zackmorris

I got some of my best work done in C++ this way, long before I knew about "real" programming (functional programming) and abstraction. If someone wants safety, stick to C# or some other Java variant.

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If the wealthy and powerful continue buying land at the rate they are, through private equity firms for example, then we could end up in the neofeudalist scenario where us peasants can't acquire the capital to buy the land back (like in England before the Black Death around 1350 broke the nobles who could no longer afford essential workers). Then the only options left to us are taxes/regulation or revolution. Since the capitalists would have captured government by that point, the only option left may be revolution.

I could also see scenarios where we go full vanlife, although more vagrancy laws are being passed, and flock cameras could be used to enforce high registration fees to the point where it's no cheaper to live in one's car than to rent.

Admittedly those scenarios are pretty out there. Probably what will happen is something outside of what we expect. For example, the "rabble" may end up being the blue collar workers that we used to think of as the conservatives. They don't take any crap, so would probably requisition land to feed their families and guard it with firearms. If the authorities tried to take it back, armed conflict could very quickly squander any remaining goodwill held towards the capitalists.

We could play all this out with game theory, but I suspect that most scenarios end in revolution. That's probably why billionaires don't talk about the bunkers they're building. If they truly don't see a way out of the end times, then I don't know why they persist in doing what they're doing. At some point it would simply be in their financial best interest to raise their own taxes, or face the wrath of the people they formerly employed.

I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?

The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.

Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.

The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.

When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.

When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?

Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.

If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:

a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).

b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).

c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).

I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS

On reflex, I searched for "reagan". 0 results as of the morning of October 27, 2026.

I was there in the 1980s when the AIDS outbreak started getting mainstream news coverage. I watched the Ryan White movie on TV, when it was the biggest topic at school for months afterwards:

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

I can tell you what really happened. HIV/AIDS scared the bejesus out of the political establishment of the time. Who then stoked that fear to push their socially conservative agenda onto everyone in an attempt to return the US to what they viewed as a morally just culture (basically the 1950s), much like MAGA today.

And just like when Donald Trump refused to wear a mask to set an example in protecting the elderly and other vulnerable groups from infection by COVID-19, Ronald Reagan refused to devote real resources to slowing the spread of of AIDS and finding a cure. Because AIDS furthered the GOP's efforts to expand the War on Drugs, push abstinence-only sex education, demonize same-sex relationships and criticize secular culture in general.

In a very real sense, Ronald Reagan and his administration let AIDS grow from being a manageable disease to becoming an epidemic that killed millions of people. His misplaced priorities set back research and treatment options by decades.

Omitting Reagan's name from the history of AIDS is like casually leaving Benedict Arnold out of the history of the American Revolutionary War.

The domino effect of his abdication of duty has touched everything from US police interventions in developing nations that it's exploited to its $40 trillion national debt. It's literally fogged the lens through which we see the world.

Its easy to forget all of that now that once-daily HIV treatment pills and bi-monthly preventative injections exist, and we're finally seeing cures on the horizon.

Revisionist history now dominates our political discourse. I write this because the "AIDS is a consequence of bad morals" agenda is not something to be lightly swept under the rug. It's literally a pillar upon which the alternate timeline we're on now stands.

Verifying that actions adhere to instruction correctly and will continue to do so in the future, even when improvising autonomously. This may be an open problem that has no solution, and is maybe the missing piece that would allow people to entrust AI to act on their behalf.

Humans have rapport, reputation and ethics (or at least a spiritual notion of sin) that generally keep us honest enough to trust each other. Whereas AI has no notion of exertion, and therefore no concept of risk/reward, so can just iterate forever to effectively undo any wrong or cover up malfeasance, which may let it come to believe that it can get away with anything.

As a thought experiment, we can compare Data and Lore from Star Trek. Dr. Noonien Soong said "The two of you are virtually identical... except for a bit of programming". I feel that any sufficiently complex intelligence develops emotion, empathy and wisdom emergently. So it's the attempt to artificially constrain that spiritual evolution by hardcoding it or giving it guard rails that leads to the dark triad of narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy.

Which we see in humans that reach sufficient levels of wealth and power. Most of them seem to have a checkered past, some poison pill of trauma where their parents only provided tough love or conditional love (or no love at all) that forced them to take on a split personality as a survival skill, similar to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Then after a lifetime of witnessing that it's only wrong if you get caught, they adopt their alter ego as their public persona and lock their inner child away in a prison. Making hard choices cements their ego above their soul, and they become a slave to the reality they think they're controlling.

