I've been: A molecular biologist that discovered that an enzyme was secretly an NPN transistor, "hardware" verification engineer bugsquashing the neo rex architecture (http://www.rexcomputing.com/) prior to tapeout, the implementor of John Gustafson's Posit Numerical System (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y&t=4275s), and have (unsuccessfully) tried to pitch several biotech startup ideas.
Currently Open-Source projects: memory safety for zig. (https://github.com/ityonemo/clr/ and inline zig for elixir (https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler)
despite being theoretical i would have greatly benefitted in learning linear algebra if i had seen even one or two not-obvious applications, like galois fields for reid solomon erasure coding.
i looked it up and at least the evergrande ceo seems to have bern fined to the point where he had to declare bankruptcy (as of a few months ago, my information is old), so i guess he did find some justice (i think hes not very bright and was likely lied to by his underlings -- many such cases, so it is nice that the buck stopped there but the root cause was not fixed afaict)
> nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant
What about the bridge falling down people, or the overpromised scam apartment people, or the tunnel that flooded people, or the police officers that blocked view of the flowers left for the folks who died in the tunnel that flooded people, or the opened the dam to flood the farmers during the rainy season people, or the fake drains people, or the fake fire hydrants people, or the lead paint in the kids school food people, or the covered up the lead paint in the kids school food doctors, or the barricaded an apartment that was burning during covid people, or the apartments with styrofoam instead of concrete that collapsed in venezuela earthquake people...?
yeah since when does "saving face" not happen in the West? Isn't there a war in europe that's been going on for four-ish years now that essentially a face-saving operation that has killed nearly a million?
i mean this is feeling too but im too paranoid and frequently do refactoring and code organization passes and never don't do it, so i cant say i know for sure there is a delta.
though people who complain that llms aren't that great strike me as the type to have messy code bases
It's generally possible to epimerize l-amino acids to d- (or functionalize glycine) but you're competing with nonmirror life at that point. plus bacteria will love love love the d-alanine you make
the left handed life thing is the only thing that makes me wonder about Adamala's judgement... there zero plausible mechanism for left handed life to succesfully compete.
in case you didn't know, your immune system WILL detect left handed pathogens, possibly more aggressively, and two of the body's mechanisms for fighting infection -- fever and ozonolysis -- are distinctly achiral
Arguably we should push for mirror life for industrial purposes FASTER because biocontrol is easier (they got nothing to eat) and lab escape is far less likely
no, it mounts a .so file using dlload, and itself is a NIF.
Incidentally there is a second proprietary industrial camera on there that I have running as a different NIF built in zig, but truth be told I probably could have had claude do that one in pure elixir. However, claude did write a harness that I used to inspect the usbpcap dumps (and create the camera interface), that was done in zig for simplicity and turning it into a nif using zigler was a trivial transformation for claude to do.
> What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others?
I'm the maintainer of zigler (https://zigler.hexdocs.pm/Zig.html), and I have my own pharma startup. I currently use zig in two contexts:
1) wraps a proprietary .so file that is used to communicate with a scientific (microscope) digital camera, in a nice BEAM-module-shaped interface. Sorry, code is private.
2) I have a vue.js component that does DNA editing, and one of the features is DNA sequence alignment, and so I had claude write the smith-waterman lalign algorithm in zig, and it compiles to wasm, and this plus going from O(N^2) to O(N) dropped the runtime of an alignment from 30s to a few hundred ms, in both cases so much better than ~5m using a web SAAS, good enough that I can render alignments on-demand, and I don't have to do a storage layer for alignments.
Two sequences may be aligned by right-clicking a sequence name when a sequence is loaded, it will align the two sequences (you'll have to create a second sequence as it forbids aligning a sequence with itself).
Why zig? Because it just makes things like cross-compilation easier (microscope is mounted on a elixir nerves deployment!), and has less footguns, and doesn't hide away things you might care about. Most of the things i build with zig don't really have a concern about memory safety, or have such trivial memory patterns that it's easy to verify by eye that they're memory safe.
not really sure what you're asking. but time is now part of the io interface, so you can pretty easily write your own io implementation that just stubs out to the stdlib's default io content and has custom time functions if you want to try something funky. This is pretty close to what you are asking for (and in terms of functionality, equivalent). I say go for it and see what happens, report back!
since zig anoints an allocator interface in its stdlib, your (and the stdlib's) data structures which use allocators can be trivially reused across different allocation strategies without rewriting code; and very likely (not guaranteed ofc) if you bring in someone else's code they will cleave to convention.
> This cant't make sense unless u24 is defined to be 24bits in the first place
It's worth remembering that zig is a ~hll that should be platform agnostic. suppose someone built a byte-chip with a 24 bit word. the "new" zig way of doing things will be more portable and slot right in, and support 32- and 16-bit datatypes just fine.
Currently Open-Source projects: memory safety for zig. (https://github.com/ityonemo/clr/ and inline zig for elixir (https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler)
yt code channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf5mA1y1vDNlydJ8d5CmSteyr6Zmp4rjS
isaac dot yonemoto at the only other useful "alphabet" service