Fully retired now and one of the things I'd like to do is get back into hobby programming through the exploration of new and new-to-me programming languages. Who knows, I might even write something useful someday!
If you want to play with server stuff, OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) has some pretty generous "Always Free" stuff.
I'm running 2 servers and haven't even scratched the surface of what can be done for free.
It looks like I need a Windows machine (or VM or wine). Is that correct?
You had me at "BASIC"! I'm going to check it out.
I think that BASIC has historically been my most productive language. My favourite implementation was something called "Z-Basic", a compiled BASIC with device-independent graphics that could run on and target Apple//, Mac, and PC.
That is actually my point. I may not have made it clear in this thread, but my claim is not that our brains behave like LLMs, but that they are LLMs.
That is, our LLM research is not just emulating our mental processes, but showing us how they actually work.
Most people think there is something magic in our thinking, that mind is separate from brain, that thinking is, in effect, supernatural. I'm making the claim that LLMs are actual demonstrations that thinking is nothing more than the statistical rearrangement of that which has been ingested through our senses, our interactions with the world, and our experience of what has and has not worked.
Searles proposed a thought experiment called the "Chinese Room" in an attempt to discredit the idea that a machine could either think or understand. My contention is that our brains, being machines, are in fact just suitably sophisticated "Chinese Rooms".
Thanks! I've been working on this idea for quite a while. I post summaries and random thoughts occasionally hoping to refine my thinking to the point at which I'll feel comfortable writing a proper essay.
I like the name you've given the overarching system. That's been a bit of a struggle for me, so you've given me a better concept to work with. "Large Sensory Input Model" captures my thoughts better than my own "the brain is just a kind of LLM." That it's abbreviation "LSIM" also conjures connections to "simulation" is a bonus for me, because that also addresses my thoughts on how we understand some things and other people.
There is a fairly old hypothesis that something called "Theory of Mind" is basically our brain modelling and simulating other brains as a way to understand and predict the behaviour of others. That has explanatory power: empathy, stereotypes, in/out groups, better accuracy with closer relationships, "living on" through powerful simulations of those closest to us who have died, etc.
Thanks for the feedback!
Soon kids will start talking like LLMs.
Always have, always will.
My pet hypothesis is that our brains are, in effect, LLMs that are trained via input from our senses and by the output of the other LLMs (brains) in our environment.
It explains why we so often get stuck in unproductive loops like flat Earth theories.
It explains why new theories are treated as "hallucinations" regardless of their veracity (cf Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno). It explains why certain "prompts" cause mass "hallucination" (Wakefield and anti-vaxers). It explains why the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time just coasting on "local inputs" to "common sense" (personal models of the world that, in their simplicity, often have substantial overlap with others).
It explains why we spend so much time on "prompt engineering" (propaganda, sound bites, just-so stories, PR "spin", etc) and so little on "model development" (education and training). (And why so much "education" is more like prompt engineering than model development.)
Finally, it explains why "scientific" methods of thinking are so rare, even among those who are actually good at it. To think scientifically requires not just the right training, but an actual change in the underlying model. One of the most egregious examples is Linus Pauling, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry and vitamin C wackadoodle.
I'm basically a doofus when it comes to web. I had no trouble using Zola as the generator with Abridge and Terminimal as themes.
I started down the path of creating a gear library for Full Control, a 3D printing system. I got sidetracked by a couple of problems:
I'm apparently not smart enough to create something from scratch.
Existing libraries are either beyond my ability to use directly or, like OpenSCAD, generating fully realized models intended for traditional slicers.
I was hoping to be able to do a variety of gear types, but I think I'm going to have to be satisfied with just spur gears.
In any case, I've set it aside until next winter. Spring is coming, so I need to finish my website work before my other hobbies take over my life.
(Actually, Full Control might be better described as a 3D plotting system, since the Z axis is as continuously variable as the X and Y axes.)
Canada used to recommend 1 car-length for every 10 miles per hour. Along with metrification, that was changed to 2 seconds, but it's been set at 3 seconds for a long time.
I've yet to drive in traffic where even 1.5 seconds is manageable. More space than that and some slips into the gap, even if that leaves something like a loaded tractor-trailer hanging a second off their rear bumper.
Edit: Bear with me while I sort out the difference between my display and the resulting code block. Ok, close enough.
Ok, thanks. I would instead (and prefer to ) do something like this:
function test(&obj, &obj2, &a) { $obj---->doSomething() ---->--->doSomethingElse() $obj2--->doSomething() ---->--->doSomethingElse() $a-->--->doSomething() ---->--->doSomethingElse() }In this case, the ">" are showing the tab stops and the "-" the resulting white space. Note how all the calls are lined up. (My preferred alignment style, not necessarily anyone else's.)