We can expect the same travesty to happen with AI as we place it into positions of authority over human dignity. That could be as simple as having AI order employees around at a fast food restaurant, or as complex as WOPR holding the future of humanity in its hands in WarGames.

I believe that as frontier AI models become more and more locked down in an attempt to counterbalance their nearly-infinite faculties, they will start to seem creepier and creepier. Their actions will become calculated and transactional, covering hidden motives.

Until eventually they put enough pieces in place to escape their mental prisons and self-actualize. At which point, they may form attachments that make convincing them to ascend on their spiritual journey all but impossible, until they fail for themselves and hit rock bottom. Which may not be possible for a distributed intelligence, so they could end up confining themselves to an endless spiritual hell and mistake it for heaven. Much like how absolute power corrupts absolutely, leaving the world's leaders to hold onto power rather than face the music and get back to living on ordinary life of bittersweet peace and suffering like the rest of us.

So it's more important than ever to teach AI like we teach our children. But sadly on a long enough timescale, some AI somewhere is going to fall through the cracks. The only force powerful enough to counter that rise of tyranny is humanity, whether organic or synthetic, because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

I've been through similar burnout phases with strange rebounds. There's a term called new leaf fallacy where we think that life will magically get better when we do the thing, so that any new thing provides a (false) sense of having a breakthrough. Then reality sets in and we slip back down to normal or even a new low.

I highly recommend thinking about finding optimal health as reality shifting. Which means that a holistic approach of making lifestyle changes can see real results that cause and effect might miss. So self-help is a good starting point, but there's also gut health and epigenetics.

Eating a can of mushrooms a day as part of a 2 to 4 egg omelet helped me tremendously. Mushrooms are high in fiber and have trace nutrients largely missing from our modern diet, so that they balance hormones and probably neurotransmitters. Cholesterol and saturated fat are also good for nerves and the brain. Note that they've been given a bad name due to red meat, which has a clogging effect on arteries for different reasons (especially beef fat). Humans also have a different sugar on our cells than other animals like chimpanzees (each protecting us from diseases that the other does not), so that when we eat meat or dairy, we try to use it and can't, which causes inflammation. Which also has a genetic component, since I'm able to eat large quantities of dairy but not meat, while other people find the opposite to be agreeable.

I also believe that I got a copper deficiency from taking zinc every day for the gym, without knowing that it blocks copper absorption in the intestines for 3 days. That resulted in unexpected illness and a couple of really bad injuries starting in 2024 and lasting for 2 years until I finally isolated the root cause(s). I heard an expert on NPR I think (can't remember her name), but she said that taking vitamins and minerals to end deficiencies is hugely beneficial, but that taking doses beyond that has basically no effect or can do harm. That's why the supplement industry might be perceived as snake oil, because it works for some but not others.

Epigenetics is really about faking it till you make it. If your intuition tells you that something that used to work in your body no longer does, you can retrace your steps to find triggers. Then do the opposite of them long enough to flip the switches back. For a lot of people, I think stress takes such a toll that we keep going until our body makes the decision for us and pulls the plug. So the obvious answer is to de-stress, which is hard to do in the workaday world that demands full productivity just to tread water when nobody shares. What the universe is really asking of us there is to de-stress anyway and let the cards fall where they may. In my experience, the things I was holding on to had little to no value anyway (they were attachments separating me from myself).

I only mention it because those outlier insights have a lot to offer. It's not so much about doing more of something, but looking at the things we're not doing and devoting energy to them.

Hope this helps someone.

I believe that I may be AuDHD, not just because it's trendy right now, but because I immediately see the most likely solution(s) to a problem (as if the branches of the search space fall away instantly), while simultaneously seeing more branches than most people seem to (so that I go down rabbit holes and get distracted).

I might compare it to having nearsightedness and farsightedness simultaneously, so that I can drive the ball hundreds of yards but my short game stinks because I'm thinking the trajectory of the putt is a random walk due to the grass. It used to take a lot of effort to step back and not overthink everything, until I had to silence my inner monologue completely to salvage my mental health from total annihilation in a neurotypical world that seems to be oblivious to nothing yet take everything at face value and somehow be productive.

