Notices by chris martens (chrisamaphone@hci.social)

spatial rewrite rules, eg:

pacman · dot · empty
↠
empty · empty · pacman

are pretty easy for most sighted humans to run by hand, because we are good at visual pattern matching and replacement.

you can also do general computation this way (think Turing tapes or cellular automata).

digital computers use bits because electricity is better at telling two things apart than many. but what about keys in locks, or loom heddles.. could a machine architecture support pattern rewrites “natively”?

rob suggested that for multiset rewriting (over finitely many pattern elements) you could do something like a coin sorter, filtering by size/shape mechanically. it occurred to me this is even closer to the “vector addition systems” style of rewrite rule representation

there’s an orthogonal line of thought here about using rewrites as a bytecode ISA implemented efficiently on top of standard architectures, which i also think is both possible and exciting.

but this question is more for fun, like if you wanted to build a fantasy physical computer where pattern rewrites were your fundamental operation, how would you do it, and how expressive could you make those fundamental operations before wanting to compile them instead

i’ve historically avoided getting interested in the lower level aspects of computing because i’m allergic to constraints that feel arbitrary, but more and more lately i’m appreciating how the PL ideas often seen as “maximally theoretical” have surprising and deep connections to low level, resource-minimal execution models

(now get rid of gender divisions and do it by height you cowards)

i never really expected to become a fan of climbing as a spectator sport, but i love that a post asking about favorite comp climbers, without specifying gender, draws comments primarily mentioning women: https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitionClimbing/s/Gqqoz6jNvg

the popular narrative about why we divide pro and amateur sports along gender lines is that if we combined them, the men would just be Too Good and no women would ever win and women would be sad so we have to give them the consolation prize of a segregated, lower-paid and lower status category

but putting aside whether that's even true, *we made up the damn sports*, *decided which ones to fund and televise*, and *designed the rules* explicitly to advantage cis, gender-normative men

whenever i pass this sign i wonder who is out here trying to REMOVE A GOOSE

okay well TIL some humans are like this

years ago i was a member of a large community on slack that had a custom emoji 🇮🇪 that rendered as the Internet Explorer icon, and it was adopted within the community to indicate "i am very out of date / belated wrt a previous discussion, but having just read it, i want to add something new". this is the kind of thing i do a lot, so i used it a lot there, and now i find my brain still reaching for it, a semantic void, a phantom signifier

oh hell yeah, acrobatics and climbing skill transfer video https://youtu.be/deLYjmmjsW8?si=e7yZ1OKS3_Kf-3fi

the guy who made this video wonders why exactly pole and judo seem to translate to good footwork in climbing and while I’ve never done those sports specifically, i have a hypothesis informed by some of my acrobatics experience: they’re not thinking about their feet, they’re thinking about their center of mass. where the feet go follows intuitively from where you want your center of mass

beyond just the education context… there really is a kind of abuser logic to these products. the goal is to isolate you from social support. I think this is probably a really important thing to worry about; I feel like i have not seen enough worrying about it by comparison with other issues (like not working/being wrong)

i’ve taught students who are new to programming who try to justify their use of LLM code tools with self deprecation — “i’m bad at this”, “there’s no way i could ever figure it out on my own.” i wish i knew how to get through that the actual value your college tuition pays for is access to live human beings whose job it is to give you the kind of help you’re seeking from the LLM. that those human relationships are what give life meaning & there are so precious few opportunities to create them

the gamer terminology of casual vs hardcore has its problems of course but i’m thinking about its merits versus skills rated on a spectrum of “beginner” to “advanced”, which sorta implies that if you’re still a “beginner” when you’ve been doing something for years then you must be doing something wrong, vs simply engaging with the skill in a less competitive/progress-driven way

LB: i’m not in perfect agreement with everything in Terrence’s thread, but I have been reflecting recently on the serenity of mathematical truth’s indifference to human rhetoric and will. a theorem being false says nothing about you as a person; it doesn’t care how persuasive you are or how much you want it to be true; no one can be blamed. in other disciplines there is often room for doubt on all of these points about conclusions drawn

@mcc yeah, kind of. I mean, computers come pretty close to making math *into* reality though, and then we can say mathematical things about that reality

if you could swap LLMs’ ubiquity for any other technology in terms of press/funding/push for adoption, what would you choose?

(let’s say you can also abstain from the more exploitative and wasteful forms of marketing, investment, and forced adoption that would be unconscionable no matter the tech)

what https://shop.curlworks.net/products/make-minnesota-bigger-bumper-sticker

i was not expecting the number of people in shriram’s replies trying to name languages more obscure than ocaml 💀 https://mastodon.social/@shriramk/114772343142354933