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dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut'n'paste it into its own post, there’s no quota here and the bar really isn't that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 10 months ago (9 children)

fucking christ. it takes a lot to fuck up my day, but a quick scroll through that thread seeing how quick these vultures (including one notable person who’s the reason why I’m ashamed to talk about my lambda calculus projects) are trying to capitalize on Vernor’s legacy is absolutely doing it

HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied.

why in the fuck? is the famous sci-fi author with a heavy CS background not notable enough for the standards of the site whose creator is a much less notable self-help author whose CS background is failing to make a working Lisp 3 times and writing programming textbooks nobody reads?

[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago (6 children)

can you please talk more about your lambda calculus projects?

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago (5 children)

sure! there was a little bit about it in the first stubsack and I posted a bit more about it in this thread on masto (with some links to papers I’ve been reading too, if you’d like to dig into the details on anything)

overall what I’m working on is a hardware implementation of a Krivine machine, which uses Tromp’s prefix code bitstream representation of binary lambda calculus as its machine language and his monadic IO model to establish a runtime environment. it isn’t likely to be a very efficient machine by anyone’s standard, but I really like working with BLC as a pure (and powerful) form of computational math, and there’s something pleasant about the way it reduces down to a HDL representation (via the Amaranth HDL in this case). there’s a few subprojects I’ve been working on as part of this:

the basic HDL implementation targeting open source FPGA synthesis and simulation
a hardware closure allocator and garbage collector
an assembler to convert lambda calculus expressions into their binary form (which starts to resemble ML with a bunch of high level capabilities, with very little code either in the assembler or in ROM on the device — that’s one part of what makes the work interesting)
a lazy version (Krivine machines are call-by-name, which is almost there, and the missing pieces needed for lazy evaluation look a lot like a processor cache but with more structure)
I have the intuition that the complete Krivine machine will be fairly light on FPGA resources, so I’d like to see how many I can synthesize onto one core with parallelism primitives, FIFOs, and routing included
lambda calculus machines can do arithmetic and high-level logic without an ALU, which is neat but extremely inefficient. I have some basic plans sketched up for an arithmetic unit that’d allow for a much more cycle and memory efficient representation of integers and strings, and a way to derive closures from them

I’ve been working on some of this on paper as a sleep aid for a while, but I’m finally starting on what’s feeling like a solid HDL implementation. let me know if you want more details on any of it! some of the more far off stuff is really just a mental sketch, but writing it out will at least help me figure out what ideas still make sense when they’re explained to someone else

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

for anyone who’s fucking lost reading the above (I can’t blame ya), lambda calculus is the mathematical basis behind functional programming. this is a fun introduction. the only things you can do in lambda calculus are define functions, name variables, and apply functions to other functions or variables (which substitutes the variables for whatever they’re being applied to and eliminates the function). that’s all you need to represent every possible computer program, which is amazing

a Krivine machine is a machine for doing what the alligators in that intro are doing, automatically — that is, reducing down lambda functions until they can’t be reduced anymore and produce a final value. that process is computation, so a Krivine machine is a (rather strange) computer

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