ot0-no-stealth-portals-please

[grizzled jackal]

Okay

[obtuse jewel]

elbow over the net?

[grizzled jackal]

It's not a proper volleyball court

But I think like probably above my chest and torso

[dense oxide]

Here's the 295kg/650lb tire I was the first of us to flip, hehe

[obtuse jewel]

is it difficult

[grizzled jackal]

Why are you wearing gloves?

[dense oxide]

Just a little haha

[dense oxide]

I'd beaten my hands to shit that week, was just preventing further abuse

and to improve conditioning in the Florida heat

[obtuse jewel]

fam I need help locking in on my strength

[dense oxide]

We have some FUNNY stuff now

[obtuse jewel]

but my parents won't let me hit the gym at all

[grizzled jackal]

Why are you beating your hands against shit?

[obtuse jewel]

oh shi I have a friend there

[grizzled jackal]

Just do pushups

[obtuse jewel]

which part of florida

[dense oxide]

Hand strength measurement rig:

[dense oxide]

Tallahassee, the mighty capital!

[grizzled jackal]

I can't grip/one hand a ball

[obtuse jewel]

woahh

[grizzled jackal]

My hands are small

[dense oxide]

This is our best thing though, VibePlate VibeStretch, massive vibration platform with a power rack frame; we split it 4 ways price-wise:

[obtuse jewel]

pardon my geography I thought miami was the capital 😭

[dense oxide]

Nope. Miami is where I was born though

Tampa should probably be the capital, but oh well

[grizzled jackal]

Why don't you sell tickets to your gym, then you can make more money

[obtuse jewel]

it'll take a lot of effort to maintain

[dense oxide]

We don't want to hang out with people who aren't serious

So it's just word of mouth

I have the smaller VibePlate at home

[obtuse jewel]

what are vibeplates

[dense oxide]

Ideally set to 25Hz (usually there's a knob between 10 and 60), it forces all the stabilizers in your body to fire all the time

and then you do something like an isometric workout, hang from the bars, etc, and it's CRAZY good at forcing your connective tissue and muscle to get stronger, in a "holistic" way, far better than "bench press" etc, things I never do

[obtuse jewel]

what are they 😭

do they vibrate?

[dense oxide]

Yeah

[obtuse jewel]

you do isos on that?

[dense oxide]

This is the one we have https://vibeplate.com/products/vibestretch

Yeah, with the power rack frame I do "isometric Zercher squats", holding a PVC pipe in the crook of my elbows, and trying to squat it up against the power rack bars

It transmits the vibration through your arms and your legs, super hard; never spend more than 10 minutes on a vibration plate, and never use more than 31Hz or less than 20

The former restricts blood flow, the latter promotes unnecessary bone growth

25Hz is the ideal that Mayo Clinic etc have figured out

[obtuse jewel]

wait, so you're 54 years old?

[dense oxide]

47

[obtuse jewel]

47

close

[dense oxide]

People guess I'm in my mid to late 30s though in person

Despite my beard being white haha

[obtuse jewel]

I'm guessing from you being in 6th in the 80s

[dense oxide]

Yeah, I guess that was late 80s

[obtuse jewel]

1989 you were in 6th

[dense oxide]

Yeah that makes sense, that's the year I ran into the LOGO language, so cool

[obtuse jewel]

what?

whats logo language

[dense oxide]

Oh man!

https://www.turtleacademy.com/ everybody should learn programming this way

[obtuse jewel]

ohh turtlee

my school taught kturtle to us

[deep heath]

Original turtle language

[dense oxide]

Random selfie from a few weeks ago wearing a friend's company's logo tee before a meeting I helped him in, I've lost a few more lbs of fat since this:

[obtuse jewel]

it was so fire

[dense oxide]

Most people don't guess I'm in my late 40s anymore, and I'm working on that further

[mortal hull]

damn

[dense oxide]

Learned some fun new "multi-omics" tricks in that regard

[simple bough]

i cant see any pounds of fat in this picture
so what did you lose

[deep heath]

What fat? There's no fat

[dense oxide]

You can just barely see that I have some "love handles" in this pic

and they are mostly now gone

[summer robin]

It's a loose shirt hanging over it, can't see much of it

[deep heath]

So... less love now?

[dense oxide]

Yeah, not a great pic

[deep heath]

I prefer a pillow

[dense oxide]

More war, less love, I guess yeah haha

[deep heath]

Not a skeleton

[simple bough]

damn.. nicky would pick a pillow over me

[dense oxide]

The reason I'm focused on it now is that I signed up for this:

and I was gonna DIE if I was as out of shape as I was at the start of April when I learned about this

I was one of the first 100 globally to register, I got the discount the flyer describes muhahah

[obtuse jewel]

https://tenor.com/view/he-made-a-statement-statement-dog-gang-praised-gif-14847923944265501688

[simple bough]

im currently 58kg at ~180cm
natural skeleton build

[dense oxide]

This came in the mail with a UF PRO order and I was like "Holy crap, if I don't register for this, I'm a poser"

[deep heath]

When my met my partner, they were a perfect combo of muscles and fat to be a comfy pillow.
But they love to cook, so we both became softer pillows since then

[modest slate]

You look aggressively normal

[dense oxide]

I'll be in Germany for Prophecy Fest in September, and then in Slovenia for Striker Challenge. Good times.

[dense oxide]

That's the goal; "grey man"

No tattoos, etc

[modest slate]

… are you applying to the CIA?

[simple bough]

if you did tattoos would you do them with ink from your collection
or is that the wrong ink

[deep heath]

Wrong ink. Different ingredients

[dense oxide]

Wrong ink sadly, but also we've learned that tattoo ink is CRAZY bad for your immune system, causes permanent changes

"graphene smart-inks" are coming soon though, and they will be safe

[slow ermine]

https://tenor.com/view/stare-look-reaction-ohnepixel-ohne-gif-3389986175019383817

[dense oxide]

I am gonna do Odin's ravens, Huginn and Muninn, on my shoulder blades

the smart-inks will be programmable, so I can have them wink or something haha

[obtuse jewel]

so like tiny nanobots embedded in your skin

with connective capability

[simple bough]

damn.. its only 51 years left to cyberpunk

[dense oxide]

I weighed 235lbs a year ago

Quitting my job is the best decision I ever made for my health, so rad

[modest slate]

damn

I weigh 235 now

Does that mean I mow have to...

[simple bough]

thats a lot for a dog

[lofty cypress]

yes

[modest slate]

oh

[dense oxide]

See if you have a trustworthy local place that can do micro-doses of GLP-1RA (tirzepatide), it's crazy-badass for your metabolism, and also massively improves your immune system, we're learning that it basically immunizes you against Alzheimers and Parkinson's too.

[obtuse jewel]

is 187 decent

[dense oxide]

Do NOT order some shit online

[modest slate]

but but but

[modest slate]

Depends on height

[eternal tide]

hey everyone, i have a little kali linux problem, can someone help?

[simple bough]

depends on height and body type

[dense oxide]

Never order a "Research Use Only" compound either, even if Reddit likes it

[modest slate]

Ask your actual question

[eternal tide]

i'm new in kali?

[obtuse jewel]

how do I find body type; 190cm

[eternal tide]

Need help understanding something with Evil-WinRM authentication.

I’m testing in my own lab:

• Windows host
• Kali WSL + Kali VirtualBox
• Local Windows account: Jass

Old passwords were:

• 1123
• jxzz

Current real password is:

• jass

But Evil-WinRM still lets me log in using the OLD passwords.

Example:

evil-winrm -i 192.168.1.2 -u Jass -p jxzz

and even:

evil-winrm -i 192.168.1.2 -u Jass -p 1123

Both still open a PowerShell session successfully.

I tested:

• after changing password
• after closing/reopening terminal
• from Kali VirtualBox too

So I’m confused how auth is still working.

Is this:

• cached NTLM/session auth?
• WSL/VirtualBox same-host behavior?
• WinRM config issue?
• some local trust/auth mechanism?

Would appreciate any explanation.

