extraordinarily amenable to use by automated systems, I still wouldn't trust AI all that much for a real task. They still bang into those guard rails a lot, and still make what I consider to be deeply suboptimal decisions far too often to take my hands off the wheel. With all the stuff we have in the programming space they are a game changer, but in a field that doesn't have anywhere near that much padding and safety nets I'd be way, way more hesitant.

I want to say it's weird to talk about such things when they are also capable of such amazing math proofs, but at the same time when you consider the numbers tossed around for how much those things have cost, I think you're seeing another space that has guard rails comparable to software engineering. By contrast to the way these AIs are working, when a human solves a comparably hard problem the human tries a few things but from the outside would seem to proceed almost directly to the solution, compared to the staggering amount of blundering about the AIs do before arriving at their solutions. Now, in terms of the final results, yeah, they got there and I won't deny that. I'm just saying that in fields where the acceptance criteria are nowhere near as sharp as math or software, they're operating at a significant disadvantage still.

I'm not sure I've ever seen an "upscale" of any kind of heavily pixelized art to something much higher resolution that doesn't seem similar in quality. There seems to be something fundamental to the pixelized aesthetic that once you try to upscale it just can't be the same and human brains will never read the very upscaled art as "yeah, the same, just depixelized". I've seen plenty of 100% human attempts at this and they all seem to have the same subjective effect to me.

Is there anything else that has both risen and fallen as far? It's not like every (mainline) Mario game is blasting it out of the park, but he has certainly been more consistent overall. I've lost track of the number of times Sonic is over... and then he comes back with some modest amount of success... and then fades... and then comes back. And who would have guessed perhaps the first truly successful video game movie franchise, of all things?

From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.

Assuming you even care about legality, of course.

Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.

And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.

Read more papers.

I've also read some summaries of even more papers, but yes, actually read papers, beyond the abstract.

Let any who read this be aware: You should be immediately suspicious of AI code that is much much faster than established code bases. AIs are even better at benchmarkmaxxing than humans are, and humans were already pretty good.

It is by no means impossible for an AI-written code base to be faster than a conventionally-written one, of course. It's just a time to be suspicious. Especially if there's little to no evidence that the human has subjected the code base to any further testing of their own. AIs seen to be able to benchmarkmax even in the presence of a lot of unit tests that would generally speaking have prevented a human from going too far down that road.

I have read more paper in the last year than the last ten years. Across a wide variety of subjects. While the AIs still need open access to science in order to function, they have make that open access something I can actually use like no other technology before it. Nothing has opened the scientific commons to me like AI.

There may be a concern going forward with locking things down. One can lament that AIs need to be prompted to "hit the literature" directly or they don't really think about it, prefering random web pages most of the time. But at least at the moment science is more open and accessible than ever before.

Lottery tickets at least avoid the worst aspects of the real time feedback that things like slot machines can give. Though scratchoffs certainly get closer.

I do hold out some hope that in this pendulum swing we can land at least for a while on banning state sponsored gambling, though. It'll come back. Too appealing to keep down forever, unfortunately. I like to say it's a good exercise to sit down and really think about the difference between "organized crime" and a "government" but when a "government" does things like zealous defense of its gambling monopoly it does rather weaken the distinction....

It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.

A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.

There are a number of things that cycle because the solution ends up being successful enough that the next generation doesn't realize there is a problem being solved. Chesterton's Fence, except on a generational timescale it's Chesterton's Oscillating Fence.

100% squashing gambling has generally not been successful, but the strategy of fencing it away from most of society and keeping it in a set of defined places that require people to actively seek it out has been successful enough that people forget why we don't allow gambling in every convenience store in the country. I'd say the additional "convenience" of having it in your pocket all the time is a new nuance, but doesn't necessarily change the fundamental equations.

We will relearn. Our grandchildren will forget again. (Unless things have really changed.)

