@nonnihil@hachyderm.io
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

nonnihil

@nonnihil@hachyderm.io

Roboticist, meticulous software dead-ender, Im in ur C++ objecting to ur barepointers.

Cambridge, MA; he/him; grumpy but anarchist-ish.

No time for:

  • LaTeX in code comments
  • Default-case Turing completeness
  • Hegel
  • Plantigrade bipedalism
  • XML for data-at-rest
  • Political legitimacy
  • Avocados
  • Software-in-the-loop eStops
  • ISObus
  • Implicit mutability
  • Reference semantics punning
  • Nations
  • Especially Hegel
  • cmake

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b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

let's imagine you're resolving this merge conflict (in screenshot).

You've forgotten which code comes from your current branch and which one comes from the "other" branch. How do you figure it out? Do you:

  1. remember what the "top" and "bottom" parts correspond to from past merge conflicts?
  2. remember what HEAD means?
  3. read the last line of the merge conflict?
  4. run something like git show main or git diff mybranch..main to see the diff?
  5. enable diff3
  6. something else?
nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@b0rk I generally use the arrows on the assumption that "it's just like CVS or SVN, right?" but then second guess myself because I can never remember which commands reverse "mine" and "theirs" (is it just rebase?) and fall back to inspecting the code and trying to figure out what I meant.

nonnihil, to random
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

My awesome coworkers posted about their work:
https://medium.com/toyotaresearch/meet-punyo-tris-soft-robot-for-whole-body-manipulation-research-949c934ac3d8
For everyone getting bored and annoyed with the LLM side of AI, remember that we're also using these same tools to design, build, and teach delightful robots that can safely hug you and carry your groceries.
(Also, come work for us! Maybe I'll get to interview you! https://www.tri.global/careers )

rechelon, to random
@rechelon@mastodon.social avatar

I'm trying to tighten up this segment of my book and I'm wondering if I'm missing any common categories of "reality is directly mentally fungible" woo.

(The sub-chapter goes further in breaking things down and covering some more complicated cases, but I'm concerned I'm forgetting a core type.)

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@rechelon Growing up adjacent to both a JW church and a Christian Science compound, I heard a fair amount of "disease isn't real until Satan (who is real) makes you believe in it." I don't think that's canonical to either of those religious traditions, it may have been some weird air-pollenated hybrid of them. But it was everywhere (Central NJ in the 90s).

ninokadic, to Cognition
@ninokadic@mastodon.social avatar

What's your position regarding consciousness? Broad physicalism (we'll have a scientific explanation one day) or broad anti-physicalism (science can't give a complete account)? Or something else?

Please repost after voting, I'm genuinely curious! 🤔

@philosophy @philosophyofmind

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@ninokadic @philosophy @philosophyofmind
Dark Compatibilism: Any interesting definition of consciousness that is compatible with either physicalism or anti-physicalism will ultimately also be proven not to exist.

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@ninokadic @philosophy @philosophyofmind
I think it's worse/better than that: For my money, there won't be a definition, or even a proof that consciousness exists -- much less a "definitive explanation"! -- within a physicalist/anti-physicalist dichotomy or spectrum.

If anyone manages to put together a "definitive explanation" of a provably existing phenomenon of consciousness, it will have been constructed in such a way as to falsify the terms "physicalist" and "anti-physicalist".

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I'm not saying there's something wrong with my brain, but I saw this scene in robocop 2 and instantly went THAT'S A WYSE-30 KEYBOARD!

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@foone The PCB behind it looks like an EPROM burner.

ElleGray, (edited ) to random
@ElleGray@mstdn.social avatar

Happy January 25th to all us idiots! 🤗🎉

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@ElleGray This is definitely the first three lines of a mid-90s post-grunge single from a band you're about to hear a lot more of on the radio.

tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

Jaywalking is a made-up crime created by car company lobbyists to make it more appealing to drive than to walk.