[modest slate]

!rule 5

[obtuse swallow]

Rules

5. Do not provide or request help on projects that may violate terms of service, or that may be deemed inappropriate, malicious, or illegal.

[obtuse jewel]

what is evil win rm

[simple bough]

just your overall like, bone structure, shape of the body, where the weight is distributed

[modest slate]

An evil version of WinRM, a protocol used for managing Windows devices

[obtuse jewel]

Windows Remote Manager?

[modest slate]

So you actually need help with EvilWinRM
This server has rules against hacking
But there are plenty of servers about hacking

[eternal tide]

i'm doing it on my own windows using sam and system file. say a network chuck video about doing this so just wated to heck it out.

[eternal tide]

can you share me the names or links?

[obtuse jewel]

try a CTF server potentially

like hackthebox or tryhackme

I'm sure they'll be of more help

[modest slate]

Yea

[modest slate]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Remote_Management

Close

[crude hound]

is that malware?

[eternal tide]

thanks @obtuse jewel

[obtuse jewel]

how could that even be exploited

or is it like a post auth framework thing

Evil WinRM

[modest slate]

How could something literally designed to take privileged actions be exploited?

[dense oxide]

The cheapest/best way is to find a big rubber trash can or plastic water barrel, fill it precisely to the brim, then immerse yourself in it, measure the amount of water that was displaced out of it (do it outside haha)

and that directly tells you your density, far better than any "calipers" or probe at a doctor can

The math is super easy

Make sure you get into it gently enough that you're not just splashing excess out, etc

Filling it slightly less than full but with an amount you know is probably better

like, make a "52 gallon" marker line on the 55 gallon barrel, etc

Any volume that's enough to immerse yourself in is fine

[granite shadow]

Hey

[weak fox]

would having a website with blog posts and demonstration of math problems -> code -> solving help me in the future or am i wasting my time

[sturdy tinsel]

are you planning on becoming a web dev?

[copper hinge]

Hello 🙂

And gn

[weak fox]

not ncessarily

[dense oxide]

IMO not worth the effort then

If you want to get into the math stuff, I highly recommend learning Julia after Python

No other language has a library set like this for example https://www.algebraicjulia.org/ (yet, I'm working on it for Zig)

[weak fox]

i like julia but i don't wanna use it

[dense oxide]

Cool, you should implement multi-dispatch JIT on Python via LLVM then

That would teach you a lot

[clear crest]

@simple bough

Since you are a great campaigner for rust and low level langs, please convince this guy that rust is good enough to use for enterprise level stuff. He believes only C is trustworthy to use because its been "battle tested" for years. Oh anyone can convince him btw.

@harsh mortar

[dense oxide]

(Not even trolling, it's likely possible)

[clear crest]

He doesnt believe me. Maybe someone with experience??

[weak fox]

that'd be cool if i wanted to study CS but i wanna go with something align the lines of math/physics (aero space maybe)

even chemistry

[dense oxide]

If you want to do that, and you don't want to use Julia, I kinda have some bad news

But I support your goals, good luck!

[onyx vortex]

Not sure how we could. Rust is good to use anywhere. It is specifically good for low level things. Its memory safety and modern type system make it a significantly better choice than C pretty much everywhere.

[dense oxide]

I have a COMSOL Multiphysics license so I'm down with that for sure

[dense oxide]

To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure.

[clear crest]

Mhm he argues, its not as battle tested as C and says its not good enough for use in enterprise

[clear crest]

🫠

[dense oxide]

He's fine then, we don't get anything from convincing people who are sure they already know the answers.

C is literal malfeasance to start a new enterprise project in, IMO.

[clear crest]

since you work with low level langs, how often is C used in ur codebases?

[dense oxide]

If I were on that board I would kick

[dense oxide]

Never

[modest slate]

I mean you can
You'll just start an argument

[clear crest]

rust?

I mean i understand your part is zig

[dense oxide]

SOMETIMES you bind to a legacy C library, but usually it makes sense to just pick something else

C++ usually is where the useful stuff is to connect to

[onyx vortex]

What does that even mean?

[clear crest]

@harsh mortar elucidate

[dense oxide]

I haven't yet needed to use a Rust library but there are some good ones now, it'll probably happen

I wish there were a decent way to bind to Go, but their design makes that impossible :\

There are some great Go libraries but it only makes sense to use them from Go, basically

[clear crest]

Go is that good?

[simple bough]

im not sure why does a programming language need 60 years to get battle tested. its not that deep

[harsh mortar]

@simple bough
For the bg, I simply want to know how million of LOC are being refactored when human resource could be allocated for perfective maintenance.
Unless it was only for the security improvement, that is the only reason I can have for it.
C, being simple and highly versatile to be implemented broadly.

that's all.
I am not knowledgable and was arguing with what I knew so far. To me it made no sense if something is already pre-established.

[dense oxide]

IMO not that good, but a lot of great developers picked it up so it has some incredible libraries. For example it has a DNS library that is basically the best ever made.

[clear crest]

I mean i heard a lot of people say its a great lang.

[dense oxide]

It implements every RFC anyone has ever heard of

It's "great" at getting the first thing going.. easy to learn, compile times are instant, etc

but it's a "local maxima" to me, because it forces a lot of non-determinism on you

[clear crest]

INSTANT COMPILES?

Are you serious?

[dense oxide]

so I don't really think of as a "systems language"

[clear crest]

(im from rust btw)

[dense oxide]

Yeah the compilation is crazy fast, nothing is "instant" but it's about the fastest at that ever

[harsh mortar]

Sound, That means there are explicit things that can be tested for, which are known. Is that true? (like we won't find any other vulnerabilities)

[simple bough]

you havent written any project where rust compile times would be an issue

[clear crest]

Is it strict like rust??

[clear crest]

I have compiled zed locally

[dense oxide]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2976630/how-does-go-compile-so-quickly

[simple bough]

why? get the binary build

[clear crest]

6-8 months ago

[dense oxide]

Not at all

[clear crest]

zed wasnt supported for windows

[summer robin]

The binary build is a recent thing

[clear crest]

so i had to compile it myself

[dense oxide]

Go is "slopware" compared to Rust

[clear crest]

to test out the new "vs code killer"

[dense oxide]

and Rust is "slopware" compared to Lean4, Z, SPARK, etc.

[clear crest]

Lean4? Whats that?

[onyx vortex]

The programming language choice doesn't feed vulnerabilities. Rust's memory safety, type system, and compile time checks help make it much harder to have whole classes of vulns.

[dense oxide]

The shit; so good: https://github.com/leanprover/lean4

[simple bough]

how was the "verify chunks of rust code in lean4" thing called

https://lean-lang.org/use-cases/aeneas/ thats it

[dense oxide]

Aeneas

yeah

I'm doing "Lean4-driven Zig" development now

I call it "Semantics-Driven Development"

Once I mature it a bit more I will publish a "handbook"

@harsh mortar Here's the thing; any language is fine, even C, if you use formal methods.

[harsh mortar]

So what I am getting with this is that it stops a specific kinds of memory related vulnerabilities. And C doesn't have that at all.

[simple bough]

if rust is good enough for the linux kernel its definitely fine for your projects

[dense oxide]

Any language you don't have a proof for is just "vibe" though compared to projects that have done that work

[weak fox]

i haven't heard much of julia in academics, at least in my area. since when has it become so important?

[dense oxide]

C lacks any kind of "guardrail", but you don't need any guardrails if you use Lean4 or similar

[dense oxide]

Last four or so years; it's evolved completely from where it was in 2018

They added a lot of the missing compiler logic, it's super slick now

[clear crest]

(hes planning to contribute to linux kernel btw)

[dense oxide]

the Fortran people also are finally aging out

[clear crest]

Fortran? Who even uses it anymore

[modest slate]

me

[dense oxide]

Julia's not the final ideal to me because it relies on Automatic Reference Counting, and I don't think we want GC at all in such an environment, but it's the best so far

[weak fox]

might be worth taking a look at again. i personally really like the language but i still prefer using numpy/pandas etc. because i am so used to them

[clear crest]

what?

