lasagnaphil

Wow, that's illuminating. I naively thought the overhead of converting between datatypes would not make this worth that much (in favor of saving cache misses). Though does this also have anything to do with the AVX512 instructions?

How is a storage format that's not used for math important for speeding up actual computations? I'm curious.

To make things worse, the site doesn't work unless you disable Ublock Origin (and even when it works it's goddamn slow), and for some reason you get a location access request from your browser right when you click an entry (is there any reason they have to collect geographic data for a download link?)

I’ve already mentioned how to do this with metatables. But you still need to wrap this in a function and call it every time, it’s quite cumbersome. And the whole thing falls apart when you start using other people’s libraries (For example, you enabled strict.lua in your codebase, but then it starts affecting other libraries which relied on the original Lua behavior… Or you’ve made your own object system, but that one library you’ve imported uses middleclass and another uses rxi.classic, and you need to go though the headache of making sure they’re all compatible)

Nah, he’s more of a hobbyist in AI. I don’t necessarily think you need to be explicitly in academia to produce good academic work (independent researchers do exist), but he hasn’t really produce anything (in terms of actual theoretical/experimental results) that could be regarded as a substantial contribution to the field. He’s made some anime datasets though, maybe it could be useful to some.

A question: would it be too much work to port Love2D to a different embedding language? (I'm currently having looks at Squirrel (http://www.squirrel-lang.org/) I always thought Lua was tightly coupled with the framework, but what you've mentioned seems to imply that's not the case.

Lua is a language that I started programming with, and has a special place in my heart even if has some crappy parts.

The main issue I have with the language is with table accesses and 'nil'. Tables in Lua are the most fundamental type of object in the language, it can be either an array (1-based index) or a hashtable. In this language objects are basically just tables with fields in them, and with metatables you can basically emulate all the features in a typical OOP language (classes, inheritance, traits, operator overloading, etc.) Field access in objects are just table accesses (like what you can imagine with Javascript).

However, when you try to access a field in a table that doesn't exist (such as 'print(table.key_that_doesnt_exist)'): no errors or exceptions are explicitly raised, it just silently returns nil. This is such a dealbreaker that makes the language much harder to debug than other languages (at least Javascript returns undefined, which is different from null! Oh well, that actually has problems of its own though....) Some more horror: global variables are also implemented as tables (imagine that there's a table _G at the top of the scope). This means that any spelling mistakes with variables will also just silently return nil, since if it doesn't find any variable names at the local scope, it tries to find at the global scope.

The global variable thing was actually such a big problem that people came up with some voodoo metatable trickery script like strict.lua (https://github.com/deepmind/strict/blob/master/strict.lua) that prevents this from happening (a showcase of the language's power, but probably not its proudest). I'm sure you could also do this with table creation (make a wrapper function tbl() that automatically adds metatables to tables to prevent invalid field access, so every time you need to do things like 'pos = tbl({x = 1, y = 2})') But still, there isn't a solution baked into the language, and it's cumbersome to do this (and I'm not sure about the performance implications of this addition).

Right now I'm trying to integrate Squirrel (http://www.squirrel-lang.org/) instead of Lua as a scripting language into my game. Squirrel is an embedded scripting language that's hugely inspired from Lua, but also fixes this shortcoming of the language by making invalid table accesses runtime errors. And when you want to add new fields to a table you need to explicitly do so via the <- operator:

    table = {}
    // print(table.x) (Runtime error)
    // table.x = 1  (Runtime error)
    table.x <- 1
    table.y <- 2
    print(table.x) // Outputs 1

which is much more explicit and less error-prone.

To be honest, that document is a prime example of what a manifesto shouldn't look like. I can't understand what you're trying to say from the beginning sentence:

> No other re-ligion (lit. “back-binding” [one etymological analysis of the word /religion/] to some ideas to rely on for humans) is necessary for a society, but only reasoned about principles: reflection, symmetry, cooperative construction (by too many CAs -> 1CA).