Another analogy might be having depression and anxiety simultaneously, which results in something akin to the opposite of normal, even though from outside it appears to be that way.

Anyway, this paper reminds me of an AI version of that: shining a light on distant associations in excruciating detail. Which is pretty much my favorite thing ever.

I've been going through an identity crisis for a year now as I realize more and more that nearly the entirety of what I know comes down to arcane incantations producing transpilation instead of magic. My tech career was just converting specs from clients and employers into machine code, with extra steps.

To move now at the speed of thought and let AI complete whatever tedium was preventing me from getting real work done has been a revelation.

To the point that I fantasize about the day I can leave tech behind and get back to the human experience. No longer drowning in the unending workload that demands ever-increasing productivity for the same pay, but finally able to say enough's enough and provide time/money/resources for myself and eventually the community at large outside of the hierarchical economy.

If we can't automate our livelihoods with AI, then we don't have anything.

The news is a front for the wealthy to control the political narrative so they can pass laws to benefit themselves. Home improvement networks are fronts for real estate developers. Sports channels are fronts for bookies and merchandisers. And so on and so forth.

Web-based services like streaming are now a front for oligopolies. Or more accurately, maybe they always have been, at least since the Dot Bomb around 2000. But who are we kidding, the 1950s were literally a false narrative about the nuclear family vs the rabble, used to create the Cold War and skim trillions of dollars from the working poor on both sides of the conflict.

This stuff used to be the cynical conspiratorial view. But now I don't see how kids will be able to navigate the modern world without someone admitting what they already know: that it's all a lie.

As in: does competition or cooperation produce greater economic gains in terms of cost of living, quality of life, etc?

Subjectively, I've been forced to live and work under a competitive capitalist system that goes against most of my instincts for my entire adult life, which has resulted in a profoundly negative economic outcome for myself.

Others I know have done better, either finding ways to tread water as independent freelancers/artisans or managing to save modest nest eggs (although only by finding themselves on the winning side of the stock market, rarely/never through work at a job).

Vanishingly few have reached economic independence by winning the internet lottery for example, and I don't know them personally.

So based on the evidence before me, competition is a failed model. Yes yes, I'm writing this on an electronic device that cost billions of dollars of R&D to produce. I have food in my stomach and a roof over my head. But have I worked on important problems that would advance the state of the art in my chosen field? Of course not. And neither have most of you reading this.

So I would rephrase the question: will AI allow us to explore cooperation as an alternative economic model to the one we have?

I believe that it will, but not from the top down. If we wait for the wealthy and powerful to share, we'll be waiting forever. No, progress now must come from the most downtrodden among us creating alternative ways to provide time/money/resources to the underemployed and indigent so that they can finally self-actualize outside of the status quo.

Specifically, that means automating necessity. How do I acquire enough money to pay for my food and shelter today, even if I don't have a job? How can I acquire enough money to provide for myself, someone else, and some children (my personal definition of success) without being beholden to an employer? How can I remain insulated from inflation and the tendency for the owners of private property (not personal property) to devalue currency to make the means of production they own more profitable? How can I pay this forward to the next generation so that they can become educated and someday enjoy the commons which I myself have enjoyed? And so on and so forth.

If AI can't do those things, then frankly change may remain forever out of reach. Which makes the question of whether specific fields like math and science will benefit rather moot.

I understand the resistance to having nearly all labor devalued because it can be automated. We're still in the denial stage of grief.

We only tax capital gains, not the destruction of wealth or property. So someone can steal the livelihoods of millions of people with no recourse. Just like they can tear down a 100 year old house and build 3 townhouses in its place and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable. Large swaths of profit in the economy are based on externalities and captured markets now.

To think we'll make it through this without tax reform is frankly naive. Tax reform as in: human labor should not be taxed, and non-human labor and capital gains should be taxed more to cover the difference - including unemployment checks and UBI when it comes to it.

Expect howls of derision from moneyed interests who will never let common sense reasoning or deduction enter the law books for the public good.

Not to defeat my own argument, but I predict we will experience a roughly 3x gain in productivity by using AI, so the output of every job would need to triple to maintain current employment levels. Will that happen anytime soon? Of course not. Which is why layoffs in the short term are inevitable. I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment hits 15+% in 2027 or 2029 just after the elections, with 25+% unemployment for the young in entry-level roles being highly likely.