[dense oxide]

Literally almost all of scientific computing

[modest slate]

https://github.com/letsbuilda/fortran-cpython-extension

[weak fox]

but julia has soem really good libraries if i remember correctly

[onyx vortex]

C is riddled with foot guns that Rust removed. Does it make it impossible to create the vulns of those classes? No. Does it make it significantly harder - to the point where you pretty much need to be aiming for them? Yes.
Rust is, at this point, a mature language that is improving incrementally. It is more than mature enough for any application you could think of.

[dense oxide]

check out AlgebraicJulia, it's rad

[clear crest]

Why arent they using C or rust or cpp for them? OR even zig or lean4?

they all are low lvl langs right

[dense oxide]

All of those are slower than Fortran, not kidding

[simple bough]

lean4 is not supposed to be fast. atleast not that fast
its a functional (functional programming) theorem proving language, not array compute

[clear crest]

Seriously?

[dense oxide]

Here's the Julia advice I posted on LinkedIn the other day:

Make sure your structs are utterly rigid, and your functions are utterly fluid, and you're good to go. Never use an array like a Venn diagram, only fill one with identical types. The functions never even run, they are just "JIT hints", never constrain the types of the arguments, never make the return type ambiguous.

Use DispatchDoctor.jl and JET.jl, pretend that anything that falls back to needing a Polymorphic Inline Cache is a compile error, because it should be.

[dense oxide]

Yeah, go look at some benchmarks. Julia is the first thing ever to beat a Fortran benchmark

[clear crest]

Julia? whats that

[dense oxide]

https://julialang.org/

[modest slate]

google is RIGHT THERE

[simple bough]

rusteo and juliette

[clear crest]

how can julia beat fortran?

[dense oxide]

It's a Lisp that looks like Ruby; your functions never run directly, they get JIT'd by LLVM

[weak fox]

this alone is dope

[dense oxide]

More context for optimization

That's my "functions loose, structs rigid" advice

That's the trick that Julia enables that makes it fast

every function invocation is fully specialized for the data types automatically with LLVM

Honestly I would call that screenshot "bad Julia" in the sense that it over-specifies types as arguments

But it's still "OK"

[clear crest]

insane

[harsh mortar]

As I am reading through the things, it makes sense that someone will like to pick up Rust instead of C. So I am satisfied with this, If I would work on some new project I will rather prefer rust.

But this leads to learning curve
some others talk about steep learning curve, comparing to C, C seems simpler. Should someone ignore C entirely? Or should Someone look into doing both Rust and C?

[dense oxide]

They solved what was called the "expression problem" that Lisp / C++ faced from different sides, but couldn't bridge

[simple bough]

julia is powerful metaprogramming and expressivity done without harming performance

[weak fox]

what is grind?

[lusty niche]

multiple dispatch is a cool concept

[simple bough]

apparently thats possible if you avoid the design mistakes made 70 years ago
some people really like to repeat them though. no clue why

[dense oxide]

The cool thing Julia enables is the ability for you to combine three different libraries that have never heard of each other, without writing any "glue"

It "just works" because everybody is forced into the same semantics model

[lusty niche]

i wish julia was used more outside of academia though

[onyx vortex]

If you're asking about whether you should learn C and Rust or just pick one I would say learn both. We will have C code running beyond the foreseeable future and it will need to be maintained. But new projects, Rust is generally considered a better choice.

[weak fox]

goated

i love languages like haskell

[dense oxide]

It will be. I'm pushing on COMSOL to support it directly instead of just Java. I have a perpetual personal NSL for COMSOL Multiphysics and so far its Materials Library and Ray Optics modules.

So they are listening somewhat.

[weak fox]

haskell actually has so much potential

[dense oxide]

Not to me. I learned Haskell in 1998 and never found a use for it.

Garbage collected

[modest slate]

Defiler is there any language you haven't used?

[dense oxide]

For sure, never gotten to do K or APL sadly for example

But I've used more than most for sure

[simple bough]

5D 5D Brainfuck With Multiverse Time Travel With Multiverse Time Travel

[weak fox]

i think pandoc uses it but generally i think it's just such an elegant language but i don't use it cause python and C++ cover 90% of what i do

[dense oxide]

I helped with a Haskell string-searching library a friend wrote once; fun language but not actually "useful" to me ever because you can't really use it from the other languages

[modest slate]

Oh I wrote a compiler for that

[dense oxide]

shellcheck is the best thing written in Haskell I've run into

[simple bough]

what about allmighty pandoc

[harsh mortar]

I was thinking to get hands on both, Wanted to stick around the C because I knew it already along with some C++.
Was going for Linux Drivers as of now, I did heard linux has rust language implemented to some extend as well, which is why I made the decision to kind of siphon a better plan for learning.

[weak fox]

diabolically good

[simple bough]

i got diabetes from installing pandoc

[dense oxide]

My advice is "learn C but never write it, write Rust or Zig instead", circa 02026.
Read "Deep C Secrets: Expert C Programming" by van der Linden. Old but so is C, it's fine. He was on the Sun kernel team, nothing he hasn't seen.

It's the one with the fish on the cover

If you have to "write C", use a recent version of C++ and carefully avoid using more parts of it than you need

[lusty niche]

Couple years ago, i made a toy project calling go, java, python, and some c with julia just to see how it would look like. it was very easy, the dev experience is very simple and easy

[onyx vortex]

!pypi pypandoc why not the Python version?

[obtuse swallow]

pypandoc v1.17

Thin wrapper for pandoc.

Released on <t:1773527947:D>.

[dense oxide]

Oh neat, the book seems to have been public-domained enough that it's on GitHub https://progforperf.github.io/Expert_C_Programming.pdf

[simple bough]

that just subprocess calls into the haskell one

[modest slate]

subprocesses aren't that complicated

[dense oxide]

Iconic cover:

[simple bough]

except you dont actually want to subprocess FFI. you want.. in-process FFI. and you want to pass around callbacks. and handle exceptions

[dense oxide]

Right away this book will show you why you don't want to write C

It has some CRAZY "OK what's wrong with this code?" stuff

Where you will just stare and stare, it looks fine unless you have been burned by C before, etc

The type coercion logic in C is impossible for normal humans to memorize

It's insane

You're gonna want to be wildly neurodivergent

[modest slate]

I got that box checked

But I still don't wanna deal with C

[lusty niche]

not just subprocesses, i’m talking about native julia/lisp concepts where i can reason about how to handle everything nicely though i don’t remember much julia now

[dense oxide]

and there will always be some answer like "Idiot, that was fixed in <year XYZ>" but oh joy, that means you have to know exactly when the code AND the compiler were written etc

[harsh mortar]

https://progforperf.github.io/Expert_C_Programming.pdf

This thingy?

[dense oxide]

Zig doesn't even have WARNINGS, because those are all things you have to matrix-test in your CI build

[dense oxide]

Yep!

[clear crest]

how many books have you read

oh my god

[dense oxide]

Zig makes anything that would be a warning either a compile failure, or a well-documented aspect

[dense oxide]

Many, many thousands

[clear crest]

I see you citing books every single sentence

[dense oxide]

I own like 1950 Kindle books haha

[clear crest]

books or quotes

[clear crest]

what

[dense oxide]

and way way way more paper books

[clear crest]

that must have cost like minimum 20k usd for u?

considering an average book is 10$ 😭

[modest slate]

Levs gonna be pissed they got outdone

[dense oxide]

Here's my driving book shelf haha

[dense oxide]

Probably, I spend most of my income in learning materials and tools

[modest slate]

y

[clear crest]

you read all those?

[harsh mortar]

Yo Computational Biology 🔥

[hushed magnet]

guys

my forum is ready

[dense oxide]

Current reading "pool" (not a queue)

[left walrus]

the manga guide to linear algebra 🫢

[dense oxide]

Those manga guides are actually GREAT

I never liked "Software Engineer", I prefer "Engineer."

My father had Chemical Eng, Electrical Eng, MBA

But I didn't finish college, seemed lame

[hushed magnet]

fire pfp, can i steal it

[dense oxide]

I spent that tuition on books instead

[dense oxide]

Sure; I stole it from DeviantArt decades ago, I think I might have it bookmarked, though I cleaned it up in Photoshop some years ago

[clear crest]

You didnt even go to college?

