rdevilla

> Experiencing time, sound, or visual motion as continuous, rather than discrete signal inputs is so much simpler.

Some practice with Mahasi Sayadaw style "noting" can train you into seeing your phenomenological experience as a stream of point-events between which we weave the illusion of continuity.

My old memories of Guava in Java 6 have been triggered.

No? I don't agree. The domain can be strongly modelled in the types; for instance, declaring kilometers, seconds, etc. instead of using primitive floats/reals everywhere, to statically prevent dimensional analysis issues.

> However, it working as a lateral join is critical as you need the function to fire for every row.

Right, what I mean is, for functions in the standard expression position, e.g. `SELECT COALESCE(..., 0)`, those functions will also fire for every row. jsonb_to_recordset however needs to know the schema of the table it will output, and the only way syntactically to declare the column types output by a function returning a recordset is in LATERAL clauses [0].

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-select.html

Don't get mad because you're too lazy to even ask the AI. You are first to be replaced in the workforce.

Or maybe it's over your head and you should just stick to reading children's fiction after all. Want some colouring books too?

You don't appear to understand the difference between runtime and static analysis/compile time, or term-level and type-level.

Only time I've ever really used CROSS LATERAL JOIN in postgres is when working with JSONB documents that I'd like to put into a relational schema, e.g. given the data

    {"data": [
      {"id":1,"value":"foo"},
      {"id":2,"value":"bar"},
      ...
    ]}

the following SQL:

    CREATE TABLE my_documents(doc JSONB); SELECT t.id,t.value FROM my_documents CROSS JOIN LATERAL jsonb_to_recordset(doc #> '{data}') AS t(id INTEGER, value TEXT); 

... should output the following table:

     id | value 
    ----+-------
      1 | foo
      2 | bar

Useful for manipulating JSON in the database instead of marshalling and unmarshalling everything in the application layer.

IIRC it's really only in a LATERAL JOIN because laterals are the only production rules that let you alias a function call (jsonb_to_recordset()) with explicitly declared column types.

> Of course there's no way to tell at compile time that a value will definitely be zero.

Yes there is. Dependently typed languages like Idris can inspect terms at the value-level during compile time. Rather, instead of proving that the divisor will be zero, you must instead statically prove that the divisor cannot be zero; otherwise the code will not typecheck.

You forget the French, who inspired Marx's exhortations to practice "revolutionary terror," the "only way," [0] with their own public executions of the rich [1].

[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

Does that include putting your ear to your neighbor's wall and recording into their private dwelling?

I don't really give a shit at this point. In Toronto it's legal to even record into your condo neighbor's unit 24/7 and livestream your recording to the Internet, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. It has been demonstrated that nobody will enforce anything.

At this point I am a privacy nihilist, and I expect all information about anyone to be exploited all the time. Everyone should do the same.

> we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.

You know, you can just host your own code forge. Or you can just drop gitolite on a server. Or pull directly from each others' dev machines on a LAN.

GitHub is not git.

Poetry.

Torontonians are hardwired to be incapable of speaking like this.

This is one of many factors that precipitated the Soviet collapse.

Turn on the news and you know the language being spewed has no relation to reality. A society full of liars where people say the exact opposite of the truth. Now that LLMs can produce infinitely many words for free, trust in language is falling to all-time lows.

Eventually people just stop believing in words, the fundamental unit of human communication.

I can't recommend Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation more than ever.

> What emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real.

> Everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation."

What you describe is paramount to gambling.

Almost 10 years ago, I used to have materials delivered from the Builders of the Adytum to my door in Little Portugal. They were bulky letters with a rather striking sender address.

Torontonians obliged themselves by opening these letters, multiple times, out of a communal mailbox, to see what they were all about. This is an indictable offence in Canada, but neither common decency nor the rule of law actually exist in this country so that's ok.

... Unless, of course, you are Portugese - then the law is fully on your side, as a Canadian white.

As if I needed another reason to despise this continent. Who actually wants to uphold, work for, and build these systems in our society? This is seriously the kind of nation you want to inhabit?

The asset is too volatile to do that while guaranteeing preservation of value.

No matter. Miss me with these 3 month old LLM accounts shilling the latest tech snake oil.

Bitcoin "increased" over multiple five year horizons. That doesn't mean it solves a problem or actually has a concrete use case beyond gambling, which is precisely the point of the article - that you appear to have missed.

The stupidity of people sinks to new lows every day. It's astonishing just how ignorant people are of table stakes, basic technological concepts.

