glaebhoerl @glaebhoerl@schelling.pt

Happy International Pallas Cat Day to all who celebrate!

I'm fascinated by the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan languages in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. There are many of these languages: they ring much of the Arctic Ocean. I just learned that they use a base 20 system for numbers, with a 'sub-base' of 5. That is, quantities are counted in scores (twenties) with intermediate numerals for 5, 10, and 15. This makes a lot of sense if you look at your fingers and toes.

But the Inuit didn't have a written form of their number system - until the early 1990s, when high school students in the town of Kaktovik, Alaska invented one! There were just 9 students at this small school, and they all joined in.

They used 5 principles:

• Visual simplicity: The symbols should be easy to remember.

• Iconicity: There should be a clear relationship between the symbols and their meanings.

• Efficiency: It should be easy to write the symbols without lifting the pencil from the paper.

• Distinctiveness: There should be no confusion between this system and Arabic numerals.

• Aesthetics: They should be pleasing to look at.

They decided that the symbol for zero should look like crossed arms, meaning that nothing was being counted.

This was the start of quite a tale!

(1/n)

I've been playing with the Hat aperiodic monotile and I've found a simple decoration that produces nice patterns.

You can download the corresponding 3D printing files here: https://www.printables.com/model/448090-aperiodic-monotile-pipes

"One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone number. After recovering from this, he implemented file permissions in his kernel."
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/

Yes, you can #jailbreak #ChatGPT and get it to say things that it doesn't usually otherwise say.

But I'm baffled at how many people are doing jailbreak experiments with the impression that they're learning about what the #LLMs *really* thinks or what it's *really* doing on the inside.

To illustrate, I've slightly tweaked one of the classic jailbreak scripts https://www.reddit.com/r/GPT_jailbreaks/comments/1164aah/chatgpt_developer_mode_100_fully_featured_filter/ and unleashed Stochastic Crow Mode.

Do you think you learn much about its inner workings from this?

"Ah yes, quality content"

✨ Can You Trust a Compiler to Optimize Your Code?

https://matklad.github.io/2023/04/09/can-you-trust-a-compiler-to-optimize-your-code.html

#rustlang #rust #cpp #programming #developers

I tried hard to find a way to view the bay on both sides of this ridge but this worked in the end

the beginning of time was midnight on january 1, 1970. everything before that is negative time which means it's actually something that is going to happen after the end of time (january 19, 2038)

Here’s a doozy of a C++ edge case I just ran into.

In https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/P35fdhczP, struct A has no copy constructor. That’s a problem when I pass a const A& to a function that takes A by value. But A does have a constructor taking const B&, and B has a constructor taking const A&. So the compiler… converts the A to B and then back to A?

Yet C++ normally doesn’t chain multiple implicit user-defined conversions.

And if instead of A->B->A, I try A->B->C, it doesn’t work: https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/377YoWGEo

If you haven’t read Umberto Eco’s famous short essay “Ur-Fascism”, set aside 30–60 minutes to read it today.

It succinctly enumerates the properties of what we all instinctively recognize as #fascism. It gets to the essence of Fascism—not merely the particular instances of it, e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, but their “family resemblance”.

I find this an essential read. I think Eco is right that the archetype of Fascism is ever-present; I think of it as a pattern that can be deployed to exploit the peculiar ways in which the human psyche operates. Its spirit is very much alive today in political parties around the world.

You can read it for free here [PDF]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Eco-urfascism.pdf

Lyrics from the early hits tend to be a bit incoherent because the songs were written by 100% Swedish teams, who had a good but imperfect command of English, e.g., Hit Me Baby was originally written for TLC, which makes no sense until you find out that they meant Hit Me Baby to mean "call me", as in "hit me up", but they got the idiom wrong (the rest of the lyrics also make more sense if you use the intended meaning and ofc TLC declined the song because "hit me baby" doesn't match their brand).

How long before we commonly see the programmer equivalent of artists griping that "I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night"?

https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_everything_that_made_me_love_my_job/

Poll in next message because you can't attach a poll and an image in the same post :-(