[simple bough]

"FFI is just bidirectional mapping between types and isomorphisms" when callbacks and exceptions:

[left walrus]

oh, I would've thought they'd be mostly backwards

[dense oxide]

Left early in 1997 from Florida State University CS program, to work on the Y2K stuff for the State of Florida on their welfare mainframe (FLORIDA Project)

10 million lines of COBOL haha

[clear crest]

Oh?

[clear crest]

How did you get used to it?

[arctic forum]

Why do you guys hate big mouth

[clear crest]

and did your family approve your dropout?

[dense oxide]

18 months after starting there part time, I was co-senior over the 110 programmers

[dense oxide]

I didn't ask

[clear crest]

Damn. Did you get paid there?

[hushed magnet]

tysm

[clear crest]

Oh you just dropped out and joined? Did they even know about it?

[dense oxide]

Oh yeah, my first job after dropping out of school was $175k/year in 2026 dollars

They knew, they asked for me

[clear crest]

school? You dropped out of school too?

[modest slate]

god dayum

[dense oxide]

Y2K was scary to enterprises (rightly, we fixed like 40,000 bugs or more)

I shipped the first Rails app that anyone's managed to find reference to that used Oracle as the db

I used our Tier 1 Oracle contract to get one of their guys on-site to re-write the bad "dev mode" ActiveRecord schema query that was taking forever, that ended up in core

[clear crest]

How did they know you?

you are an inspiration to us 🙏

[dense oxide]

I had joined the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) while at FSU, still a member, and some of them met me at a meeting and were like "wait, your hobbies are WHAT?"

So they hired me as an IT admin, and then let me help with the software test planning, and then figured out I knew how to program and promoted me to the other side of the fence

[clear crest]

what were your hobbies?

[dense oxide]

Uhh, everything haha

[summer marten]

Hi

[clear crest]

Like which one shocked them

[dense oxide]

combat, philosophy, motorsport, photography, I was fan-subbing the anime that we showed at the FSU Film School theater, obviously computing, etc

[hushed magnet]

hi

[dense oxide]

Not sure which caught their eye, probably just the mix

This is back when FSU was teaching Ada95 as the language, not C++ or Python or Java

Ada is sick as hell

[clear crest]

Oh?

[dense oxide]

The F-22 fighter jet is written in Ada83

[clear crest]

And how old were you when you joined that

[dense oxide]

They rewrote most of it for the F-35 II in C++ (ugh), but kept the avionics core in Ada83

[clear crest]

Why? is it that good??

[dense oxide]

18

[clear crest]

Oh. Are there clubs like that still anymore?

[dense oxide]

Yeah, my major professor at the time, Dr. Lacher, wrote the compiler for the DOD and I have HIS copies of the reference texts, so rad

[clear crest]

sounds like good exposure for me

[dense oxide]

Literally the same yeah https://www.acm.org/

Join that and go to whatever the local meetings are

[clear crest]

Local? We dont have that stuff here 😭

[dense oxide]

You do, where do you live?

ACM is everywhere

[clear crest]

India

[dense oxide]

There's a massive India contingent of ACM

These days I'm ACM, IEEE, AAAS Platinum, Nature+, APS, ACS, maybe something else I'm forgetting

[clear crest]

not where I live

[dense oxide]

What state/city?

[clear crest]

Tamilnadu

and im just 15 so dont know if im even eligible

[dense oxide]

https://india.acm.org/

No age restrictions I'm aware of, if you run into trouble I'll write them a letter

[clear crest]

Oh

[clear crest]

No need

[dense oxide]

So cool that you're starting at 15, giant head start

[clear crest]

I dont know if i have enough free time for this 😅

[clear crest]

Been programming since 10

[dense oxide]

I cheated and started at age 6 haha but I'm not a useful reference

I'm the weirdest of the weird

[clear crest]

nah you are an inpsiration to us

[dense oxide]

Always the goal, thank you

[clear crest]

Got a lot of career-deciding exams for the next 2 years. So maybe after taht

[dense oxide]

Freaking American Physical Society though, their pricing is CRAZY

I won't even tell you what they charge me for access to Physical Review Letters

It's horrible

[clear crest]

how much?

[dense oxide]

More than all my other journal subscriptions to all other sources combined

$2390/year or some other number that starts with '23'

[clear crest]

btw what did you learn there? What did they teach?

[clear crest]

insane

[dense oxide]

Dunno, I basically didn't go to class haha

[clear crest]

then?

[dense oxide]

I started a Quake clan instead

and we used the library computers haha

[clear crest]

Whats that?

[dense oxide]

first-person shooter game

[clear crest]

Oh you literally gamed-

[dense oxide]

https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-talk/quake-central/7936-original-quake-clans

In Quake 2 Capture the Flag, we were number 2 in the world for a while, on the OGL ladder

the top guys, Elite Strike, were SO coordinated though, we lost to them and only them, every time

[clear crest]

Oh

[dense oxide]

Vanguard, I was [V]Defiler

[clear crest]

Cool

[dense oxide]

The bracket/parens/etc was the "style at the time", modern games just display your "clan" affil automatically next to your normal handle

[clear crest]

btw did your assembly knowledge prove useful?

You told us you learnt assembly at 6

[dense oxide]

Constantly, yeah, though I've almost never written it vs. reading debug output

but it was fun to know how the Nintendo games were written when the NES came out

Same CPU as the Commodore 64 I learned on

[clear crest]

dont tell me they were written in assembly

[dense oxide]

Yes

6502 asm

[clear crest]

how though?

like isnt it too hard?

[dense oxide]

LOTS of good comments

[clear crest]

didnt C exist at that time?

[dense oxide]

Nah, people are just lazy now

Sure but C doesn't let you emit arbitrary assembly, and the NES was all about using the hardware, not about "logic"

[clear crest]

honestly, would you write in assembly rn?

[dense oxide]

When you need to do I/O etc you're always just "poking a memory address", and C doesn't make that any easier

[dense oxide]

No, I generate LLVM "bitcode", .ll files, and review those.

IMO there's no reason to directly "assemble" code anymore, LLVM is amazing

[clear crest]

why review llvm?

[dense oxide]

You have to read the code before you ship it

[clear crest]

you could read the c code instead right

[dense oxide]

and if you're doing low-level, that's the .ll output from LLVM

No, the C code never runs

The machine instructions run

[clear crest]

oh

[clear crest]

So you review those manually?

[dense oxide]

Yep, at least for "critical" things

Not ever for a website or anything, to be clear

but you DEFINITELY want to do that for a pacemaker, etc

[clear crest]

Yeah i get your point

Do you have a blog website or something

where you publish your handbooks and stuff

[dense oxide]

I'm working on a thing I call "Yule" where we get to finally automate that process

[clear crest]

might be an interesting read for me

[dense oxide]

Not yet, but I set up the domain for it, it will be lore.defiler.io

Launching my four YouTube channels also next week finally

Can't mix all the stuff I'm into in one, YouTube's algorithm just hides you

So I have to split the computing from the fitness from the motorsport from the philosophy, and just link between them at the end of episodes etc

[clear crest]

Cool

[dense oxide]

Working on the storyboard for "Episode 0001" today actually

[clear crest]

btw, Have you read the rust book?

Since you read a lot of books

[dense oxide]

Yeah, basically all of them

[clear crest]

Was it lacking any concept

[dense oxide]

I know the author quite well also from the Ruby scene

[clear crest]

which i might need to learn from another source

[dense oxide]

Not really, the latest edition is great IMO

[clear crest]

Since i am learning rust from it

[dense oxide]

(to be clear I'm talking about the Steve Klabnik one)

[clear crest]

Any low lvl concept i might need to learn seperately? Any gatekeeped stuff?

[dense oxide]

Steve is great

[dense oxide]

Nothing leaps to mind, but if you want to become a LEGEND, read this also and do the exercises: https://webperso.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyHaridi2003-book.pdf

I've corresponded with the authors and gotten their permission to do a YouTube "book club" on it, I have a bunch of the supplemental course notes they sent me if you end up actually doing the above

But CTM will teach you every paradigm of programming, not just the ones Rust and Python support.

