interpunct

Hmm..took my brain several orders of magnitude longer to warm up than a 6L6 power tube.

AI suggested that I was being generous with my 0 dB S/N for social media, it should be -∞ dB. Good catch.

It also didn't like my unit compatibility (reminding me of the utility of unit analysis), but remember that my '+' is overloaded--most programmers would probably write:

    int plus_ungood(int bytes, double SNR);

dropping the units. Of course we programmers also add geometric points together without dividing, which is mathematical no-no too.

I guess I'll put this on my TODO list for a fun project--"Relativistic Shannon: A Critique of Pure Reason on Social Media":

    Einstein wasn't afraid of arguing across time with Newton, nor should we be afraid of arguing with Shannon.  Arguing on social media, well that's a different thing altogether....[continues for 7000 pages]

I did learn what semantic density was without AI's help, postulating that it would be involved (viz Graham above) using my alarmingly down-trending cognitive abilities.

Hello,

Update, I thought of a way to express the parent comment here:

0 + 0 = 0, substituting literal values, dropping the units, for some convoluted overloading of the operator '+'. My TSH (thyroid test) came back from the lab without units this, I guess I'm modernizing.

0 dB S/N + 0 bytes originating information = 0 bytes transmitted (arguably error free to be fair).

Contrast this with P. Graham's comment last year "Why would I want anyone to fail?" on Twitter, which (I'm not a fanboi of Graham or Shannon or Turing, just an admirer of their work), was the most information transmitted to me over any medium, with any S/N that year. Perhaps we should revisit the basis of Shannon's work, in light of what we have learned from the Internet--Einstein wasn't afraid of arguing with Newton. :)

Bye.

My professor for Compilers 101 in grad school tasked us with working on an Ada subset compiler. I work best alone, but he insisted on making me work on a team. My experience with "teams" in college was a couple of us doing the work, and others claiming, "We worked on the organizational aspects and wrote some tests, so we didn't have much time for meetings or coding." Anyway, punster that I am, I told the prof that our team was the "NOOPs" (we spelled it differently back then).

So my group's project was writing the VM in C, and only two of us contributed as predicted. Our VM passed the prof's test suite (actually written by our adversary, "Team Lambda", IIRC). So I have a "It all started with a NOOP" story too.

This prof really was a genius himself and an expert in his field. He introduced many of us to the wisdom of Knuth. Our professor once recounted a story about having written an earnest letter to Knuth asking, "I know you are busy, but do you have time to do a lecture on compilers for my class?" He received back in the mail the original letter and envelope, enclosed in another with the "I know you are busy" underlined. My puns are kind of dumb, so I'm not sure he ever understood what I meant. He did ask us what our individual contributions were, and proof there of. My teammate followed me to State U.'s security headquarters begging for some of my test cases.

Have a nice day everyone!

I went to RPI's summer program for high school students in the mid 80s. I was hand assembling and linking assembly for a PDP-11 in the computer lab for a class, and I struck up a conversation with the sys admin of the "big" VAX-11 machine. The load over the summer on the VAX was low, so he was using the whole VAX to calculate the digits of pi. When I asked him "Why?", he said he hated to waste all those cycles. I remember less about the technical details of what he was doing than I do about PDP-11 assembly language. And pi is 3.1415927..., right?

Now that I am reading Meagher on octrees, I kind of wish I had met him--I think he was there at the time. I did get a tour of the image lab, and remember the colorful monkey on a monitor.

Thanks for the feedback!

However, if you can discern "better" (i.e. 1 plain old bit of difference) by taking a few words off my posts on social media, you have "Beat the Shannon Limit". ;)

"I regret that I have but one upvote to give to my fellow HN netizen."

