Just finished writing a blog post about how I found a bug in TAOCP and Knuth named the theorem after me after fixing it. Spent the day counting page views, so I’m going to disconnect this weekend, go to the mountains and visit a festival.
Sitting in a weird transitional space in life. Relationship is over, but neither of us has acknowledged as much as yet. Nobody did anything wrong, it's just kinda fallen apart. I'm not angry, would be so much easier if I was, just fed up and exhausted with the situation. Gonna be a mess, sorting out living arrangements and finances. So I'm just sitting with it for a bit.
Idk, there's that, and also watching pretentious video essays on youtube I guess.
Going to Latvia and Lithuania on vacation, and meditating a lot on what it actually means to be sentient. Sentience is becoming a very interesting question to me as it seems like a continuous experience hsppening over time. Can an LLM which has discrete steps be sentient?
I've never thought of sentience as it would relate to continuous vs. discrete experiences. That's very interesting.
My (very Hofstadter-ey) take has always been that sentience requires some form of self reference or modification. I believe an LLM cannot be sentient because our current architectures are all feed-forward.
That said I think an LLM can appear sentient, because as we scale the number of parameters its lower level of thought can approximate a higher level of thought. To me this feels like regular grammars vs. context free grammars. No DFA can match an infinite number of nested parentheses. But you could construct a sufficiently large DFA that it could match every string of nested parentheses a human could possibly type. That doesn't mean it's context free! Just a DFA that appears to be context free.
I'm not really sure what constitutes sentience. Surely you are correct that self modification is part of it,but the fact that I experience the world in the present tense and not as a slide show feels like continuousness.
Currently on the ferry to Isle of Man for a long weekend with a friend in the Z4. Was supposed to be taking part in a road rally event, but that was cancelled. Already had ferry/hotels booked so we're going to explore anyway, just at a more relaxed pace. Second time I've been there, looking forward to visiting again.
Last weekend, after months of slowly grinding, I got YEdit to run as a 16 bit program under OS/2 and render a file...only to crash as soon as a key is pressed.
This weekend will be the most exciting part of making it truly work.
It's currently 150Kb so has to be mindful of the 16 bit segmented memory model for both code and data, which has been an interesting exploration. And factoring code so that each part can be built in 640Kb with a 127 character command line has been an interesting challenge too.
Ultimately I'll get this to run on DOS 4, which is now MIT licensed with a bundled compiler/linker, and desperately needs a bundled text editor.
I'm going through the corrections my student made to his PhD thesis after the examiners' feedback. It's the culmination of four years of hard work on his part.
I don't know. I've had a stressful few days at work while the boss was away and tomorrow's a national holiday so everything's gonna be closed. My partner's on vacation. I might just sit at home and watch a horror movie or two, build an orc army in Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, and work on whichever of my project catches my eye after I've recovered from the work-related stress.
I'm going to make some homemade dairy-free yogurt. Basically I make homemade soy milk. Add 1 cup of cashews blend in my blender for about a minute or two. Add some agar agar which I've bloomed in water. Pour it into jars. Let it cool to 110 Fahrenheit. Then I run it 110 in my sous vide water bath for 12 hours. But before that I put in my Thermopolis bacteria. So is it like Greek yogurt more or less.
Junction Jam! it's a game jam in the MidWest USA where participants build a game while on a train to and from the hub in Chicago! I haven't taken many trains so I'm looking forward to it. This will be my 3rd game jam.
I'm a hobbyist gamedev and I make games for old 8-bit microcomputers. I'm very close to finish the level design of my next ZX Spectrum 48K game, so I'm hoping to put in a couple of hours this weekend.
There's still a lot of work to do, say 4 to 6 weeks if I don't get distracted, but I'm very excited because I've been feeling a bit low for the last couple of years (I didn't release anything in 2025 breaking a 10 years strike), and this looks like it this could be a nice release.
I'm hacking on my "better Markdown" Zd. I think after another round of simplifying the syntax, it's time to rebuild the incremental parser. Getting closer!
Looks like I'm going to be changing teams at $WORK on Monday - in that, a Director is putting together a team whose stated remit is a very close superset of the work I've been doing for the last few months, and has been asking my manager about my availability to move. (Un?)fortunately, several other folks at the company have also been doing similar work too; which means that the first problem that this team will have to solve will be "whose idea wins? Who gets to be Tech Lead?".
All of which is to say, this weekend I'll be - trying to decide whether I want to struggle and politic my way to a leadership position in that particular group, or to take a backseat contributor role.
I have been getting into learning binary exploitation lately, and since everyone is saying the 90s and 00s were the golden age of that, I have spun up a VM with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to try to recreate some old vulnerabilities.
nk_kolja | 7 hours ago
Just finished writing a blog post about how I found a bug in TAOCP and Knuth named the theorem after me after fixing it. Spent the day counting page views, so I’m going to disconnect this weekend, go to the mountains and visit a festival.
adampetrovic | 6 hours ago
did you get a reward check as well? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
nk_kolja | 6 hours ago
Yup, for
0x$1.00! An annotated letter too https://lobste.rs/s/d857ms/long_division_storymarginalia | 2 hours ago
Sitting in a weird transitional space in life. Relationship is over, but neither of us has acknowledged as much as yet. Nobody did anything wrong, it's just kinda fallen apart. I'm not angry, would be so much easier if I was, just fed up and exhausted with the situation. Gonna be a mess, sorting out living arrangements and finances. So I'm just sitting with it for a bit.
