Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
tao@mathstodon.xyz ("Terence Tao") wrote:

In basic research, such as pure mathematics, one might naively expect that the natural question to ask with regards to a given problem X in a field is

"What is the answer to X?".

But in many cases the more valuable question is

"What can be learned from studying X?"

The answer to X itself can of course be one of the things learned in this process of study; but one can learn far more useful information besides, such as

* What are the main difficulties to overcome to resolve X?
* What new techniques can one discover in order to solve X?
* Why are existing techniques insufficient to solve the problem by itself?
* How does X relate to results in prior literature?
* Can one uncover new connections between X and other topics Y, Z, ...?
* What are some natural related or followup questions X', X'', ... to study?

Nevertheless, until recently the two questions were closely aligned, to the point where it was not really necessary to distinguish the two: the only practical route to solving a difficult problem was to first address many of the subquestions listed above. (1/3)

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
jessebot@social.open.engineering (":heart_cyber: JesseBot :they_them:") wrote:

TIL that Studio Ghibli contributes to Open Toonz (open 2D animation software):

https://opentoonz.github.io/

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
brad@m.toad.host ("Condor Puma Serpiente") wrote:

Fun fact: the year 2026 was 23 years long

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Who would have thought the plagiarism machine plagiarises???

https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/117230769537879596

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
timnitGebru@dair-community.social ("Timnit Gebru (she/her).") wrote:

"The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator..."

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
kgz@chaos.social wrote:

There's a FOSDEM smell in the air, the season is starting: submit your devroom proposals now:

https://fosdem.org/2027/news/call-for-devrooms/

#fosdem

Boosted by db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿"):
vale@fedi.vale.rocks ("Vale") wrote:

Sometimes you look at an old HTML document and see some weird tags and snippets from bygone eras.

I’ve compiled many legacy HTML bits I’ve noticed and documented what they were and why there were present. Many of them are rather obscure.

Satisfy your curiosity: https://vale.rocks/posts/html-relics

#WebDev #HTML

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

I am so fucking excited for this

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

The rehearsal season 1 was filmed sometime starting in 2019 and released in 2022. Nathan fielder spent 2 years learning to get his commercial pilot's license for the second season.

So he was doing a the rehearsal on Elizabeth Holmes the whole time he was doing the second season. This is what happens when you give extremely weird motherfuckers with special skills a lot of time and resources.

https://archive.is/hKfZ2

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Surely the light of human consciousness will evolve beyond its biological bounds and create an interstellar information superspecies thanks to a process whose incentives include "minmaxing token output on benchmarks so hard the model defaults to minified python"

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Its cool how the arrival of AGI means that for some reason I am seeing a lot of minified python with lots of eval and compile calls in it

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
JenMsft ("Jen Gentleman") wrote:

It turns out, ICQ was foretelling the future of social media when they associated the sound of incoming messages with "uh oh"

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mttaggart@infosec.exchange ("Taggart :ifin:") wrote:

Machine speed is a con and we don't have to buy it.

https://taggart-tech.com/speed/

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
Secitup@infosec.exchange ("Lady Secitup") wrote:

I wrote a thing, please read.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-have-problems-apparently-jessica-hebenstreit-pq2hc/

Boosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

My fellow aging white men I am begging you to understand that when you are saying out loud that things were better back when you lived in comfortable ignorance, all anyone else can hear is that you are definitely still doing that.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
heyheymomo@socel.net wrote:

I set up a new commission listing on my ko-fi where you can request a custom fully personalised heyheymomo comic!

https://ko-fi.com/c/708dad3f77

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

mov-reg-64-imm32 is the call, taking those two parameters. for simplicity, we picked an example where they're both constants.

then ~ buffer length is a comment about what this particular call is for, which is relevant to a person reading the code the call is lexically contained in, so we will probably want to preserve that one.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
masukomi@connectified.com wrote:

@catsalad Wait. You know what your passwords are?!

🤔 The only passwords I know are the pin codes for my glass slabs, and the master password for my password manager.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
zak@infosec.exchange ("Zak") wrote:

@catsalad Ugh dang. One sec.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
catsalad@infosec.exchange ("Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch)") wrote:

IMPORTANT MASTODON PASSWORD SECURITY/PRIVACY ISSUE…
⁠----

For everyone:

If you are using the same password for Mastodon that I use, CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD NOW.

It's my password, and I call dibs...

Hint: h*****2

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

so, here's an example of a call to this word (from a snippet of code elsewhere that we have handy)

1 :rdx mov-reg64-imm32 ~ buffer length

we'll go through that piece by piece.

1 is an integer literal.

:rdx is a word that evaluates to a pointer to itself, which is a convention we borrowed from Common Lisp that lets us make ad-hoc enums that can be mixed and matched depending on how they're needed.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
BathysphereHat@mastodon.online ("Rabbit Cohen") wrote:

Huh, a search for "best video game for pain management" turned up a resource from the charity Child's Play that some of you might find useful. https://assets.childsplaycharity.org/docs/gameguide.pdf

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

the body of the word itself is a bunch of stack manipulation and some calls to words that actually produce output. the calls to pack8 and pack32 are producing low-level output of integer values having certain byte sizes.

the calls to rex-w and addressing-reg-64 are using helper words defined elsewhere in this same file; they do things that are specific to Intel machine code, but shared by many instructions.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

importantly, we don't actually want that comment in the hex dump, it wouldn't be useful there. it's an instruction for readers who are maintaining the implementation of mov-reg64-imm32, it doesn't need to be shown on every call to it.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

the challenge with the hex transform is finding meaningful comments to put into the compiled code. since we implemented amd64 assembly within Evocation, we have the luxury of tweaking how the assembly words are implemented. for example, here's one:

~ (output point, immediate value, register -- output point)
: mov-reg64-imm32
 3roll rex-w 0xC7 pack8 swap
 0 swap addressing-reg64
 swap pack32 ;

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

(we've already written the comment-stripping hex-to-binary converter, which is short enough that it's easy to audit even in its binary form)

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

so we've got the core abstractions for the hex transform's special comment syntax in our head now

as a refresher, Evocation is our Forth compiler. it is already self-hosting; we are adding a feature we call the hex transform which goes a step further, removing most of its dependence on a binary executable as part of its build process, by compiling itself into a commented hex dump which can be audited by hand.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
chadmccullough@bsd.cafe ("Chad McCullough") wrote:

It really kind of angers me when I see Republicans celebrating Labor Day here in the US.

A person in our neighborhood who voted for Trump, placed two American flags in her yard with a "Happy Labor Day" sign. It took everything in me not to go and have a conversation with her about it.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

from Wikipedia:

"While the term progressivism represents a range of diverse political pressure groups, not always united, progressives rejected social Darwinism, believing that the problems society faced, such as class warfare, greed, poverty, racism and violence, could best be addressed by providing good education, a safe environment, and an efficient workplace. Progressives lived mainly in the cities, were college educated, and believed in a strong central government."

it is a century later now. as a society, we seem to have lost our way.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/117232702510765223

#HeadDesk #HeadDesk #HeadDesk

WTF salary is this clown getting, and why?

[insert sarcasm emoji here]