869 private links
A great introduction article on homotopy type theory! I've been learning HoTT recently, and this article explained it really well.
Also read: https://www.science4all.org/article/homotopy-type-theory/
There are stars all over the place!
A collection of miniature programming languages which demonstrates various concepts and techniques used in programming language design and implementation.
TL;DR: they are converging to sans-serif font mostly for simplification and readability purpose.
An interactive demo on how ants follow simple rules to find near-optimal solutions to feeding and fighting problems.
The author claims the pretention to acquiration twitter is just Elon's joke. Elon's unusal habit is to pretend to acquire something and he has several antecedence before. It's an expensive joke to make but he can afford it as the world's richest person.
Un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/5nLiC#selection-3951.7-3955.102
the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology.1 It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation.
A comment on hackernews summarized it well:
If you want to do great work, you need freedom first.
Play with quantum experiments.
There's fundamentally 3 architypes of programmers, divided by which ideals we hold in highest esteem:
- You are a poet and a mathematician. Programming is your poetry
- You are a hacker. You make hardware dance to your tune
- You are a maker. You build things for people to use
And you don't have to pick one - I realize myself jumping between the three when coding. I often aim for the most beautiful code possible but can easily relegate to the rest when facing real-life challenges.
Kernel schedules to pid 0 on idle, which issues the "halt" instruction (x86) to cause the cpu to stop working. There is a "dynamic tick" technique that don't wake up cpu on a fixed period but rather can be programmed to wake up at some time. The technique is used on mobile processors.
This article is the probably the best one I read on explaining text to image generator (DALL-E/Imagen).
A neat trick. TIL sqlite3 :memory:
. It starts a sqlite3 cli immediately without needing a file.
Townscaper is probably the most interesting procedure generation "game" I played. The buliding are generated for an irregular grid, and yet everything fit together organically. It was always a mystery to me how it actually works. This article explained some of the mechanisms.
A game where you place planets in a system. The goal is to place as many planets as possible while avoiding collision or flinging them out.
It's an interesting playground for learning concepts like why small planets are likely located in near star orbit, three-body problem, etc.
Another fasterthanlime's article on troubleshooting Rust memory leaks. It's good to learn about the memory profiler bytehound (https://github.com/koute/bytehound). I also learned about this Rust-native embedded language called Rhai.
Intelligence: what is it? Is it fair to consider human the only intelligent animal? This article talks about various traits animals exhibit that we typically associate with having a intelligence.
To be honest, this AI is the closest thing to a sentient being I ever read about. I don't think it is sentient per se according to my own interpretation of being "sentient", for that it is not still capable of thinking out of the box, i.e. the context, personality, which are still set up or hinted by human.
However, I also believe that given enough effort, it's quite likely to see a "real" sentient AI being in forthcoming years.
I had the same issue with my previous work laptop earlier. Turns out it was caused by the always scanning™ AirPlay. What a (not) surprise! Fortuitously I have switched to Linux few months ago.
A rather thought-provoking argument on how HTML should be written. In short, it should be written as like troff rather than like XML or JSON.
The idea is quite new to me. I thought that close tag should always be present, and the attributes should always be quoted, and browsers are only lenient for those "mistakes". Turns out the standard explicitly permits otherwise. And the reason for it is the topic of this article.
Writing HTML in this style has benefits - the document is much readable, as if it was written in Markdown or something alike but more powerful. It's obvious that this type of document is not good for complex layout or "web application" due to the overly implicit nested DOM structure. However, it at least look pleasant to me and at lot easier to edit in without using structure-aware editors. So I may switch to actually write in plain HTML in this style in blog posts or wherever "<div>" is not expected.
There is a lot of controversy around it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694849). It's not difficult to foresee that a lot of people will dislike it.