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chriswarbo

7,895 カルマ登録 13 年前

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Ask HN: How to avoid LLMs struggling with Lisp parens?

4 ポイント·投稿者 chriswarbo·17 日前·2 コメント

Multibase CLI

chriswarbo.net
1 ポイント·投稿者 chriswarbo·7 か月前·0 コメント

コメント

chriswarbo
·12 時間前·議論
There's no way to empirically spot an uncomputable process, since it would require infinitely-many observations.

For example, if aliens claim their machine solves the halting problem, we could test it on millions of inputs whose halting/not-halting behaviour we already know; but even if it works for all of them, there's no way to know that it works for all inputs. For all we know, it might be a huge lookup table which happens to cover all of those inputs we tried.
chriswarbo
·12 時間前·議論
> Information and computation are not the same thing.

Shannon information, sure.

However, algorithmic information (Kolmogorov complexity, etc.) is based on computation.
chriswarbo
·12 時間前·議論
They're not tied to anything physical; but they are a mathematical sweet spot.

24ths and 60ths are useful fractions because 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers, i.e. they have many divisors. 60 is a particularly good choice, since it's a "superior highly composite" number; and so is 12, if we consider an AM or PM period, rather than a full rotation.

Such divisibility was important before the invention/discovery of general fractions (i.e. the rational numbers). Babylonian arithmetic used something akin to base 60 floating-point, which could represent halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, and their sums and products (but not e.g. sevenths, or reciprocals of higher primes; in the same way base 10 floating-point can't represent a third).

Minute, meaning "small", describes the shifting of the radix point in such a base 60 floating-point system. Second, as in the ordinal 2nd, describes a further shift of radix point; and likewise for thirds, fourths, etc. for ever-smaller increments.
chriswarbo
·17 日前·議論
I tend to run all my terminals in Emacs, which TUIs tend to interfere with (e.g. providing their own keybindings which clash with those of Emacs; providing their own panes/scrollbars/etc. which don't have any of the functionality that Emacs provides; etc.).

I'd much rather have application functionality provided by a CLI, over stdin and stdout; and have Emacs provide its TUI-like layer on top.

I don't mind short-lived TUIs, like config wizards; but would still prefer a CLI that prints a few lines to stdout and reads text from stdin; rather than curses-like things that attempt to print whole "screens" at a time, and are driven by a mess of control characters and internal state.

The worst ones are those that (a) want to live for a long time, and (b) hammer the terminal with updates despite no user interaction taking place. These AI agent TUIs tend to be the most obnoxious; e.g. having a bunch of "spinners", which would traditionally be placed at the end and updated using backspace, but for some reason these AI companies have implemented by redrawing the entire screen, based on some HTML/DOM/React layout algorithm; with the result being a whole bunch of CPU & RAM spent, and a headache from staring at the flickering mess it draws.
chriswarbo
·23 日前·議論
> I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

I've been using computers since the early 90s; we got our first home computer when I was four; I've used many different operating systems.

As a professional Web developer, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what those slider widgets are supposed to mean. It's still very easy to get them wrong/confused (both as a user, and as the designer/dev making the form), e.g. when the affirmative state involves a negative setting, like "Mute" (does "on" mean "muted"; or does "on" refer to the audio, which I can use this to mute?)
chriswarbo
·23 日前·議論
> In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them:

This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
chriswarbo
·23 日前·議論
I've switched my git projects to push their objects into IPFS and their refs to pkkarr. That feels more distributed than the sorts of HTTP servers mentioned in TFA.

Anybody who cares about my repos potentially disappearing can contribute to their hosting by re-providing those repos from their own machines. (Note that only someone with the private key can create new records for a pkarr address).

That's mostly a side-benefit though: I mostly wanted something I can `git push` and `git pull`, that is self-hosted, and self-organises across a bunch of underpowered machines with unreliable network connections, with minimal coordination.
chriswarbo
·25 日前·議論
> the same principles apply to US dollars

Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence.

Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.
chriswarbo
·29 日前·議論
> Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?

According to their videos, they prefer trams within cities; generally take trains between cities; and acknowledge that cars are very useful for places which aren't so well connected (e.g. places that are far apart which aren't on a train line). They think encouraging the use of cars within cities is a bad idea (dangerous, scales poorly, makes those areas less pleasant to be, etc.).

Not what I'd think of as a "biking maximalist".