[clear crest]

1000 pages?

damn

[dense oxide]

Yeah, it's a massive commitment, hence it being out of print more or less, but...

There's never been anything else like it.

I own two copies, a treasure

[clear crest]

2 copies?

one might suffice right?

you could always take a print

[dense oxide]

I got a "beater" one to write notes in, and I have my original one prisitine

mostly I got it to have one to give to a needy soul if needed

but I don't meet people with the guts very often

None of my co-workers in my whole career, for example

But if you actually work through that book, you're on the mountaintop almost alone

[clear crest]

Have you?

[dense oxide]

Mostly, I plan to start over from scratch as part of the "book club"

I've never not gotten an offer after a software engineering interview.

I once didn't hear further after a phone screen, but they seemed weird anyway

The freaking US armed forces would NOT STOP hounding me after I took that "ASVAB" test in high school junior year

They don't tell you your scores unless you enlist, but I guess I "did ok" haha

[clear crest]

Oh

theres things like that over there?

[dense oxide]

The Coast Guard in particular was like "Please draw a ship and we'll make it and you can have it" level of attempt haha

Yeah

Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, it's calibrated to cap out at 100% score around 145 IQ

[clear crest]

Lmao

[dense oxide]

(3 stddevs over median)

2 stddevs is like 0.3% of the population

It's different than the other tests because it focuses on "non-verbal g factor", the "non-culturally-biased" portion of what we call "intelligence"

Math, speed, geometry, etc

[twilit patrol]

all things i suck at

hullo

[twilit patrol]

g factor?

[dense oxide]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Unlike IQ, G-factor correlates precisely with lifetime income in broad studies

IQ is very historically weird

Bedouin tribes average 59 IQ, which is obviously "wrong"

But the Bedouin culture does not permit drawing stick figures etc as a child

[clear crest]

Anyways Great chatting with you @dense oxide . Learnt a lot of stuff and il defo try to read that book you sent here.

[dense oxide]

So all the IQ test questions like that are just impossible for them

[clear crest]

Its time to sleep as its like around 1 over here

Goodnight I guess

[twilit patrol]

gn!

[dense oxide]

But surely Bedouins are no less good at non-cultural "G-factor" things than the rest etc

(I haven't, sadly, seen a study of that, UAE should fund one)

[twilit patrol]

i mean how much can that be measured though

to what extent

[left walrus]

a high IQ demonstrates you are good at IQ tests

[dense oxide]

Pretty well honestly, it's a complex topic, there's a lot of rigor in the modern approach but it can always get better

Yeah, exactly, IQ is broken

but g-factor is a metric we can watch in fMRI machines

it's literally how fast your "neural network" converges on an answer

[twilit patrol]

hi lambdaambda

[simple bough]

discord should remove the "is typing" thing

[twilit patrol]

you can disable that

[simple bough]

i dont want people to know that im lurking

[pliant wagon]

🚋 🚆 🚅 🚄 🚃 🛤️ 🚉 🚂
I am gonna buy a ruined train station and will turn it into The international trainway centrum

[dense oxide]

Literally you can measure G-factor with an MRI machine and showing someone "2 + 2" on a card, because you can see when their brain decides on "4"

It doesn't have to be a "hard question", etc.

(combined MRI/PET scanners are crazy rad)

PET can tell when your nerves are consuming sugars to do work

That's what the tracer injection is for, to make your glucose very slightly radioactive

[simple bough]

you mean the UI element on your client, or discord sending that information about you to others?

i think if you go invisible mode it wont share your typing status
but then people will think you're offline, i dont want that

[dense oxide]

"Streamer Mode" may also

[pine narwhal]

why isnt my code working

[twilit patrol]

hm, i could've sworn it had an option

[dense oxide]

Anyway, fun as always chatting with y'all, going to go wash my car, it needs it desperately

[twilit patrol]

cya

[dense oxide]

Especially with my temporary new wacky brake pads, they create so much iron dust from the rotors it's silly

(Stuff coming from Endless in Japan soon to fix that, but they had to make me a custom tool-path)

(Right now I have Ferodo DS2500 and they are insanely "dirty", but very good otherwise)

[simple bough]

game is undefined, unintended is undefined, games arent iterable over bugs, bugs are not equal to unintended - unintended is a classification of a "thing", deleting local variables doesnt delete them from the thing you iterated over

[dense oxide]

This is like.. a DAY of driving on them haha

[simple bough]

pov : you took a joke literally

[twilit patrol]

i dont know enough about cars to tell x.x

[dense oxide]

If you look just "counter-clockwise" from "6 o'clock", you can see where I touched them with my fingers

That's all a layer of iron from the rotors basically

[pine narwhal]

I started programming like a few months ago, my joke must've been repeated like a bajillion times. im very proud of my progress so far though.

[twilit patrol]

?

[dense oxide]

My new brake system is fun though, confirmed unique in the world so far by the makers

[twilit patrol]

ah

i was looking at the tire

[dense oxide]

Yeah, rotor iron mostly sticks to the wheels vs. the rubber

[twilit patrol]

ic

[dense oxide]

(Most people think it is "brake pad dust", but no, it's iron from the rotors)

Endless (Japan) has wildly different pad "chemistry" and you get like a faint amount of ivory-colored dust instead, very stealthy.

Also their pads and brake fluid are insane, I use the same Endless RF-650 that the Mercedes Formula 1 team uses.

Metal bottles, not plastic

Totally incompressible, the brake pedal inherently feels totally different

There's a lot more "chemistry" to motorsport than many people think

(10% ethanol in fuel for example is GOOD, not a way to save money, it has better "latent heat of vaporization", keeps the engine and turbo cooler, etc)

Never buy "non-ethanol gas" for anything but an old lawnmower, it's just a meme

[twilit patrol]

cooked spaghetti presumably?

[dense oxide]

(The joke is that's how people do "brains and eyes" at haunted houses)

[twilit patrol]

ic

[hushed magnet]

Anyone intrested to my forum😁

[dim topaz]

yo

[urban glen]

tunnel from #python-discussion message

[dim topaz]

wassup

[simple bough]

matiiss just created portal3
played around discord's lack of feature to properly move between channels

[viral glen]

@simple bough i remember when i was like 13, it was passover, so i went to the family of my father, to celebrate the holiday with them

and i kept thinking about that i'm celebrating the holiday, having fun, eating good food, while there are homeless people at the streets, or people with no families, and no one cares about them

[urban glen]

yo, this could be a legit lance feature

[viral glen]

and we're celebrating, not caring about them

[simple bough]

yeah i feel like shit each time i walk past someone struggling

[dim topaz]

you can't care about everyone in the world

[simple bough]

and that sucks

[dim topaz]

its all how you see i

[warm oak]

this is a good impulse. You can help others even if you can't help everyone

[viral glen]

for some moments, i hated everyone who smiled there

[dim topaz]

i don't think about people that are struggling while im eating good food

i don't feel bad at all

i see it as it is

life is just like that

try to enjoy as much as you can

[warm oak]

it's ok to enjoy yourself as long as you also have times to care for others.

[dim topaz]

ofcourse

i was taught that caring is sharing

i always helped a person in need

[viral glen]

yea

[dim topaz]

but it is important to not carry the world behind your back

[opaque finch]

Have you heard about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism ?

[viral glen]

it really sucks though

[dim topaz]

life is just like that

[warm oak]

i have, and it seems to be controversial with people, but I'm not sure why.

[dim topaz]

enjoy it

btw why are python videos so hard💀

[opaque finch]

I'm not sure about the details, but the basic concept seems pretty reasonable to me.

[warm oak]

right, that's where my confusion comes from.

[simple bough]

nope, i havent researched the related topics at all, just something often bothering me that i never act on

[dim topaz]

brooo

[dim topaz]

i haven't done that either

never will

you do you

[viral glen]

however, i can't say i'm better than anyone

[warm oak]

but also, i am going to give to causes, and help people, who are close to me in some way. That's not bad.