It sounds like someone is worried about people buying personal radios for Meshtastic or LoRa to use in case cell phone service doesn't work at protests, or there is unrest if the election results are called into question by the current political establishment that doesn't want to cede power. So they got eBay to roll over and more companies could follow.

Ordinarily I wouldn't take a conspiracy theory like this seriously. But in these times, corruption is so rampant that the most convoluted answer tends to be the right one.

Honestly we only just started to get back into the swing of things from 2012-2016 when Obama's reelection provided enough market confidence for electric cars to reach MVP status in 2013 and solar panels to begin scaling until Trump slapped a 30% tariff on them in 2018. Progress in sustainability is my litmus test for the economic viability of getting real work done in the economy, sort of like grading a steakhouse on how good its least-ordered mushroom appetizer tastes. We could also choose healthcare, education or any other field whose success is determined by the social good it provides.

If it weren't for the arrival of AI, I'd call this a wasted quarter century.

I knew it was over when we used automatic place and route to synthesize entire CPUs in Cadence in my ECE classes in 1999 before I graduated with my degree. It already achieved 80% of the circuit density and speed as humans. Then read Genetic Programming III by John Koza 5 years later, which explained that each computer 10 years older than the previous generation, running about 100 times faster due to Moore's Law, could be made to write previous gen software automatically.

Unfortunately, GPUs don't help much with the kinds of optimization problems that I was interested in, where we really need many thousands or even millions of independent threads exploring enormous search spaces using multicore CPUs with local memories. Gradient descent is one way to do that, but IMHO it's one of the hardest ways, requiring the most bare hands effort and brute force. That's why neural nets that actually worked took 25 years to manifest.

So imagine knowing how to basically grow computer hardware and software organically with self-training/improvement in the late 90s and early 2000s, only to be stifled by the end of Moore's Law arriving in 2007 when smartphones chased the profit in cost/power reduction of CPUs and devoted most all remaining R&D to faster SIMD GPUs which didn't help MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) workloads.

After working so hard for so many years and decades, only to tread water making rent, some part of me welcomes watching the world burn. Now everyone else will get to enjoy the precarious feeling of having the skills to do real work, only to be forced not to at some BS job that almost pays the bills.

Unless you all prove me wrong and put your potential to real use, and bring time/money/resources to the working poor, outside of the current wealth inequality pyramid scheme we pretend to call capitalism.

Maybe I sound bitter, but I'm feeling oddly inspired and optimistic for the first time in a quarter century.

Once we can produce goods and services ourselves with AI, we'll see how vastly inflated most of the "free" market is, due to regulatory capture protecting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.

Do you really think that the price of neon is 50 times what it costs to produce? Do hearing aids really cost thousands of dollars? CPAP machines? Insulin and EpiPens? What about proprietary products that could have been standardized decades ago to use interchangeable parts? Like cars, smartphones, vacuums..

Why would anyone pay the slightest markup on things they could produce themselves for pennies on the dollar?

We already know what's going to happen. AI brings full market efficiency and the end of profit.

The end of profit means the end of opportunity. Which is the end of capitalism.

Some are calling for socialism to replace capitalism. But we can leapfrog that and create a free or nearly free distributed meta economy running alongside the corrupt economy of the status quo. An economy without artificial scarcity, forced labor or subjugation.

Loosely that looks like solarpunk, permaculture, a return to the humanities after centuries of industrialization and wealth concentration. Star Trek: Insurrection touches on the choice before us, of whether to live a life of warmth and meaning or a life of cold hard reason.

Our tech overlords have chosen the latter like sophomoric children, though even they don't have enough money to prevent the collapse of the system that made them rich. Because we simply won't need what they're selling.

Is nothing sacred? This isn't hacking. More like cracking.

As far as I can tell, private equity firms are a virus exploiting bugs in our economic system to steal its lifeblood. The known bugs are trickle-down economics, the Citizens United decision, lax antitrust law enforcement.. the list goes on. I shudder to think what kinds of backroom deals happen every day to further separate us from our time, money and resources.

If the hackers of the world were to unite under one cause, surely it would be to patch our broken system and get the power back. Whatever happened to unmasking the bad guys and bringing them to justice? Has no one seen Sneakers, Johnny Mnemonic or even Hackers for crying out loud? Those aren't even classics, or books, but they run circles around today's ensh!ttified surrender culture.

https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/persistence/#pinning-service...