They do show themselves cycling to places that are nearby. Does that make Youtubers who record videos in their car "driving maximalists"?
chriswarbo
·先月·議論
> I didn't want to read a whole ton of text and C code details

There's no C in there? It seems to be Python and shell scripts.
chriswarbo
·先月·議論
I don't have any answers or strong opinions yet, but I feel like the legal/societal conversation should focus on "actions taken via XYZ" rather than "technology underlying XYZ". Similar to how GDPR, etc. cover actions like collection/storage of personal information, not specific technologies like cookies (despite what many believe!).

In particular, your examples bring these things to mind, which might be worth considering alongside:

- Any machine can host a server, with no third-party required except an ISP (if we're being pedantic, even that's not needed if use a mesh network, etc.). The main barrier to connectivity IME is NAT, but there are ways around that (e.g. make it a .onion service). I played with all of the above as a teenager, so it's not unrealistic.

- "Hosting a website" covers a lot of things, some of which are already illegal (e.g. CSAM). Just because we can spin up something without jumping through social media sign-up hoops, doesn't mean it can't/shouldn't be subject to legal questions.

- Hosting a website/blog/etc. does not come with the same questionable baggage as social media (algorithmic feeds, PII, tracking, identity verification, communication, etc.). We might opt in to such things, e.g. by accepting comments on posts, but I'd distinguish such two-way, "user generated" activity from merely "hosting a website". Technologically, such things require some dynamic system (usually a self-hosted or third-party backend), rather than "just" a static HTML server.

- There is no technological difference between a blog used like a personal diary, and a blog used to post reviews of Lego. Is there a societal difference? What about if they include photos?

- Posting things on a personal website/blog has an implicit understanding that it's being published and shared with the world (that feels like the whole point of a blog). Social media has muddied those waters, by claiming things like "privacy settings", which can give the impression that posts are not being published and shared with the world.

- When it comes to activities like receiving comments, two-way communication, unsolicited messages from anonymous strangers, etc. the more relevant "basic tech" feels like running a server for email, IRC, Jabber, etc. rather than a web site; since those place such "dangerous" aspects front-and-centre. Email is the most obvious, but I mention the others since getting external systems to trust a self-hosted email server is notoriously tricky!
chriswarbo
·先月·議論
> btw, Git also supports the HTTP protocol ...

In fact, Git supports any protocol! If you add a git remote like

    git remote add my-remote my-super-duper-protocol::some-sort-of-address-thingy
Then pushing/pulling `my-remote` will try to invoke a command called `git-remote-my-super-duper-protocol`, with `some-sort-of-address-thingy` in its arguments. You can implement that however you like.

I use remotes like "pkipfs::y5a9inx61aski4miz4sgmg55qgbazxhfwab3i6ee1ypa6rnumi8o", which invokes a custom git-remote-pkipfs command that pushes/pulls object data to IPFS and resolves/updates refs as subdomains of a specified pkarr address.
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
Exactly the same thing happened when git showed up (alongside the same things for bzr, darcs, hg, etc. too!)
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
I suppose it depends what you mean by "horribly break things".

The only thing I've noticed is that `jj` will leave the git repo with either a detached HEAD, or with a funny `@` ref checked out.

I don't think that would trouble someone who's experienced with git and knows its "DAG of commits" model.

For someone who's less experienced, or only uses git for a set of branches with mostly linear history (like a sort of "fancy undo"), I could imagine getting a shock when trying to `git commit` and not seeing them on any of the branches!
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
> It wants me to start with the new and describe command

jj doesn't "want" anything.

I always end a piece of work with `new`: it puts an empty, description-less commit as the checked-out HEAD, and is my way of saying "I'm finished with those changes (for now); any subsequent changes to this directory should go in this (currently empty) commit"

The last thing I do to a commit, once all of its contents have settled into something reasonable, is describe it.

In fact, I mostly use `commit` (pressing `C` in majutsu), which combines those two things: it gives the current commit a description, and creates a new empty commit on top.
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
> I often find that in the process of making one change, I have also made several other changes, and only recognize that they are distinct after following the ideas to their natural conclusion.

I do that all the time. With git, everything starts "unstaged", so I'd use magit to selectively stage some parts and turn those into a sequence of commits, one on top of another.

With jj I'd do it "backwards": everything starts off committed (with no commit message), so I'd open the diff (`D` in majutsu), selecting some parts and "split" (`S` in majutsu) to put those into a new commit underneath the remaining changes. Once the different changes are split into separate commits, I'd give each a relevant commit message.
chriswarbo
·3 か月前·議論
Tooling can support both (e.g. don't assume all hashes have the length of a SHA1, etc.); but they can't be used together in one repo.
chriswarbo
·4 か月前·議論
Haskell has a package to make testing this sort of thing easier https://hackage.haskell.org/package/inspection-testing