[dim topaz]

wat

[opaque finch]

The idea is to use science and rationality to figure out the most effective way for you personally to do good in the world, taking into account your life situation and resources. Basically, of course you can't help everyone, but you can help some people, and what's a reasonable amount of effort for you to put into helping people that won't destroy you or your life?

[simple bough]

programming is very different from what you are used to, perhaps. not even python specifically
so learning it takes a lot of brain effort

[dim topaz]

i am used to cs2💀

its very similar

[warm oak]

isn't python off-topic for off-topic? 😄

[dim topaz]

wat

[vernal anchor]

cs2?

[simple bough]

counter strike, which was previously csgo

[dim topaz]

yes sir

[simple bough]

goodmaxxing 😭 why is that not widespread

[vernal anchor]

why is that what you compare to python?

[dim topaz]

but i got a vac 7 premeir ban'

it says something with crashing out

idk

[dim topaz]

💀

"goodmaxxing"

[simple bough]

AHHAHA https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rEXSjkB4fvcnSksaa/goodmaxxing
i am not the first one to think of that

[opaque finch]

Apparently the FTX founder who went to prison was a funder of effective altruism causes prior to 2022, maybe that contributed to the controversy.

[vernal anchor]

(it did)

[opaque finch]

Though I don't see how that has any bearing on the validity of the movement itself.

[dim topaz]

it does

of course

[warm oak]

help us understand how

[viral glen]

oh boy

[dim topaz]

lets say for a example if a nazi made a book about loving everybody wouldn't you critises them?

can i say nazi?

[warm oak]

if a nazi donated money to plant trees, does that mean planting trees is a bad idea? No.

[viral glen]

(like how come they're not thinking about it, i was a bit down)

[dim topaz]

but the person who made the donation matters

[warm oak]

ok, but we're talking about the validity of a philosophy.

[dim topaz]

if a mass shooter donated money to trees is it justifed ?

[opaque finch]

There's apparently been some other controversies related to the movement itself, but that's again not really related to the idea.

[simple bough]

to be fair "the movement" is different from "the philosophy of the movement"

[warm oak]

I'm not talking about the donation. I'm talking about the concept of effective altruism. Is it a bad idea?

[opaque finch]

Just the conduct of some purported advocates.

[viral glen]

i can't help all the people in the world, and not at all times i help people
but its important to help people at times, and if we all care about each other, the world will be better for all of us

[dim topaz]

idk but i sure wouldn't use it for my situation

i already have a good philosophy

its called you get what you give

so i give alot of love to others

[warm oak]

that is a good philosophy

[dim topaz]

ye

[opaque finch]

Also known as "an eye for an eye". Doesn't sound as convincing that way though.

[viral glen]

i like this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovs7CNr-MdI

[dim topaz]

video unavailable

[viral glen]

perhaps in your region or something

[dim topaz]

its the way you say it

eye for an eye means that you do me harm i will do you harm

while mine is more friendly

[opaque finch]

If I do you harm, will you not do me harm?

[dim topaz]

no

[viral glen]

there is an interesting concept in jewdaism, one of many

[simple bough]

is it fair to people who have currently have little capacity to "give", either because of lack of resources or ways to "give" them (say, unlucky geolocation, family situation)?

[dim topaz]

yea

[simple bough]

how so?

[opaque finch]

Sounds nice for people who get to inherit a lot, they'll have so much to give and get back.

Like, right from the start.

[dim topaz]

i would still give

if you can't you can't

[warm oak]

which concept is that?

[dim topaz]

which is ok

[simple bough]

but if "you get what you give", and you're currently struggling, how are you supposed to stop struggling?

[viral glen]

say
one guy is rich, a billionaire, donating 1 million dollars
vs a guy who's not very rich, donating 1000$
the 1000$ of the not very rich guy, would be as effective as the 1 million dollars of the very rich guy

[simple bough]

ultimate cope
sadly reality doesnt work that way

[warm oak]

as effective? In what way?

[dim topaz]

ask for help you don't need to give back as long as you can tell the person that

[simple bough]

what is more realistic is that there are 1000x more not-very-rich guys

[dim topaz]

this is nice

it shows that both are giving

everyone is worth the same

it doesn't matter how rich you are

[viral glen]

say, every 1$ of the 1000$ would be the exact amount of money someone needs for a flight to somewhere, or the dollar he needs for his bus, a food for a homeless who haven't ate for a week, you can use your imagination

[dim topaz]

you can still give

[simple bough]

no? million != thousand

[viral glen]

the 1 million dollars would do a lot more, of course, but fills less need

that way it's your intent that matters more, that you put into the donation you give

[simple bough]

how does 1 million fill less need than 1 thousand?

[viral glen]

less than the flat amount of money

[dim topaz]

the point is both give

btw i gotta go to bed

its late

[simple bough]

yes, but the 1 million is obviously more helpful. you could help like, 1000x more people.

[dim topaz]

for me

[viral glen]

its how the money rolls

it'll roll less effectively

[simple bough]

that says more about distribution, not the worth of money as a resource

[viral glen]

yes

of course you can't say if the concept is right or wrong

but its a concept i like i guess

makes you feel your donation is important, even if its not 1 million dollars

[urban glen]

yk, Peter Singer had this controversial philosophy paper about essentially altruism, in which he argued along the lines of it being immoral to not help as much as you can, or something along those lines, I'm sure this is poor paraphrasing, but still

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA

[simple bough]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality

Here is the thrust of Singer's argument:

"Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad".[3]
"If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it".[3]
"It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away".[3]
"The principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position".[4]

[viral glen]

the idea is because, to the rich guy, the 1 million dollars is less important, of course, 1 million dollars is just an example

the idea is that the intention plays a part as well

[simple bough]

im not sure who finds any of this controversial

[dense oxide]

I think of myself as an "Altruistic Defector" in the game theory sense. It is "the meta" to do altruistic things, I don't believe altruism in the sense of "not getting anything back" exists, see e.g. The Moral Animal, interesting book. Instead, I say it outright: I will be the nice guy 100% of the time, you can trust me, until the "last turn", and then I will betray you, that's just how game theory works. If "tit for tat" is no longer possible, winner takes all.

I always get benefits from "doing things for no benefit" for people.

[opaque finch]

Peter Singer is kind of an extremist in altruism circles.

[dense oxide]

A new friend of mine got so tired of me helping him out that he demanded I accept a percentage of his company for free. Silent partner, no obligations, etc.

[urban glen]

that it calls most people evil and immoral

[opaque finch]

I think it's a bit foolish in an objective sense.

[urban glen]

you mean pragmatically?

[opaque finch]

Yeah

[simple bough]

i mean, in a certain sense yes. in the sense he describes it

[opaque finch]

Self-defeating

[simple bough]

i can confidently say that i haven't helped a single "person in need"
so i have morals, but i dont act on them. so they dont exist in "the real world", only in my head. for the outside, i am evil and immoral

[urban glen]

mmm, cognitive dissonance be like (sort of)

[dense oxide]

That's interesting. I don't have many things that I think about twice that I don't act on.

[viral glen]

i think you'll eventually act on them

although, i'm sure u helped some friends in need, or helped in some situations

even if its helping your friend at school

with some subject or whatever

[opaque finch]

The argument is too reductive. It doesn't take into account psychological factors or like, human limits. It's virtually impossible to live up to those standards, and it's psychologically defeating to convince people that they are evil for not living up to them.

Defining evil like that will tend to create more evil.

[viral glen]

eventually all those small deeds roll as well

[simple bough]

you could say the "within our power" is doing a lot of work here, and its interpretation decides how "useful" this idea is

[viral glen]

btw, about the concept i talked about before, there's a cool ted video that also reminds me of it

[opaque finch]

I mean, I guess you could make it practically workable if you were extremely charitable when defining what constitutes "your power".

[dense oxide]

I don't personally believe "evil" to be a useful idea; it's always defined in a small cultural and historical context.

If I can't write a unit test about it, etc

"Stuff Defiler will attack you for doing" is the part I care about 🙂

[viral glen]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwAYpLVyeFU

[simple bough]

"If I can't write a unit test about it, it doesnt exist" 🥀

[dense oxide]

It can exist, but only in a subjective sense. Subjective is fine, we like it in art, etc.