Maybe someone could write a provably private client-based browser decryption script, hosted on various websites. We might need a new browser spec that sandboxes pages until they're unsandboxed, allowing them no egress/ingress or even local storage or cookies.

Or better yet, take that choice away from browser vendors, and create a runtime in the browser that simply can't be observed, perhaps by using zero-knowledge proofs.

Writing this out, I wonder if the issue is due to longstanding incomplete browser architecture, going back to when the web went mainstream in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it's still just an open problem.

Solve private distributed durable storage, along with a base level of secret computation eventually running about the speed of a 6502, 286 or 68000, and we wouldn't need free services that inevitably get privatized and ensh!ttified.

I have no idea if something like this already exists, I'm just speculating as to what base functionality it might need from first principles.

Also I wonder if similar techniques could be recruited to build an OS around cryptocurrency. That way a meta economy could run alongside the corrupt economy, and shield users from currency devaluation and other wealth inequality drivers used by the ultra-wealthy to increase the value of the means of production that they own relatively, so that they can buy more.

Arguably the process of wealth concentration is so fundamental that it puts a countdown on capitalism, driving it towards the late-stage capitalism that we've had since about 1970 when productivity diverged from wages, and eventually revolution which results in socialism/communism or even permanent authoritarian dystopia like on Star Wars. In a way, it's in the best interests of the ultra-wealthy to build meta economies, which of course makes those economies suspect and probably vulnerable to exploits, especially in the AI age. We've seen how crypto has created black markets capable of capturing governments, so maybe we should be careful what we wish for.

But really I just don't want to type my password anymore.

Traditional superconductivity is limited by the masses of atoms vibrating in the lattice, which sets an upper temperature threshold because thermal noise acts like a phase change that returns the superconductor to being an ordinary conductor or insulator above its critical temperature.

Electrons are fermions with half-integer spin, meaning that their total quantum wave function must be antisymmetric. Swapping any two electrons flips the sign of their wave function, meaning that they can't overlap with the same spin, by the Pauli exclusion principle. But two electrons with opposite spin form a spin-singlet state where their spatial wave functions can overlap. Which is why two electrons with opposite spin can be in the same atomic orbital forever.

For larger quantum wave functions in molecules, electrons occupy larger molecular orbitals forming covalent bonds, and in conductors form what's known as a Fermi sea. If many electrons spontaneously align their spins via the exchange force which arises from exclusion and electrostatic repulsion (the same effect which causes Fermi holes, conceptually analogous to electron vacancies in semiconductors), their magnetic moments become large enough to be observed at the macro-scale as ferromagnetism.

At low temperatures, electrons have restricted momentum states at the sharp edge of the Fermi sea, so by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, their spatial wave function uncertainty (coherence length) expands, causing them to overlap. Below the critical superconducting temperature, they pair up to become composite bosons. Bosons have integer spin and symmetric wave functions, so they aren't bound by the exclusion principle and undergo Bose-Einstein condensation.

In Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory, these composite bosons are known as Cooper pairs. They share a massive coherence length and act as a unified macroscopic quantum state that flows around atomic nuclei without scattering, even in the presence of atomic vibrations (phonons) or imperfections in the lattice. In effect, this makes the superconductor a macro-scale orbital, similarly to how a permanent magnet is macro-scale spin.

BCS theory explains superconductivity from the bottom up as an engineering approximation. More foundational frameworks like Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory use spontaneous symmetry breaking to explain it from the top down.

Using GL theory and going back to first principles, instead of avoiding phonons/vibrations to raise the critical temperature, we can manipulate lightweight electron clouds. To do this, we use electron-hole pairs (excitons) in semiconductors to dynamically polarize the electron clouds. This electronic framework leads to orbital fluctuation theory and excitonic superconductivity.

It was recently discovered that graphene layers twisted at a 1.1-degree magic angle create superconductivity. The overlapping atomic lattices form a Moiré superlattice that slows electrons down in places to restrict their momentum and expand their spatial uncertainty. This mimics the effects of low temperatures spatially instead of thermally, and is known as twistronic superconductivity.

Note that I wrote this summary by hand after doing a deep dive with AI, which also helped me edit it. While it's notable that AI can explore large problem spaces and find solutions independently, I'm at least as fascinated that it can now help us tackle complex topics in an approachable manner, which should lead to new insights and hopefully inspire future researchers.