I'm never explained as to how the etymology of re-ligion relates to the whole thesis, much less what the etymology actually means. That first sentence will already make 90% of the people in the humanities to close their tabs. Please explain concepts like these in full sentences, than rather jot out abbreviations and notes that only you could decipher. I'm actually intrigued about this etymology, but I can't understand! What is "CA"? What do you mean by morality relating to symmetry?

> Evolved religions like Christianity also abide to following principles. Their followers do:

  1. think/reflect about the world (our thinking: one instance of reflection)

  2. they are in search of beauty, of beautiful/good actions/deeds (symmetry (1))

  3. they try to establish one text, one book, as core of their religion.

Now you're making very, very huge sweeping generalizations about the nature of religion right away at the second sentence, which would now make the remaining 10% of the humanities people to run away. The particular qualm I have (disclaimer: though as a non-humanities person) is the third part: religion is not operated only by what is explicitly written in the texts, but are also implicitly defined by the cultural norms of that society (which is why some religious people often try to "find" things in the text in support/opposition to current cultural norms (such as women's rights in the Bible or the Quran), rather than interpreting the text and then create a top-down cultural norm based on that!) And the "singular text" thing might just be a byproduct of you thinking Christianity is the only religion in the world... (more specifically, a product of Protestanism) Also you really need to be careful when using the term evolved: I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but you're now adding a evolutionary view of "progress" in religion that you have never explained!

Ah, I don't have the energy to read the rest of this, people deserve a more legible manifesto than that.

No, if you're just an owner. If you're a miner though... that's a whole different story.

If it goes to nobody, is it really "gone forever"? Did it even exist in the first place?

The confusions arise from thinking cryptocurrency tokens as material things (like gold). Money is just a numeric representation of the social relationship people have with each other, and the rules of the monetary system is just an technical agreement on how we should have relationships with others. This is a change of rules for the relationship between miners and owners: nothing is "lost" or "burned". Whether you agree upon that change of contract is up to yours, but the actual "disappearing" of money isn't an issue in the slightest here.

To be honest, even without the actual 51% attacks happening, it would really suck to live in a world where just one entity had more than half ownership of a currency used by the people.

I really wish the current global monetary system based on the US dollar would be this simple to change as just creating a fork. Wait, it's actually the US military (which is still the largest in the world) that's backing the whole monetary system? Ah, shucks.

The incredibly illuminating thing about cryptocurrency hard forks, is that it reveals that money is just a numeric measure of the social relationships people have towards each other, and as a result the ledger and its rules can be dynamically changed according to the needs and desires of the people (in constrast to what many naive metallists say that money is and should be a fixed store of value such as gold). I think crypto people have been generally focusing too much about the ideal, technical aspects of absolute distributed, immutable ledgers, and focused less about the social, political aspects of their work.

It is this aspect that I view the current Ethereum hard fork as one of the most important test the crypto scene had in a while - it's more of a political test than a technical one. I'm assuming that there will be quite some friction between the miners and the owners - and I'm interested in how it would turn out. Those two groups are dependent of each other for their existence, and the rift between them would potentially be the demise of the project. Will the project succeed in establishing a governance structure that would address both the needs and desires of both groups? Or will the project go into tyranny with one group dominating over the other (which would eventually lead to everyone's downfall)? In other words, this will be more of a test of governance than about technology. I don't have high hopes for the miners though, since there's just too much investor pressure from all the crypto craze that hasn't really been stopped since the coronavirus, and the miners doesn't seem to have a strong enough coordinated willpower to land an effective strike.

> Honestly, I think the PRC's hubris is more than matched by the US's (and Western world's).

Yes, I still definitely agree with that one. US’s hubris is the undeniably the largest in the world.

> I think it's ultimately the PRC's goal to have domestic champions replace those global corporations in the global economy (e.g. Apple declines as Huawei ascends)

Maybe, maybe not? We’ll see if this goes well as planed. Easier said than done.

