smlckz

I find it interesting that we can think about [simple and complex] mathematical structures. How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so?

I distinguish between mathematical structures and "reality". From my perspective, mathematical structures are being used provide succinct description of the perceptible portion of "reality", the Universe as we say. Need all mathematical structures exist?

What can we say about [biological, AI, or even theoretical] systems that can deal with abstract mathematical structures: to be able to construct, modify, specialise or generalise such structures in a extra-computable manner?

This refers to the pic(1) preprocessor to the troff(1) typesetter. Troff is a historical typesetting software with a long history in the Unix ecosystem. Having personally used some of the modern implementations (e.g. GNU troff or groff, heirloom troff) of troff for personal projects, it has been a pleasant experience.

https://troff.org

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIC_(markup_language)

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/roff.7.html

Then you arrive at questions such as "Why do we exist?", even "Why anything exists at all, what was the need for all of this?"

> Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part?

There’s the non-helpful answer “I think, therefore I am.” I don’t think there’s any good answer to these questions. We can think about ourselves, we can think about existence, so we feel we exist? Let us imagine a person can not receive any external stimuli, can not send any instruction to control the movement of body, [e.g. a brain with blood circulation to keep it alive, but no input/output], in awakened state, now what should they feel? [Such a horrible state!] It seems they should feel their existence only on the basis of the functioning of their brain.

Extra hilarious as I can actually hear the sound of crickets.

What else can be done about it instead of building things, writing down or talking?

Fabrice Bellard is a CTO? Are you talking about this guy?: https://bellard.org

> In C, a read from an uninitialized variable is an unspecified value and is allowed to be any value each time it is read. This is important, because it allows behavior such as lazy recycling of pages: for example, on FreeBSD the malloc implementation informs the operating system that pages are currently unused, and the operating system uses the first write to a page as the hint that this is no longer true. A read to newly malloced memory may initially read the old value; then the operating system may reuse theunderlying physical page; and then on the next write to a different location in the page replace it with a newly zeroed page. The second read from the same location will then give a zero value.

What? What is the benifit of such behaviour?

What does other OSes do in this regard?

For those people who are thinking about some HTML subset, you can have a look at WebLite: https://weblite.codeberg.page

Try Racket and DrRacket.

Aren't we, now?

Truly, someone should try out NetBSD here...

Naming things are hard :)

> Also, Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator, so trying to do that would potentially reduce readability.

I also didn't know about any operator to logically xor two boolean variables (thought about (ab)using JavaScript's implicit type conversion mechanisms: `x ^ y`), and then I learnt that `!=` works fine as a logical xor for booleans. Tada!

I don't know how much readability is reduced by this.

> Dutch directness.

This reminds of Edsger W. Dijkstra.

> "I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras." -- Alan Kay

- ''Artificial'': not naturally occuring, also not a "clone"/"fork" of something natural.

- ''Physical'': not software simulation, virtual; "exist" in the same world we live in.

If my original terminology is insufficient or ambiguous, please suggest better terms.

Have we humans been able to make artificial physical self-replicating machines? Is it feasible to make such machines?

I am unable to forgive the author for the following:

    #include <cmath>
    #include <stdio.h>

The code looks almost like pure C, but that little `c`...