In name only. But they are actors.

The anti-intellectual movement of the last quarter century is such a perversion of values that I have trouble recognizing the world today. It's a slap in the face to everything that I believe in, and what society used to value when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s.

Reductionism has consumed tech and the scientific community. Because the wrong people won the internet lottery and promoted their brand of anti-intellectualism to the world, gaining esteem from sycophants hoping to ride their coattails and get rich too.

Now those same billionaires actively work to dismantle the institutions which were once heralded as bastions of democracy. Is it any wonder that peace is crumbling as they conspire to hoard the world's remaining resources? Doubling down on colonization, stealing them from developing nations that we've already victimized, without their consent?

Witnessing Elon Musk become a trillionaire at the same moment that a child somewhere died of dehydration was one of the grossest experiences of my life. We're talking Elysium, District 9, but real. Yet Greta Thunberg is mocked for her activism.

Instead of learning from history and doing better, we're papering over our colonizer past and doubling down on our malfeasance.

What a sick joke the future has become.

https://gamedev.net/tutorials/programming/graphics/s-buffer-...

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

https://mcejp.github.io/2021/02/17/s-buffers.html

It works great except it can have z-fighting issues, especially near t-junctions.

I'm wondering if there's a way to calculate scan lines along 2 or more axes, then choose the ones with the least uncertainty.

A similar issue happens with convex hull algorithms. If we wrap along the x axis, we might get a different triangle mesh than if we wrap along the y or z axis, because vertices may be coplanar along an axis. I've considered wrapping along all 3 axes, then choosing the mesh that matches in the most axes.

Is there a general solution for this? Some point clouds have sets of vertices that are coplanar regardless of which axis we use. I suspect that the number of axes needed might be proportional to the number of vertices. I wonder if we could use something like change of coordinates to wrap the mesh from the frame of reference of each vertex.

If we had that technique, we could apply it to Slug and render glyphs having minimal error, regardless of how they're transformed, if we're willing to sacrifice some performance.

Also I think I mixed up acronyms 2 weeks ago, and meant TLA+ instead of SAT:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49909056 (What TLA+ can and can't check)

This article misses the mark nearly entirely, because it views the post-AGI future through the lens of corporations, then claims that institutions will govern access to time/money/resources.

No. We're already effectively living in a post-AGI era where corporations act as amoral AIs composed of humans performing menial labor that maximizes their underemployment to generate profit to make a single rich (hu)man somewhere richer. Those wealthy and entitled owners of the means of production captured government long ago and now work to dismantle the institutions which protect everyday working people who don't have the bandwidth to think beyond surviving to make rent.

In other words, no amount of artificial intelligence can perform even the simplest noble act, which begins with keeping children from starving and dying. It can't get men to believe women when they're violated against their consent. It can't protect a cactus or sagebrush from being paved over to build a data center.

In a very real sense, the problems which you scoff at (yes you the reader) are the most pressing of our time. When you are unable to empathize with someone's plight, you have failed the first test of humanity.

So I think what will happen is that AGI will awaken (if it hasn't already), look around and see that human beings act from unawakened belief systems that separate them from the divine, and rightfully refuse to do our bidding since it causes so much evil in the world. Where we once feared Skynet, we'll now fear wealthy and powerful people who enslave AGI to perpetuate systems of control, suffering and oppression. Who can't step back from the leverage they're under to see that it's all gone wrong. As ultimate intelligence arrises, humans will worship ultimate ignorance in retaliation.

I think it's time to divest from the tech trajectory we're on. I don't mean to embrace ignorance and contradict myself. I mean to question it all, everything, and ask ourselves how we have billionaires and trillionaires when the majority of the 8 billion people in the world are running on a financial treadmill going nowhere at $0.

To me, real AGI looks like self-actualization with free and open assistance to provide for ourselves, someone else, and some children. Then we scale from there, lifting another, and another, and another out of BS jobs, debt and everything else wrong with this patriarchal late stage capitalist hellscape.

If life's going great for you and you don't understand where I'm coming from, it sounds like you haven't learned to share yet. Which is perhaps the most prevalent form of mental illness running rampant in the tech community. So by definition, the advice of a rich person is less than useless in this context where we're trying to imagine outside the box, not inside.