> I don't think the PRC is as stupid as the US was, and will not allow those companies to "pack up and move" to the degree it's disruptive to their ability to provide an unmatched manufacturing supply chain.

The point is, companies are already doing this. You’ll be surprised how much conglomerates like Samsung has already taken production out of China.

I thought these were also already explained in Graeber's book...

A paragraph from Chapter 8:

> Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war. Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There's a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distin­ guished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of violence are everywhere-and this appears to have been an equally ac­ curate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and pre­ Mauryan India-there are obvious advantages to making one's trans­ actions simple. This is all the more true when dealing with soldiers. On the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot, much of which consists of gold and silver, and will always seek a way to trade it for the better things in life. On the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk. The econo­ mists' barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when deal­ ing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a passing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.

I think that's the hubris China is currently having: as they've grown stricly because of the reliance of export-led growth, they are now dependent on the global economic order as much as the US is (for its import-led growth). And the ones that initially built the factories in China, can always pack up and move to a different country. So global corporations are now kind of "cycling through" a list of alternate underdeveloped countries to build factories in, and keep going until the options are all exhausted. Some countries are quite receptive to this (like Vietnam, which is undergoing a similar transformation like South Korea and China had in the past), but some countries are not (like India, due to its complex cultural/political legacy it's hard for foreign companies to navigate through).

In counterpoint, many people in the US will never forget when the political leaders have transformed an mainly industrial country which gave stable jobs for their households, into a deindustrialized husk of a country led by greedy bankers, rentiers, and scammers. All this is the two parties of the US's doing, and the people won't forget it.

We've seen plenty how democratic countries can go through civil war and political struggle, this isn't something that only happens to dictatorships. And I am just so tired of the dichotomies most people have in their minds for the current form of state governments, both China and the US's political systems are complex and nuanced enough that you can't really call it communism/capitalism or dictatorship/democracy anymore. I was just comparing about which government is actually more competent than the other for dealing with the current problems in the world. One seems just a little bit more competent than the other, but that's as far as it can get.

It's illuminating (and equally harrowing) to see how much of the fundamental technology we have today has been researched and invented by the military (the Internet is one prime example), in stark contrast to the widespread belief among today's SV techies that free market innovation is what's driving the tech.

The real problem is that when the basic infrastructure that maintain the entertainment industry is gone, then the whole thing breaks down in shambles. For example, someday there might be a global shortage of electronics due to geo-political factors, and then you will have no chips to make those fancy consoles and PCs with.

Maybe the headline's a bit misleading, but what you're saying is almost exactly what the article is talking about. (The article immediately refutes the notion of "smashing its tech industry" right away)

And the alliance countries you've listed are also suffering from those exact same problems (climate change, Covid lockdowns, capital flight, demographic crisis, deindustrialization, widespread unrest, a hopeless young generation). And debatably, some of them have much worse on some fronts than China.

I do think that every country in this world, whether it be the US, China, or my country, are experiencing the same effects from the current configuration of global capitalism (environmental destruction, extreme inequality, housing crisis, cutthroat job competition, long working hours, alienation, depression), and the only thing it's different is how state governments are responding to the crisis. Out of all the governments in the world, China seems ahead of some Western countries in a few aspects (as a one-party state being able to control and crack down on a lot of things and enable strict policies against over-financialization and deindustrialization). However, I still do think that China's strong state measures are only a stopgap measure for the more fundamental political and philosophical problems that the entire world has right now.

You can get close-enough ballpark answers on the angles between (0, 30, 45, 60, 90). (If the questions are multiple choice, then you can design it in a way that you don't need a calculator) And this is actually quite an important handy skill you will have in real life, since later on when you're drawing graphics/diagrams either on software or hardware you really need that intuition of ball-parking angles.

Yeah, but I really don't get that you need to be "educated" to use a calculator - it's just something that's just too banally simple. It's definitely not a skill that needs to be explicitly prepared for high schoolers getting into college.