But evil is no better-defined than "artwork I like", IMO

[warm oak]

this is not true

[dense oxide]

Evil is when people don't give me control of all their resources.

[simple bough]

in what way?

[warm oak]

you help people here

[simple bough]

yeah, but they arent in need

[opaque finch]

You don't consider people who come here asking for help as "people in need"?

[simple bough]

nope, its just something they want

[warm oak]

yes they are. Not financial perhaps, but they are struggling with concepts.

[opaque finch]

How do you know that?

[warm oak]

they feel bad because they don't understand something. You explain it. They feel better. You've helped them. Don't discount it.

[simple bough]

i mean, i assume that not understanding something wont lead to a bad life. a bad day, maybe.

[warm oak]

why doesn't it count to help someone with a bad day?

[viral glen]

a bad day could lead someone to quit programming

[opaque finch]

It seems to me that a lot of people who come in here are desperately struggling to figure out a way to improve their life by trying to pursue a career in tech.

[viral glen]

depends how much he's into it i suppose

[opaque finch]

Whether or not they are likely to succeed, the pursuit itself is no casual matter, I think.

Not to them at the very least.

[viral glen]

or abandoning a project, a realistic scenario

[simple bough]

hmh. well, i guess my interpretation of "people in need" is much more narrow than yours

[warm oak]

if we take your interpretation, we might as well go all the way and say it doesn't help anyone to do anything for them because they will all eventually die.

[simple bough]

thats something i could say on a bad day tbh

[urban glen]

I mean, at that point you might as well say that killing them is doing them a favor

[warm oak]

and i understand why. but keep the other view in mind also: you help people, and that matters.

[viral glen]

we will all eventually die definitely

[warm oak]

i did a long pycon talk that touched on this

[viral glen]

but i do believe helping people to live nice is good

[warm oak]

of course

[keen gyro]

When 256gb vram gpu

[opaque finch]

It's also hard to predict what kind of long-term impact a small act of kindness could have. Even if the person in question seemingly isn't struggling too much, they might go on to do something significant down the line. Or maybe your kindness will inspire them to pass that kindness along tenfold.

[urban glen]

well, it is technically unknowable

certainly from your own perspective

[viral glen]

logically

[dense oxide]

Not super hard at the moment, just expensive, but if you want it to have a DisplayPort or HDMI connection, approximately never, it seems.

[topaz bear]

me randomly helping people led to two couples forming and one wedding lol

[urban glen]

did the two couples marry?

[dense oxide]

They formed Voltron.

[topaz bear]

one is too young to do it

first one did

haha

[dense oxide]

"And I'll form.. the head!"

[simple bough]

the.. HEAD

[dense oxide]

Damn embed system is unknowable.. sec

[keen gyro]

Probably. Selling such strong gpus to consumers would probably pop the AI bubble on the spot, thus nvidia and all other corps investing in AI losing tons

[urban glen]

are the two dots intentional as well?

[keen gyro]

Just let me local host frontier level models, pls nvidia

[simple bough]

no. what would they mean in the context of git?

[opaque finch]

Not too shabby

[topaz bear]

ikr ? it's funny that it happened twice

[simple bough]

are you a singer

[dense oxide]

Obviously this is how I start my car.

[urban glen]

my dream car is of the NVL72 series

[urban glen]

commit range

[simple bough]

"car"?

[dense oxide]

You can actually just do that with some DGX Spark / Dell Pro Max GB10 boxes

[urban glen]

idk, it's funnier that way methinks

[dense oxide]

I've got 256GB of UMA in a pair of those that are connected with 200Gbps DAC

[topaz bear]

But I can't sing 😔

[dense oxide]

I don't actually use models that large though so I stopped "clustering" them for now.

[simple bough]

sing! dap, da-da-da-dam, di-dap-da
lemon tree..

[twilit patrol]

is it normal that the first thing i think of when i saw this was git

[simple bough]

this was the intention

[twilit patrol]

cool

[simple bough]

the question is whether am i normal for making a joke about git HEAD after seeing head in its normal context of a body part

[twilit patrol]

probably

[simple bough]

i use my voice so little that i actually have no clue how to sing
though i can replay sounds in general pretty good in my head

[twilit patrol]

sometimes i forget the actual meaning of master and slave

[urban glen]

what is the actual meaning? 👀

[twilit patrol]

:p

[simple bough]

like i can basically listen to music in my head sometimes
some breakcore

[twilit patrol]

i cant do that

[simple bough]

you know how fallout has you like balance positive and negative perks

aphantasia took away my visual fantasy but i got audio fantasy instead
well
not fantasy
just replaying
i cant imagine something new

[dense oxide]

Interesting, I've not met anyone who had aphantasia but had "mind's ears"

Aah, I see

That makes more sense

I'm at 6% on the scale, 5% is aphantasia, so I'm maximally "hypophantasiac"

[modest slate]

I can't really picture things
Reading is easier
Don't know if thats just me

[dense oxide]

Also a very quiescent "Default Mode Network", I never get "words" or "intrusive thoughts"

I only compose English in my head when talking or writing

[modest slate]

.wa s define quiescent

[median swallow]

Wolfram Alpha

not active or activated

[simple bough]

i tried to read the 86 light novel and died from boredom in 2 minutes (i am dead)

[twilit patrol]

this did not help me understand what defiler said

[modest slate]

me neither tbh

[dense oxide]

My "I get words" layer is shut down, was never on

Some people apparently have "sentences" appear in their heads

That has never happened to me, took me a long time to learn that it did to other people

[twilit patrol]

i've had people try to explain aphantasia to me but i dont get it because i dont understand what "seeing in your head" means

that... might be a sign i have aphantasia

[simple bough]

maybe you have it lol

[dense oxide]

OK, what happens when I say: "Don't think of a pink elephant?"

Do you "see" an elephant, or any colors, etc?

[keen gyro]

Speaking of which,

Wouldn't a 258gb vram TPU break havoc inside the AI bubble? Or a simple GPU

[dense oxide]

I do not, even when I wrote that

[twilit patrol]

i don't know i mean

i guess i can imagine the concept of an image of a pink elephant

[dense oxide]

Yeah, but it would basically need to be SRAM I think not LPDDR5x, so it would be EXPENSIVE, but IBM could probably build it

[dense oxide]

Sounds like you are also aphantasiac; not a bad thing.. Disney's most famous modern animator has no "mind's eye" at all, he says he drew The Little Mermaid and Beauty & The Beast to "meet them."

[twilit patrol]

how much of that is "seeing" a (pink) elephant i dont know

[dense oxide]

Literally most people can close their eyes and "examine" a pink elephant, it seems

[simple bough]

i actually have no clue whether words appear in my mind themselves or actively by me thinking

[dense oxide]

That would be giant push-ups for me. I BARELY can if I grind it out, but I have to do shit like pick the type of lighting, the room it is in, etc

[twilit patrol]

like, similarly to physically seeing?

[dense oxide]

I have a friend who says that when you say "cereal isle in grocery store" to her, she pictures an aisle of photo-realistic well-lit made-up brands she can read you the label of

Yes

[simple bough]

well, nothing appears on your eye, thats impossible, but its more like an internal dialogue but visually

[twilit patrol]

huh

[dense oxide]

As in the same parts of your brain activate basically as if you were looking at them in an MRI

[twilit patrol]

oh also internal dialogue

i dont get that either

like i think of word

s

[dense oxide]

For me I am in a "quiet theater with no lights and a black velvet curtain" by comparison

[simple bough]

like, when you talk with your internal dialogue, there are no sound waves, the brain part responsible for it just directly works

[twilit patrol]

does that count?

like i know the words im thinking

[dense oxide]

Do you think of words when you aren't typing in Discord or speaking aloud?