You just gave an AI destructive write access to your production environment? Your production DB got dropped? Good. That's not the AI's fault, that's yours, for not having sensible access control policies and not observing principle of least privilege.

Some examples.

Firstly, Twitter has an upper bound on the complexity of thoughts it can carry due to its character limit (historically 180, now somewhat longer but still too short).

Secondly, a biased or partial platform constrains and filters the messages that are allowed to be carried on it. This was Chomsky's basic observation in Manufacturing Consent where he discussed his propaganda model and the four "filters" in front of the mass media.

Finally, social media has turned "show business [into] an ordinary daily way of survival. It's called role-playing." [0] The content and messages disseminated by online personas and influencers are not authentic; they do not even originate from a real person, but a "hyperreal" identity (to take language from Baudrillard) [0]:

    You are just an image on the air. When you don't have a physical body, you're a
    _discarnate being_ [...] and this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It
    has deprived people of their public identity.

Emphasis mine. Influencers have been sepia-tinted by the profit orientation of the medium and their messages do not correspond to a position authentically held. You must now look and act a certain way to appease the algorithm, and by extension the audience.

If nothing else, one should at least recognize that people primarily identify through audiovisual media now, when historically due to lack of bandwidth, lack of computing and technology, etc. it was far more common for one to represent themselves through literate media - even as recently as IRC. You can come to your own conclusions on the relative merits and differences between textual vs. audiovisual media, I will not waffle on about this at length here.

The medium itself is reshaping the ways people represent, think about, and negotiate their own self-concept and identity. This is beyond whatever banal tweets (messages) about what McSandwich™ your favourite influencer ate for lunch, and it's this phenomena that is important and worth examining - not the sandwich.

[0] Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Mike McManus, 1977. https://www.tvo.org/transcript/155847

> Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation.

I'm reminded immediately of the Enochian language which purportedly had the remarkable property of having a direct, unambiguous, 1-to-1 correspondence with the things being signified. To utter, and hear, any expression in Enochian is to directly transfer the author's intent into the listener's mind, wholly intact and unmodified:

    Every Letter signifieth the member of the substance whereof it speaketh.
    Every word signifieth the quiddity of the substance.

    - John Dee, "A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee ... and some spirits," 1659 [0].

The Tower of Babel is an allegory for the weak correspondence between human natural language and the things it attempts to signify (as opposed to the supposedly strong 1-to-1 correspondence of Enochian). The tongues are confused, people use the same words to signify different referents entirely, or cannot agree on which term should be used to signify a single concept, and the society collapses. This is similar to what Orwell wrote about, and we have already implemented Orwell's vision, sociopolitically, in the early 21st century, through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).

LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier. In some ways they are maximally Babelian, in that they maximize confusion by increasing the quantity of signifiers produced while minimizing the amount of time spent ensuring that the things we want signified are being accurately represented.

Speaking more broadly, I think there is much confusion in the spheres of both psychology and religion/spirituality/mysticism in their mutual inability to "come to terms" and agree upon which words should be used to refer to particular phenomenological experiences, or come to a mutual understanding of what those words even mean (try, for instance, to faithfully recreate, in your own mind, someone's written recollection of a psychedelic experience on erowid).

[0] https://archive.org/details/truefaithfulrela00deej/page/92/m...

Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response in the hopes that by parroting the language the associated psychological changes will follow. Language is a means of programming other humans.

Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.

It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.

I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.

> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.

There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.

> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.

It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?

I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.

This is indeed the right way to approach this topic. Arguably religion (and more broadly, mysticism and shamanism) is the millenia-old art of cultivating positive voices inside one's head. A proto-science of mind, or the engineering practice of creating "psychotechnologies" that run on your carbon wetware.

Unfortunately, it just needs a rebranding for the 21st century, since the aesthetic of angels and demons is so hopelessly antiquated and doesn't really have the same cachet it used to.

Now that I think about it, the Haskell Report did come out in '98...

Just use lisp.

Israel doesn't need warrants because it's not an American government agency conducting homeland security.

In 2026, it's Israel. The NSA is so last decade, and isn't even mentioned in this article.

Silicon Valley and global communications infrastructure has been compromised by Israel. Quoting TFA:

> This analysis identified 4G infrastructure associated with operator networks based in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Channel Islands. Notably, in prior public reporting these same countries have been linked to CSVs targeting mobile users.

> Israel has long been a focal point in the global surveillance industry, with multiple companies developing and exporting advanced spyware, cellular communications interception, and monitoring technologies.