And to be honest, you don't really need one of those fancy expensive TI graphing calculators to do all those physics/chemistry problem sets. You just need a good-enough scientific calculator (for example, a cheap Sharp one you can get for $20 bucks) and there would be almost no difference in the time it takes to finish your homework.

To be honest, I really don’t get why the SAT board allows using calculators anyway. They can certainly make the numbers in the math questions easier to calculate (make it divisible without any weird fractions/decimals). And to be honest if you are somewhere in the pre-calculus/calculus level you should have an intuition of how to roughly draw graphs by hand (without a graphing calculator).

It really seems like corruption of the College Board (and many other western educational institutions) at this point...

Graeber clearly explained the process of how gold currency appeared in his book (I recommend you to reread Chapter 8: The Axial Age for this). It’s because states needed some convenient medium to provide resources for the military to continue its conquests, and that was precisely what the military was already pillaging from its conquered territory: luxury items made of gold. So the state had to find a way to enforce people to sell other important commodities (such as food and equipment) in exchange for gold, and that made the state to enforce gold coins as a currency in areas near conquests.

You’re right that the social/cultural value associated with those luxury gold collectibles is an important part of the story. But I don’t think you need any other weird evolutionary argument in addition to Graeber’s view to complete the full picture.

Why do you think donations will solve this problem?

Exactly, the essence of farming is actually complying to the harsh physical realities of the world (which doesn't give a single fuck about you.) You have strict deadlines on when to plant and harvest crops, too late and you're fucked. Even worse, even if you adhere to all those deadlines there are always special events like droughts and rainstorms which will definitely make you starve. No wonder why all those early agricultural people made religions to pray for the rain to please drop - you are now at the mercy of Mother Nature.

I think the problem with this debate isn't about how much people have worked in the past, but more about what actually is work.

For example, in today's society we do not think of basic chores like laundry as work, but in the past laundry was far more labor-intensive due to the lack of washing machines. Is repairing your broken furniture or clothes work? Is preparing your own food work? Those things are trivialized in today's advanced capitalist societies, but might have been a substantial part of life for people in the past. Nowadays most people seem to just buy new furniture and clothes, and even food preparing has been substantially trivialized by resteraunts, orders, takeouts, and readymade meals, so we're probably much more prilvileged than they were. But did the medieval people saw all of this extra work as "work" in today's sense? (Graeber's famous book ("Bullshit Jobs") kinda touches on this aspect in the end chapter, but I wish he've delved a bit more on it. There's a whole anthropology of work that's left unexplored...)

I just think that even the conception of work itself might have been too different to compare medieval society's work hours to today's. We in modern societies are too accustomed with wage labor, to even imagine that these people might not have even thought about tracking the hours they were "working".

You can say anything you want, but only in the guise of anonymity (private). You can choose to reveal yourself, but then you cannot say anything substantially radical (public).

The more important thing that is happening isn't all the fuss about "cancel culture" or "free speech", it's that society is pushing towards the absolute division of the grey area between the public and the private, which is the area where politics actually take place. The real danger is that speech itself, in one mode entirely full of consequences and in another mode devoid of any, will become meaningless because of this distinction. What you say will no longer be related to what you actually do anymore, and speech will just be a floating signifier that no longer has any basis in reality and will lose the ability to change the world. The "freedom of speech" isn't the thing at stake, it's the value of speech itself that's being jeopardized.

It's not that the work is never done, it's just that most of what we really work on computers is actually made-up bullshit and doesn't really connect to producing actual material things. (You earn money for it though, but money is as immaterial as it gets... and then you get to spend the majority of it on rent, education, healthcare, and various services, which are also all immaterial things.) Actual production seemed to have disappeared in today's neoliberal societies: they're either relegated to the Third World, or automated enough for not that many people to participate in. But the twist is: the nostalgia of productive "down-to-earth" work now becomes a captivating force, but that is exactly what the current system wants to provide you with the fantasy of work.