I agree. I recently started using an R4RS Scheme called "STk", the precursor to STklos, which I modded into a build system (replacing Make and Sh, for the most part) and a graphics DSL front-end to C. The author wrote a demo app web browser with Scheme as a scripting language, as was the original plan with Mozilla, and Tk as the GUI. Writing extensions in C is a breeze too, as it supports dynamic loading:

https://github.com/egallesio/STk

I like Common Lisp too, although not as much as Scheme day-to-day--it is nice now to have both. I was thinking about adding a TinyCLOS using Common Lisp. Pseudo Scheme transpiles source to CL, so I might be able to do it with CLOS underlying it instead of how TinyCLOS does it.

Jonathan Rees, the original author, has a Pseudo Scheme repo up on Github, with a branch that uses ASDF (which I am testing with SBCL).

https://github.com/jar398/pseudoscheme

Thanks for your comment, and thanks to the maintainers of both of the linked Scheme implementations.

I wasn't trying to be snarky. Here is a 7 volume "A history of engineering and science in the Bell System"

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1460436

The first volume 1875-1925 is over 1000 pages. I'm telling you, Bell was an important organization with respect to modern sociology.

> great contribution

One of his great contributions, I would argue, information theory being another, and secure telecommunications.

Early work on switching networks (MS Thesis):

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173

Seminal work on information theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Commu...

> they let him work on whatever he wanted

UNIX was written by some guys in the same organization, I wonder one of them thought "Oh sure Shannon gets to work on what he wants, why can't we work on the the future of a global inter-net? Why do we have to hide it as a text processing system?"

My management here apparently is a crowd sourced mob trying to silence me by clicktivism. Shannon and KNR had it easy, IMO.

> At the close of the war, he [Shannon] prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", dated September 1945. A declassified version of this paper was published in 1949 as "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in the Bell System Technical Journal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Theory_of_Secrec...

> what societal changes happened as a result of engineering the Bell system specifically

I don't have that much time, but in general think about how I am even capable of communicating with you at all. Start with the "https://" at the beginning of most modern URLs.

UNIX, transistors, foundational information theory, "on and on till the break of dawn." If you want to become more familiar with Shannon's work and Bell systems, separately and together, try his master's thesis, followed by his Ph.D., ...

> obviously

I thought my original comment was obvious. At least we both seem to be familiar with the principles of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...

Thank you for for helping me clarify my thoughts, and have a nice day.

> Sorry for the rant

No problem here. I deleted a rant turning into a screed about blog articles superimposing "The Book of Dragon" and "The Dragon Book", but after some consideration found this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...

With respect to "refuting the central point", if in the OP it is "Performance engineering should be about knowledge and science, not superstition and myth. (Godbolt not Godwin?)", then I agree. See:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-172-performance-engineering-of...

[I think Graham's hierarchy of disagreement ought to be used to color down votes, especially here.]

I hear you, since I spend half my free time fixing stuff that breaks on my house and its contents.

Of course, engineering the Bell System led to a few innovations and societal changes, too.

And still meticulously adhered to, I'm sure.

I guess you mean "management by walking around"? For perspective, we had TQM in the '90s, which consisted of orders to tell TQM consultants that we knew where the TQM manuals were at, if we couldn't otherwise avoid "The TQM Bobs".

The corporate headquarters building my dad worked in was also considered progressive and employee friendly in the '70s--with natural lighting and office noise abatement (with white noise piped in, for example).

I guess he would need an "Extreme Makeover" to go on "Undercover Boss".

My dad was the financial controller for a large pizza chain in the '70s--they used to send him into the field to do spot checks, which was progressive IMO.

> I've proven to my satisfaction that writing an interpreter in assembly is both fun and performant!

Fun maybe/maybe not, but define "performant". I might drop into assembly for 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster for a non-toy project. Even then, what are my requirements? What is the bus factor of LuaJIT again? Try getting support for s390x, or your patch accepted.

Look at the speedup of Lua v. LuaJIT (C language VM v. C/Lua VM with JIT code gen):

https://web.archive.org/web/20180430211146/https://luajit.or...