[twilit patrol]

not really

well

sometimes when im really thinking about stuff

okay thats a probably not then

[dense oxide]

It's all a continuum/spectrum, there's no right or wrong etc

[simple bough]

apparently its really hard to know what your mind is doing

[livid halo]

a

[dense oxide]

but for me, I would never have "words" occur to me that way lying in bed pondering something, as far as I can tell

[twilit patrol]

it really is

[simple bough]

i think mostly because you're so used to it and cant imagine it any other way around

[dense oxide]

Yeah, practicing some meditation like vipassana can help

[twilit patrol]

en passant?

[simple bough]

croissant

i should probally try meditation at some point given how stressed i am and the noise in my head
im kinda just rolling with it

[dense oxide]

Don't give up for at least 48 hours, it takes at least that long being "non-verbal" for all but massive experts at it to transition to the other brain mode

[opaque finch]

Can you think in words to yourself? Like, can you articulate your thoughts in words? Like have the exact sentences "Hm, maybe I should go to the store to buy some milk? Do I have milk in the fridge. I better go check." play in your head as you consider whether to buy milk

I don't normally do that, but I can do it if I want to

[dense oxide]

..but yes, if this is your experience, an investment in meditation will help a lot. Miyamoto Musashi had those issues as a youth, busted his ass with meditation, died undefeated in battle.

It's work though

[twilit patrol]

... occasionally?

that seems like a copout

but

sometimes

[opaque finch]

I mean, that's what an internal monologue would be

[simple bough]

bro's brain dynamically switches capabilities

[dense oxide]

Yeah, you can have "some", it's actually the same layer that LSD and weed are playing with to do what they do.

(the Default Mode Network)

[simple bough]

"depends on the weather. and whether its a tuesday"

[opaque finch]

Not sure if surviving 60 duels to the death is what you should typically be working towards when trying to improve your mental health...

[dense oxide]

Would you like to be unhealthy mentally and be in a duel?

[twilit patrol]

like when i really think about things sometimes then sometimes the thoughts are kind of in words

[simple bough]

i would like to not be in a duel

[opaque finch]

I'd like to not be in any duels

[dense oxide]

Well, in that era, that wasn't one of the choices on offer

Would you like to not pay taxes?

That's about the equivalent today

[twilit patrol]

why are we talking about 60 duels

[simple bough]

well actually a virtual duel would be cool but i dont want to actually kill anyone

[opaque finch]

I'm not too convinced of that

[twilit patrol]

oh

[opaque finch]

I bet Musashi mainly did it cause he wanted to

[dense oxide]

OK, pick a different master of the quiet mind

My thesis stands

[twilit patrol]

doesnt mark zuckerberg meditate /j

[dense oxide]

Not rigorously

[opaque finch]

I'd like us all to pay more taxes, tbh

[dense oxide]

He does some meme yoga thing

[twilit patrol]

he actually does?

[dense oxide]

Yeah I've seen it mentioned

Dunno if he still does

[left walrus]

yes, but only because has to pass time while he's lying in the sun to charge up

[dense oxide]

A lot of the techbros do it but use it like "nap time", not as an exploration of their mind

[twilit patrol]

i knew he did boxing or smth [citation needed]

[simple bough]

i want my brain to go take a nap

[dense oxide]

For real, vipassana is one of the more-potent ways to try that out.

[twilit patrol]

take a nap

[dense oxide]

There are other traditions that work fine too. That's just one that's easy to find "retreats" for.

[simple bough]

but then i cant experience life with a nappy brain
i just skip time

[twilit patrol]

fair

[simple bough]

i guess i havent been thinking of much when i was cleaning today
so my brain can be "off" atleast sometimes

[dense oxide]

Washing your hands / showers are also a massive proprioception signal, it's why people so often report having their "best ideas" in the shower.

[twilit patrol]

my brain is off most of the time so that's better than me

[twilit patrol]

i love showers mainly just because i can just melt away in hotw ater

[dense oxide]

Yeah, the "sense of where your body is" is called proprioception when it's involving external signals, introception when you're "feeling if you are hungry", etc

and you can train both

the ancient Stoics had a nice word for the "mindset" equivalent, prohairesis

[twilit patrol]

hm

[dense oxide]

The skill of learning to judge what matters to you and what doesn't.

They saw it as the only actual job you had; doing push-ups to improve that, figuratively speaking.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.
Tsunetomo Yamamoto again, though quoting someone this time, Hagakure.

That's prohairesis in a nutshell right there. It's too much work to use a nuclear missile to change the weather and make it not rain, just move on and towel off later

[simple bough]

hmh actually
i think it might not be coming from purely my imagination
atleast breathing is definitely in play
pretty weird
and the sounds i can play back are limited

[dense oxide]

A wild number of the "beats" in our lives turn out to have a biological basis, all languages for example have a shared cadence, we learned a few years ago

[simple bough]

maybe really its just internal thinking with a slight voice change and beatbox lol
and i have been doing it subconsciously forever

[dense oxide]

https://neurosciencenews.com/speech-rhythm-neuroscience-29606/

We have 7 different non-correlated biological "loops" at different "clock speeds" that we know of so far

[simple bough]

pretty crazy to think that at some point humanity will have knowledge exactly of how a human works
like a machine

[dense oxide]

Here's a fun one; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5504225/

On the Origin of the 1,000 Hz Peak in the Spectrum of the Human Tympanic Electrical Noise

This arises directly from the "clock speed" of one of our loops

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3785784/

Functional and structural architecture of the human dorsal frontoparietal attention network

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00254/full

The deep learning model I'm working on building has all seven

Action, Geometry, Focus, Interrupts, Valence, Control, Simulation

LLMs only have one

(Control)

The praying mantis is the only invertebrate with true 3D vision, and you can tell; they are scary good

So I'm building a "praying mantis model" first, not anything that can generate language.

You don't implement Loki without a test suite that can tell if he's lying.

By "Valence" I mean "estimate how energy intensive that thing is"

Another way to list them would be: Somatomotor, Visual/Spatial, Dorsal Attention, Ventral Attention, Limbic System, Frontoparietal, Default Mode Network

That's what we call them in ourselves.

Dorsal is "Focus", "what should I do next", Ventral is "Interrupt", "hmm, this isn't working, let's try something else"

Those turn out to be two different systems in our brains.

the Limbic System is how we measure if we're getting tired enough of this to stop etc, it's what the Ventral layer is "getting from the sensors"

The frontoparietal layer is approximately like the "Tree of Thoughts" junk the LLMs pretend to do

But they can't really "do" it without a "world model" so it's fake as hell etc

[simple bough]

how do you get so much info on all this cool new stuff

[dense oxide]

I have a ton of Google Scholar / arXiv alerts set up

and I am a member of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, Nature+, ACS, and APS

(Computing Machinery, Electrical Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nature's crap, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society)

[left walrus]

hopefully I will be dead by then

[simple bough]

i only know of like, programming language papers that people post in r/ProgrammingLanguages, lol

[dense oxide]

also my LinkedIn feed is nuts now

Constantly frontier crap

[left walrus]

yo another r/proglangs lurker

[simple bough]

i think i figured it out
i can replicate some voice that i am used to pretty well in my internal thoughts
and some really simple sounds
and then like basically coughing for some other sounds

[dense oxide]

That kind of junk is how I found out about the BrainChip hardware I use now

Look at how power-efficient these accelerators are

300 milliwatts to do like 60 watts of nVidia GPU work

Not even a heatsink; I have three now

(The AKD1000 is easy to get from their webshop, the 1500 is cooler, I had to work at getting them a bit, but found a nice contact who hooked me up.)

1500 should be on their webstore later in the year

Also, uhh, these guys have a working all-photonic general-purpose computer https://www.akhetonics.com/

gg needing a power plant for your datacenter

I'm going to hang out with someone who's flying there to be their intern later this week, before he flies out on Sunday

He's going to show them the README for the compiler I'm writing for this kind of thing

[simple bough]

this is crazy lol why is this not talked about more

[dense oxide]

Because there's too much money in doing it the old way

Once you see behind some of the tech industry curtains it starts to make sense.

Working in FinTech taught me a lot about the real world.

This is why I don't have "customers" or "VC" anymore in my life.

Nobody wants the real next thing until you wave it in their face.

Here's what I am building. Yes, it is crazy-ambitious: https://github.com/wilson/xotiq