Idk, there's that, and also watching pretentious video essays on youtube I guess.
scubbo | 21 minutes ago
I'm sorry to hear that, fellow human. I don't know you, but I care for you. I hope you find ways to care for yourself, too.
timthelion | 6 hours ago
Going to Latvia and Lithuania on vacation, and meditating a lot on what it actually means to be sentient. Sentience is becoming a very interesting question to me as it seems like a continuous experience hsppening over time. Can an LLM which has discrete steps be sentient?
crockeo | 2 hours ago
I've never thought of sentience as it would relate to continuous vs. discrete experiences. That's very interesting.
My (very Hofstadter-ey) take has always been that sentience requires some form of self reference or modification. I believe an LLM cannot be sentient because our current architectures are all feed-forward.
That said I think an LLM can appear sentient, because as we scale the number of parameters its lower level of thought can approximate a higher level of thought. To me this feels like regular grammars vs. context free grammars. No DFA can match an infinite number of nested parentheses. But you could construct a sufficiently large DFA that it could match every string of nested parentheses a human could possibly type. That doesn't mean it's context free! Just a DFA that appears to be context free.
timthelion | 28 minutes ago
I'm not really sure what constitutes sentience. Surely you are correct that self modification is part of it,but the fact that I experience the world in the present tense and not as a slide show feels like continuousness.
[OP] caius | 6 hours ago
Currently on the ferry to Isle of Man for a long weekend with a friend in the Z4. Was supposed to be taking part in a road rally event, but that was cancelled. Already had ferry/hotels booked so we're going to explore anyway, just at a more relaxed pace. Second time I've been there, looking forward to visiting again.
malxau | an hour ago
Last weekend, after months of slowly grinding, I got YEdit to run as a 16 bit program under OS/2 and render a file...only to crash as soon as a key is pressed.
This weekend will be the most exciting part of making it truly work.
It's currently 150Kb so has to be mindful of the 16 bit segmented memory model for both code and data, which has been an interesting exploration. And factoring code so that each part can be built in 640Kb with a 127 character command line has been an interesting challenge too.
Ultimately I'll get this to run on DOS 4, which is now MIT licensed with a bundled compiler/linker, and desperately needs a bundled text editor.
jak2k | 5 hours ago
I'll be at FrOSCon.
harrigan | 4 hours ago
I'm going through the corrections my student made to his PhD thesis after the examiners' feedback. It's the culmination of four years of hard work on his part.
steinuil | an hour ago
I don't know. I've had a stressful few days at work while the boss was away and tomorrow's a national holiday so everything's gonna be closed. My partner's on vacation. I might just sit at home and watch a horror movie or two, build an orc army in Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, and work on whichever of my project catches my eye after I've recovered from the work-related stress.
symgryph | 4 hours ago
I'm going to make some homemade dairy-free yogurt. Basically I make homemade soy milk. Add 1 cup of cashews blend in my blender for about a minute or two. Add some agar agar which I've bloomed in water. Pour it into jars. Let it cool to 110 Fahrenheit. Then I run it 110 in my sous vide water bath for 12 hours. But before that I put in my Thermopolis bacteria. So is it like Greek yogurt more or less.
CobyPear | 4 hours ago
Junction Jam! it's a game jam in the MidWest USA where participants build a game while on a train to and from the hub in Chicago! I haven't taken many trains so I'm looking forward to it. This will be my 3rd game jam.
reidrac | 47 minutes ago
I'm a hobbyist gamedev and I make games for old 8-bit microcomputers. I'm very close to finish the level design of my next ZX Spectrum 48K game, so I'm hoping to put in a couple of hours this weekend.
There's still a lot of work to do, say 4 to 6 weeks if I don't get distracted, but I'm very excited because I've been feeling a bit low for the last couple of years (I didn't release anything in 2025 breaking a 10 years strike), and this looks like it this could be a nice release.
tel | 32 minutes ago
I'm hacking on my "better Markdown" Zd. I think after another round of simplifying the syntax, it's time to rebuild the incremental parser. Getting closer!
scubbo | 15 minutes ago
Looks like I'm going to be changing teams at
$WORKon Monday - in that, a Director is putting together a team whose stated remit is a very close superset of the work I've been doing for the last few months, and has been asking my manager about my availability to move. (Un?)fortunately, several other folks at the company have also been doing similar work too; which means that the first problem that this team will have to solve will be "whose idea wins? Who gets to be Tech Lead?".All of which is to say, this weekend I'll be - trying to decide whether I want to struggle and politic my way to a leadership position in that particular group, or to take a backseat contributor role.
Outside of work - nothing in particular planned!
loldot | 5 hours ago
I have been getting into learning binary exploitation lately, and since everyone is saying the 90s and 00s were the golden age of that, I have spun up a VM with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to try to recreate some old vulnerabilities.