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xjm

Re:Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @08:19AM (#50272431)
They can pay with shares into a state fund and the state could even return the voting power. It can be done if we want it. That was in a proposal in French legislation for example, so it's not 100% crazy and to me it seems completely natural.

How is that not the obvious comeback to the argument "wealth is stocks so we can't tax it"? Is there an obvious downside?

Re:Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang on Saturday June 06, 2026 @02:58AM (#48422173)
But ... if they were sentient, sentience would just happen for the time of a session, and only when tokens are being generated.

I don't think people here are arguing that sentience would happen when the model is not running, or that sentient experience spans several sessions that do not share some kind of state?

Also, a definition of consciousness is anyway hard to imagine :)

Webpage of the text without the intro paragraph

https://hex.ooo/library/power.html

Proving that a particular program terminates does not require deciding the halting problem on arbitrary programs (same for deadlock freedom)
Re:If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @05:34AM (#46286950)
It is not so obvious, some countries have a wealth tax in addition to the income tax.
Re:If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @05:28AM (#46286916)
Only if you pay it off with taxable income.

If you have a lot of assets you can just refinance your loan with more debt.

Re:Addressing the adding situation on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @10:27AM (#46122144)
Part of the Advent of Compiler Optimisations https://xania.org/AoCO2025

Loving it so far!

We used a low number _and_ it was a while ago (it would be different if we used the same number spread out on the same time span)
Re:Interactive λ-Reduction on Thursday November 27, 2025 @11:04AM (#46070513)
I find it much easier to see what is going on when selecting λ-calculus instead of Δ-Nets. E.g. for the mandatory Y Combinator,

λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x))

for which the difference with

λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x) f)

is very clear, whereas with Δ-nets the difference is more subtle. I guess it is because the visualization has more information than with the λ-calculus.

Re:A New Bridge Links the Math of Infinity to Computer Science on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @08:04AM (#46056993)
First sentence:

> All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory

That's ignoring most of formalized mathematics, which is progressing rapidly and definitely modern. Lean and Rocq for example are founded on type theory, not set theory.

agreed.

tiring.

maybe someone will make an "article-to-prompt" sort of reverse ChatGPT?

But of course someone already did that, and of course it's inside ChatGPT, what was I thinking? Though if I do try it, the prompt I get is not especially pleasant to read: https://chatgpt.com/share/6926f33c-8f98-8011-984e-54e49fdbb0...

Re:Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs" on Monday September 15, 2025 @12:03PM (#45251343)
> Thatcher told us, “There is no alternative.” In 1982, Bill Gibson refuted her thus: “The street finds its own uses for things.” > I know which prophet I’m gonna follow.

> Thanks to a free AI model that ran on my modest laptop, in the background while I was doing other work, I was able to write [an accurate quote]

He's right, but it sure sounds like a long fight made of small actions.

Re:The Peano Axioms: Building Blocks of Arithmetic on Monday March 24, 2025 @04:24PM (#43465049)
Another one is Presburger Arithmetic, which is Peano Arithmetic minus the multiplication. What makes it interesting (and useful) is that this removal makes the theory decidable.

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

Re:The Intelligence Age on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @10:16AM (#41647817)
> fixing the climate

I would be happy to be convinced that climate is an intelligence problem.

One could argue it could be solved with "abundant energy" but if this abundant energy comes from some new intelligence then we are probably several decades away from having it running commercially. I would also be happy to be convinced that we do have this kind of time to act for climate.

Re:Generating sudokus for fun and no profit on Friday July 26, 2024 @08:43AM (#41078146)
I counted one trillion or 9! * 3!^8 * 2 : the 8 because you have can choose 3 independent permutations of columns inside column blocks + 1 permutation of column blocks, plus same for rows. Then only one rotation should be counted, because flips are included in col/row permutations.

I think wreath products relate to the second sentence; see this page, which mentions the same result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_Sudoku#The_sudo...

I'm struggling to try and find information on "exact same modus operandi has been used by far-left movements in the past to disrupt high-speed lines" can you provide some links?

(I'm assuming you are not talking about https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_de_Tarnac specifically which I would say is not "the exact same".)

Though burning random cars might be French, we are talking here about arson with precise strategic targets (although I'm not staying this is more Russia's style)
The scale is different: "thousands of travellers" vs "hundreds of thousands"

One line was blocked because of "two optic fibers" in Germany "for around three hours".

Now in France three main lines are blocked: West, North, East (+ attempt on South), the disruption will probably last for days, it's a lot more than two optic fibers.

The Eiffel tower's is fun (:
Re:Coroutines in C on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @06:11PM (#39531499)
A modular and safe way to achieve this is probably effect handlers. It's like python's yield but can return a value and is scoped like an exception, it's not local to a function call. If you're unfamiliar with it, this article is a good motivation.

Each function, written in direct style, can perform an "effect" when the function wants control to go somewhere else (for c=getchar() and emit(c) here).

Control then goes to the effect handler, in this case probably the caller of the two functions, which decides what to do next: decompressor emits a char? Let's resume the parser's code with the char until it asks for more, then resume decompressor again, etc.

Effects can be efficiently implemented, especially if the continuation is only allowed to be called once (which is the case in OCaml), and allow writing code in direct style, together with type/memory safety. They are also very helpful in a concurrent setting.

An example here : https://effekt-lang.org/docs/casestudies/lexer

Re:Category Theory Illustrated – Sets on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @02:03PM (#37499637)
Nice!

Note that this page has no category theory yet since it explains sets, so if you already know sets, set product, etc and want to learn about category theory, my advice is to go directly to the next chapter, more specifically to this section:

https://abuseofnotation.github.io/category-theory-illustrate...

which uses set theory terms to define the category theory way of defining products (the corresponding "universal property").

Re:Climate Change Tracker on Thursday September 07, 2023 @05:29AM (#37416572)
In addition, even selfish people should care about loss of biodiversity if only because it facilitates disease transmission, and so is a threat to food security and public health.
Re:Tidal Energy Is Not Renewable on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @08:18AM (#37403986)
Did not know that, thank you. However how do you know it will re-form just fine? The abstract says:

> Instead, coal accumulation patterns implicate a unique combination of climate and tectonics during Pangea formation.

and I don't know how to determine if those conditions will happen again?

Re:Why Functional Programming Should Be the Future of Software on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @09:49AM (#33435714)
It doesn't fit "pure", but it solves the same problems the article is talking about, as other functional programming languages do.

In fact the article is excluding most functional languages by saying "pure", and then goes on with "Of the top dozen functional-programming languages, Haskell is by far the most popular" under the graph, which is wrong because it's missing "pure", a feature that is _not_ required to solve the problems that are being talked about.

So I agree on the initial point "Makes me suspect the article is not very well researched."

Re:Text editing hates you too (2019) on Saturday May 22, 2021 @06:45PM (#27250925)
Your iceberg should lay on its side but then the layout would look weird :(

https://gizmodo.com/youre-drawing-icebergs-all-wrong-1846329... https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html

Neat! I just discovered the gnome alternative gnome-sushi (available via apt-get). It's very nice, but sadly the "open file" dialog doesn't trigger gnome-sushi.
Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera on Saturday July 11, 2020 @12:53PM (#23803534)
The glue used for those varies, so you may end up with sticky glue on your webcam after removing the sticker (maybe that's good though if it falls off by accident)