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Here is an attempt: .de Q .nf .na .pso awk 'BEGIN{bs=sprintf("%c",92); pre=bs"&"} {out=pre; for(i=1;i Invoke with: nroff -U -Tascii quine.roff | sed -Ez '$ s/\n+$//' Possibly relie…

I gave a few attempts with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Neither of them could get it right. So this goalpost can remain in place for the time being. (I am assuming that the task is actual…

How would your views about AI change if that goal were achieved? When my personal goal was reached, I found myself a little bit at a loss for words.

What would be a better way to measure intelligence?

Turing machine program states are conventionally represented with letters: A, B, C, etc. The starting state is A. Now suppose you are running a Turing machine program from the begi…

> The most insane python feature is that for loops keep their intermediate variable. "Insane feature" is a generous way of describing this behavior. I would say it is just a stupid…

Great post. Some general takeaways for people who want Knuth checks: 1. You are unlikely to find errors in the algorithms themselves, especially if they've been officially publishe…

> You never understand other people's code as well as your own. No matter how thoroughly you've read it, you've only read it, not written it. There is certainly some truth to this.…

For anyone who finds this sort of discussion interesting, I highly recommend reading Chapter 3 of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . There is quite a bit of ph…

Looking at some of these screenshots, this is such a fantastic idea that it is surprising it wasn't done earlier. Magit has the perfect interface, why shouldn't everything be like …

Well said. The Magit interface is such a pleasure to use, sometimes I will modify and rearrange commits just for fun. A Magit-style interface for Calc seems like a great idea.

> We are selecting for the maximally pathological machines. This is not quite right. We're selecting for maximally long-running (or mark-producing, etc) programs. Whether those pro…

Busy Beaver champion programs are said to run for super-exponentially many steps. But nobody has actually run their simulators for that many steps. Instead, simulators can prove ta…

> They have used a proof generator based on a logical theory... I don't understand your scenario. If they're using a proof generator, that sounds like the opposite of intuiting or …