In WA, all intersections are already crosswalks, but using an unmarked crosswalk is dangerous because drivers either don't know or don't care. 90% of what is perceived as "jaywalking" actually happens at legal crossings; the rest is on intentionally hostile roads, often in poor neighborhoods

It should be drivers' responsibility not to hit pedestrians, period.

https://komonews.com/news/local/washington-jaywalking-laws-crosswalk-citations-free-to-walk-sb-5383-decriminalization-disproportionally-impact-minorities-homeless-traffic-sponsors-saldaa-liias-nguyen-valdez-wilson-politics

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@tess Teaching my kid to drive, the motto I teach is:

It is the responsibility
Of all drivers
At all times
And in all circumstances
To avoid all collisions
With all other things
Regardless of "right of way."

In an urban environment there is just no other way.

chrishudsonjr, to random
@chrishudsonjr@mastodon.social avatar

Look, if capitalism includes “local government zoning laws” it really means nothing.

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@chrishudsonjr The train could equally have been labeled "socialism" or "grumpiness" or even "ABSTRACT CONCEPT" and made just as much sense and been just as useful an allegory.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Bar for time travelers. A programmer from the 21st century is complaining about bugs caused by time zones. A programmer from the 31st century scoffs and starts talking about bugs caused by relativistic time dilation. Next to them, the guy who writes the firmware for the time machines is grinding his teeth

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@mcc Falsehoods That Material Entities Believe About Time

fabian, to til
@fabian@floss.social avatar

I already knew git commit --amend, but about git commit --fixup and git rebase --autosquash — convenient, although probably not something I’ll need on a daily basis.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#Documentation/git-commit.txt---fixupamendrewordltcommitgt

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@fabian I use these heavily in my git aliases because they leave nice breadcrumbs in the reflog if I mess something up. Otherwise it can be hard to debug something that went wrong half way through a multi-command alias.

shortridge, to random
@shortridge@hachyderm.io avatar

I’m still reeling from learning last week that floppy disks were literally floppy.

ppl in the 80s were really living in a magnetpunk world and acting like it’s nbd rather than actual fucking wizardry

nonnihil,
@nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

@shortridge @sigh_d TBF you couldn't put three zeros next to each other or the drive would desynchronize (see "MFM coding"), so "entirely unserious" didn't even begin to cover it.

lzg, to random
@lzg@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @lzg After some crucial moment or duration since its crimes last made headlines a nation is baptized into perpetual indigeneity and the next person to show up is the colonizer, until enough centuries then they get their turn to be the indigene.
    Or possibly nations are kinda fake. It could also be that thing.

    aeva, to random
    @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    god damn it I'm thinking about programming language design again

    Does anyone know of any examples of programming languages of any variety where the language was designed with the specific intention of being easily edited with only a speaker and a microphone? I'm really looking to read about something where visual syntax is a tertiary consideration or missing entirely.

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @aeva
    In '99 some old ex-BBN CommonLisp hackers from my company tried this. The thing killed it was that you blew out the programmer's working memory without being able to look back over your code, so the whole language has to be designed to minimize context-keeping. Modern post-lisps like Ruby might be a near-solution to this?
    Also the editor and language are closely coupled. However you pronounce "read back the last line" has to not be anywhere near the language grammar.

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @aeva Alas, I think any record of that work vanished into the maw of serial acquisitions :-(

    b0rk, to random
    @b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

    today I'm thinking about the tradeoffs of using git rebase a bit. I think the goal of rebase is to have a nice linear commit history, which is something I like.

    but what are the costs of using rebase? what problems has it caused for you in practice? I'm really only interested in specific bad experiences you've had here -- not opinions or general statements like “rewriting history is bad”

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @b0rk We (https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake/) use a pure-rebase workflow.
    The major cost I've seen is that it plays badly with some tools, and github is sort of top-of-the-list, though reviewable as well: Which commit's message gets to be the rebased PR commit's message is hard to predict and we've had a lot of chained commit messages sneak into history.
    If you use commit metadata like co-authored-by it's super easy to lose that; we have external contributors for whom that's professionally damaging.

    ZachWeinersmith, to random
    @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

    Offhand thoughts reading Michael Lewis's book on Bankman-Fried's downfall:

    It's interesting the extent to which belief in Effective Altruism played a role in people doing bad things. I'm generally a believer that utilitarianism is ultimately what most ethics systems do, and perhaps what they should do. But, would a virtue ethics system have led to... greater overall happiness?

