141–150 of 163 posts
This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…
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>"Intelligence is produced by the brain" Depends what you mean by produced. If you mean it happens in the brain, then the following would also be true: - I prefer Strawberry ice cream. Preferences happen in the brain, which is a physical organ. Ice cream preference must be physical. - I speak English, which is a language, and language happens in the brain, which is a physical organ. English must be physical. If by pr…
Yes, I have a conception of software when it comes to the human mind. Even assuming the "software" is identical across humans (which seems unlikely), if one human has 10% or 20% better "hardware" due to genetics, wouldn't we expect differences in intelligence (accounting for differences in nurturing and other potential confounders)? Especially given how general human intelligence is -- it shouldn't arbitrarily cap ou…
My point is that the software is NOT identical. It's where intelligence comes from, as opposed to the hardware.
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Common Lisp conflates all types with Boolean. NIL, the sole instance of the NULL type in Common Lisp, is false, and an instance of every other type is true. (Of course, this situation quite good).
> Common Lisp conflates all types with Boolean Yes, I know. > (Of course, this situation quite good). I think that's debatable. Javascript, for example, does something similar but it takes all empty containers as false, along with zero and a few other things. (Not that I am necessarily holding up Javascript as an example of good language design. My point here is just that there is not a consensus on how (or whether -…
The Javascript design means that we cannot test for the absence of an integer in this manner, because a negative result could mean that a zero is present.
It could be handy from time to time. I propose a NAUGHT function for Lisp which returns true for empty sequences, empty hashes, zero (integer, real or complex) and any other nothing you can think of.
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RationalWiki is biased trash that can't be trusted for anything.
Without actually reading what it says, you seem to be attacking the source rather than the content.
They definitely could be correct on this topic. I'm not familiar enough with it to say. However, I want to strongly encourage everybody to verify with other sources instead of lending this one even the credibility you'd give Wikipedia.
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If you know about Yarvins other beliefs, the fact that t seems obfuscated makes quite a bit of sense in my view. I think it's a superiority thing for him. At its core? I think it's kind of interesting. Would have been more useful if he had made it simpler to understand/develop in. In its current form, it seems like a vanity project to me.
Discounting Yarvin feeling superior, or others perceiving that, I am in favor of the 'start from scratch' here. Worst-case scenario it fails, and only drags a few bleeding edgers with it. If it succeeds, we have a whole new way to proceed without necessarily abandoning the old. Just at the hardware level, we are forever, it seems, stuck in the von Neumann architecture with some recent hops to vector processing on GPU…
Do you have any suggestions on good starting points? I found Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to be a rough introduction to Wittgenstein. I'm also curious what Eco you'd recommend; I've only read his novels and essays.
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Without actually reading what it says, you seem to be attacking the source rather than the content.
I readily admit I haven't even read the content in this case. I am just attacking the source: most of the times I have read their content on a subject that I am familiar with, it has been grossly misleading. They definitely could be correct on this topic. I'm not familiar enough with it to say. However, I want to strongly encourage everybody to verify with other sources instead of lending this one even the credibilit…
I picked that article because it seemed much more comprehensive than that of Wikipedia.
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There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... > We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.
Focus on the intuitively right. I think it makes sense for 0 to yes/true. Think of the Unix exit codes, and golang returns. No news is good (yes/true) news. edit: as to the "annoying" that's just Yarvin being cheeky. I really don't think it is too serious.
FALSE == TRUE & FALSE ==> 0 & 1 == 0 ==> TRUE
I'm not entirely sure I buy the arguments that "made-up words" are a bad thing. All words were made up at some point. And the English language on the surface seems extremely redundant in its vocabulary, but each element of a cluster of words can contain separate nuance, so we keep them around. Perhaps this doesn't have a place in computing, but perhaps it does. Consider, for example, the most jargon-y field of mathem…
> Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different. Proofs = Some Types and Type Theories = Some Categories, so I think even taken as an attempt to paint the situation in broad strokes what you wrote is at best misleading. Many (commonly studied) categories and classes thereof are not interpretable as type theories, and type theories contain plenty of terms that wo…
The terms put the technology in the context of the philosophy, giving hints as to how it solves the problems within it. I can see why that would turn some people off, but for its purpose I believe it's effective. It grounds previously ephermal concepts in metaphors that are tight, like land = server + addressing space or code = law. A lack of good metaphors (rather than an abundance of poor ones, as is the state of things) may be a part of the reason we've become so disoriented with how we handle privacy. When you think of privacy issues as, "my identifying documents are on someone else's land", suddenly it becomes more clear as to what the problem is. By contrast "The Cloud" is a shit metaphor: the cloud is just someone else's computer. It isn't public, universal, or neutral, like real clouds are. And where in the cloud is there a network?
If one were to derive Unix in terms of, say, the operations of an anarchist society, as opposed to problems that are mostly mundane or technical, I would be saying the same thing. Arguably the last time this happened was during the Mother of All Demos with Doug Engelbart's models of the knowledge economy. Since then we've either been footnotes to Xerox PARC's visions, or have been otherwise haphazard.
As for the Proof/Type/Category equivalences, you're right, they're only equivalent for some structures in all three theories. So they're only equivalent up to locally closed cartesian categories, or wherever. But moving between those three perspectives even under this constraint still leaves you with distinctions, like syntax vs semantics. So in that sense they maintain the notion that different views lead to different nuances even if they cluster around the same space.
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I don't disagree with your criticism. I read through the Urbut whitepaper [1] a while ago, and there's some meat and novel ideas there. As far as a concise description, here's my attempt, followed by some content from the whitepaper. The key idea that distinguishes Urbit is its focus on deterministic computing. Urbit is a computing environment, like a virtual machine, with the distinction that the entire computationa…
I don't see how a clean-slate approach brings them closer to their goal of "make hosting this virtual machine easy enough to do that anyone could". Decentralized "cloud" computing is a necessity and I commend them for their efforts but this seems like a case of NIH syndrome if I ever saw one.
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ironically, this is what the parent comment is doing - attacking the author and not the message
The software is heavily based on the author's political views - and allows the author to shape the network into whatever they want, being based on a system of "digital landlords" who have significant control over the users who work on their "land" - so it makes sense to look into said political views.
What you're describing sounds more like the web as it currently exists under the benevolent rule of King Verisign.