Viewing profile — catpolice

This is a weird policy for reddit. But also, Jesse Singal (and Graham Linehan, linked elsewhere in this thread) are infamous in the trans community for spreading hateful disinforma…

This is a very strange claim. Just off the top of my head, this definition of "mainstream mathematics" would exclude, for instance, Gödel's more famous theorems, a good bit of Grot…

I'm not usually one to poke fun at these things but my friends who study formal logic/model theory/category theory/homotopy type theory/etc. will be excited to learn that they are …

Yeah, I think there are reasons why a lot of big compilers use some recursive descent variant (even a few like gcc used YACC-generated parsers for a long time and switched back to …

Related: I made https://j-s-n.github.io/WebBS/index.html#splash which is designed to look like an MSDOS era GUI application

A mess of my personal life

She presumably waited until 101 so as to die in her prime.

I like this a lot, not as an alternative to MVC but as a kind of conceptual refactoring of the same ideas behind good MVC implementations that's very easy to explain and doesn't ha…

Last year I decided to write a WASM-targeting compiler in Javascript, completely by hand. The idea was to compile a vaguely C-like toy language to WASM without any external depende…

Fun fact: the creator of RSS, RDF and Schema.org is Ramanathan V. Guha, a former leader at Cycorp (currently at Google).

1. There are internal and external factors when it comes to Cycorp's secrecy. The external factors come from the clients they work with, who often demand confidentiality. Some of t…

Java _code_. It's madness, though I'm assured it made sense at the time.

These answers are very personal to me. I joined Cycorp because Doug Lenat sold me on it being a more viable path toward something like AGI than I had suspected when I read about it…

Yes, I probably can't talk about them though. There are companies that use Cyc as part of processes for avoiding certain kinds of risks and the financial impact (by the company's e…

All the programmers at Cycorp, and most of the ones who've gone on to do other things, have a dream of re-writing the inference engine from scratch. Its just that those dreams don'…

I'm not sure I'm able to answer that in a satisfying way just because my memory is fallible. The degree to which the system is unsure of something (to the degree to which that can …

I don't work there anymore, though I know some folks that do. I suspect that they're reading this and don't want me to air out their dirty laundry too much. Here's what I'll say: t…

If there are current employees reading, they might be able to give a better answer than me. Basically, the project is to build a huge knowledge base of basic facts and "common sens…

Cyc has a few ways of dealing with fallibility. Cyc doesn't do anything Bayesian like assigning specific probabilities to individual beliefs - IIRC they tried something like that a…

Yes, quite a few. The prerequisite is basically that you have to be able to do formal logic at the first order level and also Doug has to be in a good mood when you do the intervie…

1) The money situation has changed over the years, and they've had times where things have boomed or busted - it's been a while since I left but I think they're still in a "boom" p…

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works…

I love articles about writing parsers by hand - it's really fun and teaches you a lot. Last year I decided to write a complete compiler in Javascript, completely by hand. The idea …

RIP screensavers