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @ZachWeinersmith Strong agree. Under conditions of limited information and processing capability, the anything-maximizing metaethics is unlikely to be naively maximizing that thing, just as pointing your car toward Chicago and flooring it is a bad way to get to Chicago in the absence of a map.
    The best arguments for deontology and virtue ethics is that they are computable heuristics for utilitarianism.

    mattblaze, to random
    @mattblaze@federate.social avatar

    Reminder about Mastodon "private" messages. Aside from not being end-end-encrypted (and so visible to instance administrators), they CC anyone @-mentioned ANYWHERE in the body of the message (not just those listed at the start).

    They are now called "private mentions" rather than "private messages", but if you don't fully understand the semantics, this behavior may be unexpected and/or cause unpleasant side effects.

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @mattblaze
    Per https://www.britannica.com/animal/mammoth-extinct-mammal , "Many mammoths had a woolly, yellowish brown undercoat about 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick beneath a coarser outer covering of dark brown hair up to 50 cm (20 inches) long. Under the extremely thick skin was a layer of insulating fat at times 8 cm (3 inches) thick."
    So yeah, probably fine against the slings and arrows of outrageous tooting.

    b0rk, to random
    @b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

    would folks be interested in some kind of “get print copies of every zine julia has ever written" product?

    (right now there's a 13-pack for sale on the store, but it doesn't include print copies of the free zines)

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @b0rk I would definitely buy this just to put them in my office library at work.

    universalhub, to boston
    @universalhub@mastodon.online avatar

    Had an appointment at a CVS in for a shot on Friday. Got canceled. Had an appointment at a CVS in this morning. Was also canceled. What are the odds the West Roxbury Walgreens will come through for the appointment I set up for tomorrow?

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @universalhub Davis Square cancelled on me on Friday, also with no explanation; seems to be a lot of it around. I wonder if @gbhnews might be interested in what's up here.
    It might be part of the general disintegration of CVS pharmacies, but it might be something more interesting?

    nonnihil, to random
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @vkc @ian 440 replacing the previous 435, which was specified in (an external reference of) the frickin' Treaty of Versailles.
    ( https://www.tumblr.com/antiquesounds/183025021368/what-i-learned-when-i-stumbled-upon-some-amazing for a moderately deep dive )

    forteller, to godot
    @forteller@tutoteket.no avatar

    What's the best game made with ?

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @forteller Delta V Rings of Saturn is a delight to me.

    ZachWeinersmith, to random
    @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

    I'm not a crazy AI hype guy, but I keep meeting people who think it won't work because it can't [x], when X is something it's quite good at, at least compared to most humans e.g. ascertaining context, providing nuance, using heuristics. It's dumb about a LOT of stuff and it hallucinates citations so you have to be careful, but it's an outstanding learning tool.

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @ZachWeinersmith I am also baffled by this -- I am in a field (robotics) where we keep finding new uses for these tools every day; they are frankly remarkable.
    I think, (1) the ridiculous hype (and instant efflorescence of scammy AI-branded products) around the tools turned a lot of folks off, and (2) most of the things these tools are good at are not the "OMG replace all humans" RUR stuff but back-office edge cases, boring tasks, and things you can't explain in a sentence or a headline.

    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @ZachWeinersmith @steuard
    For me a game-changer has been running these models locally so I'm not sending everything to the cloud.
    I self-censor and over-polish when I'm writing in an observable place, and that seems to prevent my finding good prompts.
    Whereas e.g. a LLAMA model running under my desk and absolutely not sending data to Google/Meta/Acxiom/whoever is more of a free play experience; much more productive and pleasant.
    I wish more people could have this sort of low-anxiety experience.

    lzg, (edited ) to random
    @lzg@mastodon.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    nonnihil,
    @nonnihil@hachyderm.io avatar

    @lzg Having been on the intended-recipient side of this: The grocery box company has probably already refunded and/or shipped a new one and regards the box as destroyed. Just keep it, or give it to a friend with relevant dietary preferences.

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