glaebhoerl @glaebhoerl@schelling.pt

Nervous System is a strange business. We are a computational design and digital fabrication studio known for things like a no-assembly 3D printed dress or designing 3D printed organs.

However neither of those things actually make any money. Monetarily we are primarily a jigsaw puzzle company. How did that happen?

So here’s a thread about jigsaw puzzles.

Reminds me of this story where automotive engineers had to fight designers to get headlights that illuminated the road. They were actually losing the fight until Consumer Reports started testing headlights for function, which created enough of a stink that engineers were able to push for headlights that actually work over headlights that follow modern design principles: https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/

And sure, #notalldesigners, but this is a problem that goes back decades across multiple industries.

For although light oftenest behaves as a wave, it can be looked on as a mote, the "lightbit". A mote of stuff can behave not only as a chunk, but as a wave. Down among the unclefts, things do not happen in steady flowings, but in leaps between bestandings that are forbidden. The knowledge-hunt of this is called "lump beholding".

Nor are stuff and work unakin! Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light.

......

Imagine particle physics explained by modern-day Vikings! This is from an essay written by Poul Anderson. It's in Anglish, a variant of English with the Greek and Romance language influences removed.

Thanks to @dznz for pointing this out.

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html

I've written a blog post at https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/formalizing-the-proof-of-pfr-in-lean4-using-blueprint-a-short-tour/ giving a "quick tour" of the #Lean4 + Blueprint combination used to formalize the proof of the PFR conjecture that I recently completed with Tim Gowers, Ben Green, and Freddie Manners.

parametric polytheism is when you worship a generic higher power; you can substitute gods from arbitrary religious canons (also known as unitarian universal quantification). ad hoc polytheism is when you call upon specific gods for specific occasions

I wrote all of this for a reporter. I want to share it here. I don't have the energy for alt text, sorry, and the copy-paste mechanism on Twitter DMs on my phone is broken. Maybe I'll manage on my computer later. This is part one of two, really spilling my soul in ink on my feelings about this past month and a half. I don't know how much will make it into the article; probably not much.

I wrote a little thing about destination-driven code generation because I'm nervous to try and write a full register allocator from scratch

https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/ddcg/

a few weeks ago an image of the "horse button" on a cockpit control panel was circulating here. well now you know what happens when they forget to press it.

the way I feel about nix after using it for 10 months (mostly baffled, 80% of my experience feels like random things happening that I have 0 insight into) is giving me some empathy for how people must feel about git

My very brief summary of Apple's new "dynamic caching" as described in this video: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375

There's a shared pool of on-chip memory on the shader core that can be dynamically split up to serve as register file, tile cache, shared memory, general buffer L1, or stack. Since it's dynamic even within the lifetime of a thread/wave, the registers can be allocated dynamically as the program needs them rather than needing registers to be statically-allocated up-front.

This is a nice overview of Maranget's algorithm for compiling pattern matching: https://compiler.club/compiling-pattern-matching/

It just dawned on me that the fanciful nonsense I wrote here ages ago

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/09/infinitesimal-types.html

makes some kind of sense now that Haskell has linear types

Background: this is motivated by compile-time 32-bit type ID extraction for template types. Here's the best I have so far (relies on GCC __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ macro also supported in clang):

template<typename T>
consteval uint32_t get_type_id()
{
const char* type_name = __PRETTY_FUNCTION__;
return murmur3_32(type_name);
}

Then I use this function to initialize a constinit static member for the template type ID.

who called it "legend of zelda speedrunning" and not "link-time optimization"

this is a fine article but also what a lovely web page. a pleasure to behold https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2023/10/why-your-web-design-sucks/

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." — James Baldwin