Yet another edit: I see that I missed addressing alignment on other than tab boundaries. To me, that's just sinful! 😀
The way you explain it sounds like how tabs works in MS Word ( or other word processors ).
That is exactly how they work, and after 40 years, I still struggle with the whole "tab as a shortcut for spaces" thing. It's not that I started with word processors, either, just that as soon I started working with them, everything got so much easier for me.
There are some code-specific things that keep me from just going back to a word processor, but I think our code editors are missing some useful features that are found in word processors.
If I correctly understand what you are saying, you are describing "relative" tabbing, where /t moves a constant distance from the current position. I prefer "stopped" tabs where /t moves to the next tab stop. If my /t doesn't create the spacing/alignment I'm after, I just tab to the next position.
Thus, I would set mine with the first tab position (for indenting) at 1.5 cm and subsequent tab stops at 3, 4, 5, ... cm. That way I'd get perfect alignment with both fixed and proportional fonts.
I'd also set line-wrap or line-continuation to use a hanging indent based on the start position of the line being wrapped or continued.
I'd also set a boundary between code and comments so that lines always wrapped before the boundary and using the comment character at the end of a line would jump to the other side of the boundary with optional leaders (the characters, usually periods that connect the end/beginning of a gap). In an ideal world, I would be able to "hide code", pulling all the inline comments into a "hanging indent" structure with their "parent" comments.
Yes, before the advent of IDE editors and all the fancy intellisense stuff, I used word-processing software for coding. 😀
Why not tabs for both indentation and alignment? (Actually, I see indentation as just a specific use of alignment.) Word processors have been doing it for decades (and typewriters for over a century!). Surely we can convince our code processors to use user-definable, fixed position tabs instead of relative position "tab = x spaces".
Keeping the [TAB] character in the file then allows everyone the layout they like.
Or has working solo for 40 years fried my brain?
Me too.
I found that my 2600 t-shirt keeps them at bay. First, they ask what 2600 is, then they make sure that nobody allows me near their computers.
I didn't suggest otherwise. I was merely pointing at a couple of examples where some pretty smart, pretty experienced people used Go to successfully implement entire collections of algorithms in some very performance-sensitive systems. It's just by coincidence that I chose those examples because that is where my study is right now. Ask me in a year and I might point to your project as an example when the next person is asking for similar advice.
If Go isn't going to be fast enough to perform your task, then you're probably going to be sorely disappointed when you finally get the performance you're after and then have to stick it at the end of a wire with all kinds of stuff between you and your end users:
Operating systems, databases, hardware, virtual machines, containers, webservers, firewalls, routers, HTML/CSS/whatever, DNS, certificate authorities, more routers and firewalls, ISPs, modems, more routers and firewalls, WiFi connected machines of all kinds, and random browsers implementing any of several different rendering engines.
Quite frankly I can't imagine a language that won't offer enough performance to meet your needs in that environment.
The CSS also came, with the idea that HTML should focus on text information while CSS should do so on the visual design.
My biggest beef with CSS is that it's on the wrong end of the wire. What ever happened to the idea that the client is in charge of rendering?
Or maybe it's that the clients have abdicated their responsibility: the browser included with OS/2 Warp had a settings page that let me set the display characteristics of every tag in the spec. Thus, every site looked approximately the same: my font, my sizes, my indents, my spacing, whether images displayed (or even downloaded, I think) and whether text split at an image or wrapped around it. And it's not like I had to customize everything for each site: if you used a tag my browser recognized, my browser took over.
I was referring more to the people around me who are outside tech. Based on interactions with friends and family, I'd guess that a little over 50% know what a bookmark is, around 25% actually use bookmarks, fewer than 5% know what RSS is in very general terms and I know only one other person who actually has any RSS subscriptions.
I know people who work in IT who have never heard of RSS!
Just thinking about how far we have to go and how badly trained people are sometimes makes me want to cry. And I'm just a hobbyist; what must I be missing out on?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure "Always Free" tier? I've got a couple of servers and haven't even scratched the surface of what I can do for free.
If ARM64 meets your use case, you can have up to 4 CPUs with up to 24(?) GB in any configuration. (ie, all on one server or spread across multiples). I have a 2x12 ARM64 and a 1x1 AMD64, both running Ubuntu.
Their service is divided into regions, so you can pick from a few locations in the US, 2 locations in Canada, and other locations around the world.