I have a PhD in category theory and know what the Leech lattice is and I still don't understand what is going on here. What is the value of using the Leech lattice to store memory?
Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
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Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#32As I understand it, content addressing function content is problematic because it does not actually "normalise" the content of functions into something interchangeable. A function of input A and output B with performance signature X can still be very different in terms of actual code, but the actual comparison between both is hard to specify.
I was exploring this as a means to solving the open source, or rather the github conundrum, the problem of sharing code socially is that we need a canonical source, and this is sociologically driven than performance driven, and as it turns out, have devastating consequences for FOSS funding. I wanted to explore sharing code "interchangeably" in some sense to avoid this problem, but ultimately this seems unsolveable, even with exploration by Unison etc.
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#33this has templeOS vibes
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#34I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer). Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be tre…
This isn’t about whether the writer uses LLM or not at all, nor is it about respect. The core novelty it tries to introduce is not hard to understand (even if it is not really that novel). If you don’t want to spend time thinking about what interesting idea it is exploring, that is fine, but pretending or insinuating that it is a LLM problem is just lazy.
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#35Just a comment: this sounds a lot like when someone I knew mildly succumbed to AI psychosis, and thought he, with Gemini, had made some physics/metaphysics breakthrough. If you’re losing sleep and feeling distressed or euphoric, maybe lay off for a few days, no matter how hard that is. Talk to friends and/or family about unimportant things. Get outside for a while. Go back to old hobbies (reading, hiking, just going…
There is nothing physics/metaphysics about this. If you don’t understand the terms, don’t pretend you do and write slop as a comment, it is really not that different from using LLM to generate slop.
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#36I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer). Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be tre…
This isn’t about whether the writer uses LLM or not at all, nor is it about respect. The core novelty it tries to introduce is not hard to understand (even if it is not really that novel). If you don’t want to spend time thinking about what interesting idea it is exploring, that is fine, but pretending or insinuating that it is a LLM problem is just lazy.
What is the core novelty?
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#37I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer). Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be tre…
This isn’t about whether the writer uses LLM or not at all, nor is it about respect. The core novelty it tries to introduce is not hard to understand (even if it is not really that novel). If you don’t want to spend time thinking about what interesting idea it is exploring, that is fine, but pretending or insinuating that it is a LLM problem is just lazy.
Explain away then my friend: surely your clear explanation will benefit many other readers who came away with similar confusion?
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#38Just a comment: this sounds a lot like when someone I knew mildly succumbed to AI psychosis, and thought he, with Gemini, had made some physics/metaphysics breakthrough. If you’re losing sleep and feeling distressed or euphoric, maybe lay off for a few days, no matter how hard that is. Talk to friends and/or family about unimportant things. Get outside for a while. Go back to old hobbies (reading, hiking, just going…
There is nothing physics/metaphysics about this. If you don’t understand the terms, don’t pretend you do and write slop as a comment, it is really not that different from using LLM to generate slop.
What if it's pure nonsense, therefore impossible for anyone to understand. Does that mean all criticism is "slop" and nobody's allowed to comment on it?
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#39The documentation is a work of art. Every time I try to work out what just one of the unexplained ideas is, it just introduces new unexplained ideas. I don't know where these ideas came from, how they fit together, or why putting them together is useful. I certainly don't know why I would want to write a program in this language, as opposed to any other language I already know.
Reminds me a lot of Urbit docs in that sense.
Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap
#40A few notes, because this is obviously vibe coded, and does not work in many ways. 1. Yon's documentation mentions "Homotopy type theory:" > the runnable HoTT fragment is refl/pair/fst/snd These are basic features of martin-lof type theory, not homotopy type theory. The documentation makes no reference of an interval type, which is generally the way to go for decidable type-checking in HoTT without univalence as an o…
As a mathematician, this reads to me as the most informed comment.
Various priors inoculate me from feeling some of the rejection expressed in other comments. I knew Sammy Eilenberg, perhaps the most famous mathematician to work at Columbia University. He hired me. With friends, I ran into him one night out in NYC, and in his 70's we all stayed out past dawn. His late career focused on topos theory, and everyone in the building politely rolled their eyes. Those are working mathematicians having an understandable reaction; most reactions to topos theory here are simply uninformed. The evolution of programming languages has lead from the lambda calculus to many forms of category theory. Topos theory would not be a surprise.
The Leech lattice? Could be a brilliant idea. Compare Lenstra's elliptic curve factorization algorithm. Sometimes famous landmarks in mathematics have remarkable properties; mining them for algorithmic advantage is no different than mining asteroids for rare metals.
The involvement of AI is most problematic. Mathematics fears being swamped by mediocre AI-authored papers, but the truth is "publish or perish" has long lead to mathematics being swamped by mediocre papers. Bad artists are losing jobs, but good artists are working faster.
I welcome a new era of programming language design, where AI makes rapid prototyping a reality. We just have to take sharing this work with a grain of salt. Stop reading when you lose interest, but welcome the churn!