"despite that this isn't some universal constant in the training data"

Isn't it though? It's not exactly an uncommon answer to the question. Basically the same input given to basically the same algorithms yield basically the same result isn't really that stunning. They certainly aren't independently reaching this answer, their paths to this answer are extremely, extremely heavily correlated.

If they gave a really different answer that wasn't heavily represented in their training data that would be at least something interesting. But this is basically what I'd expect.

It doesn't mean they're right or wrong. Humans think it about other humans for good reasons too. It just means it's not that surprising, which to put it another way, doesn't carry much information.

"You can't fire me, I quit!"

In Chesterton's fence analogy, the person who wants to tear a fence down is at least aware there is a fence there. I think a lot of modern UI is being done by people who aren't even aware that there was logic being used to make decisions and are just steamrolling over the fences without even being aware they existed.

In their defense, it's not like good UI has ever dominated very many spaces. It is very hard to come up with a concept of good UI concepts from a natural meandering through the shattered landscape of UI paradigms anyone computer literate ends up subjected to. And then it's even harder to convince a manager that it's worth so much as a moment's thought about such things. Not impossible. But not easy.

Exclusive to Meta (unfortunately), there is Triangle Strategy: https://www.meta.com/experiences/triangle-strategy/534013047...

Control is a bit dodgy, I kind of feel like it didn't quite commit to either the VR or the controller-like controls, but it's perfectly playable and is an interesting angle on things.

Is there anywhere good to get some sort of reliable stream of information about this possibility?

It's going to be pretty bad if we all panic to get the latest PHP up, and all confidently roll out our updated websites, just for them to still be vulnerable to something serious anyhow.

It creates an absolutely enormous political snarl to decide who is "worthy" of getting advance notice on something like this, and to correctly determine who is capable of keeping the secret in the presence of highly motivated active attackers who may have capabilities all the way up to and including "state level actors".

Basically, it's only possible in our imaginations where we don't have to get into the nitty-gritty of exactly who gets what notifications. It isn't possible in reality for something this large and consequential.

I don't expect every person to instantly fall in love. I expect that it could be a more popular option than it is now if the industry hadn't been quite as monomaniacal about VR being "VR".

It doesn't help that the headset hardware space has been closed off even worse than cell phones. One of the things I hope the Steam Frame will do is crack open the space of possibilities more by virtue of being a headset that is open, and force even the closed headsets to expand their thinking. More possibilities won't hurt you, even if you are personally uninterested in them.

Since getting my Frame I think I've spent more time playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 in 3D than I have doing anything else. 3D in a window is much easier to deal with then full VR from a motion sickness perspective.

I think the VR space made an unforced error by focusing a bit too much on VR and not enough on just plain 3D. VR is cool and it has a lot of interesting applications. But I've enjoyed my time with SMG2 in a 3D window quite a bit. I've enjoyed Triangle Strategy on my Quest 3S, which is a tactics game played on a diorama. There are some other applications based on the idea like shared dungeon crawlers modeled on table-top layouts rather than first person perspective. There's a lot of games that need only minimal tweaking or fiddling that could add a bit more visual interest by being displayed in full, true 3D. The space of games that could be improved by just being playable in 3D is much larger than the space of games that can be improved by VR specifically, since the former is a superset of the latter.

Subconsciously it may feel like if you're developing for a "VR" headset, it ought to be "VR", but that's not the case. It's a well-known trap in gaming in general that when some new tech comes out there's a rush of things that feel obligated to "exploit" the tech so as not to be perceived as being behind the times, but it always becomes clear that is not necessarily. Most famously, the numerous Wii games that had to integrate "motion controls" and turned a nice, easy, concrete button press into a vague, nondeterministic "waggle" until just saying "motion controls" with a certain inflection has become a meme. There's no problem using the VR headset to enhance a game... or indeed any application... without it having to be "VR".

My Steam Frame was cheaper than this 57" curved "gaming" monitor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQM55C9 If gamers are willing to drop that on nice monitors just to play games, it would make sense to drop that much on a VR headset to play them in 3D too... if there was anything to do with that.