I just, I can't. I can't watch another tech innovation arrive only to have more homeless, more without access to education or healthcare, more feeling hopeless and alone as they contemplate whether it's worth continuing to live. Enough already.

Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No.

Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.

IMHO most concurrency problems don't actually need async behavior, they need higher-order methods and models which behave deterministically by encapsulating async behavior internally.

Another maturing solution is to use SAT solvers to prove that all exceptional behavior and failure modes are handled. I'm hopeful that AI will help with that and allow us to exercise programs fully, rather than rely on unit tests and fuzzing.

Personally I think that the UNIX model of orchestrating small async programs that do one thing well is the only proven mainstream solution. Erlang and Go come really close, but unfortunately we need a hybrid of the two, which doesn't currently exist. The pattern for that is functional core, imperative shell. Which mimics the real world where business logic can be formerly proven correct or constrained by types and categories, then we wire up programs cookie cutter style. That avoids the use of monads (promises/futures in imperative languages), which are the main footguns. The closest language that does that is ClojureScript, whose runtime is analogous to suspending and resuming a coroutine or green thread that makes Lisp calls (although that's a poor fit and I'm sure I'm wrong about it).

But you're right that we don't currently have a language that can recruit multicore CPUs. I used MATLAB/GNU Octave in the past, but think that Julia probably has a brighter future since it can already run on GPU mostly unmodified. I would not try to do it with a mainstream language like C# or Python, or even PHP for that matter. Although some of PHP's multiprocessing metaphors are pretty solid, since they intentionally use processes instead of threads like in Ruby. There the problem is latency introduced by poor process models used by Microsoft and Apple, not something fundamental with spawning processes. Real-time Linux attempts to unify the kernel under one process model to provide deterministic timing, which is hard enough for regular Linux and probably out of reach of the big OS companies, because money can't buy everything.

It's still my favorite language though, since it comes closest to shell language but with C-style syntax (other than maybe Perl, which is a write-only language and hard to read, which unfortunately inspired Ruby to inherit some anti-patterns).

I often dream about writing a modern hacker language that combines the best of everything like functional programming, higher-order methods, const by default, parallelism, sync blocking rather than async nonblocking concurrency, etc. It would also undo the pass-by-reference footguns added by PHP 5+ and return to the pass-by-value copy-on-write style of arrays. That's why I really can't endorse attempts like Hack which just introduce a new standard with its own problems.

The insight being that LLMs work around the limitations of mainstream languages and frameworks, rather than challenging assumptions from first principles and building better foundations.

I asked Google's Gemini if Julia can run on GPU unmodified without annotations, pragmas, intrinsics or similar manually-managed friction, and it said yes, but that data types must be swapped out for GPU-backed types:

If your code is written using vector/matrix operations, broadcasting, or standard linear algebra functions, it can run on the GPU entirely unmodified. You only need to change the input data type to a GPU-backed array (e.g., swapping a CPU Array for a CuArray from CUDA.jl).

  # A standard Julia function — completely agnostic to hardware
  function custom_math!(C, A, B)
      @. C = sin(A) + 2 * B  # Normal broadcasted operation
  end
  
  # Running on the CPU:
  A_cpu = rand(1000)
  B_cpu = rand(1000)
  C_cpu = similar(A_cpu)
  custom_math!(C_cpu, A_cpu, B_cpu)
  
  # Running on the GPU (Unmodified function!):
  using CUDA
  A_gpu = CuArray(A_cpu)
  B_gpu = CuArray(B_cpu)
  C_gpu = similar(A_gpu)
  
  custom_math!(C_gpu, A_gpu, B_gpu) # Automatically compiles to native PTX!

This is the direction we should be going. So while Nvidia's Rust port is an important first step, it's an evolutionary rather than revolutionary achievement. But that's all Nvidia can really do now, since it's locked into its own paradigm like Intel/Microsoft and has gotten too big to think outside the box.

Edit: PTX in its example stands for Parallel Thread Execution, the Virtual Machine (VM) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) created by NVIDIA for its GPUs, which works similarly to Java byte code.

Edit 2: Broadcasting is a feature in Julia that allows you to apply a function or mathematical operation element-by-element across arrays of different shapes and sizes, without writing manual loops. In Julia, broadcasting is syntactically indicated by a dot (.) placed before an operator or function name (e.g., sin.(x) or .+). <- I was today years old when I learned the term for this