Peteragain

7 ms·

1.
by Peteragain 9d ago
Found it! Thanks for the pointer: https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/rob-stewart/ My argument is that verilog is to FPGAs as assembler is to pdp11s, and C is closer to assembler than Java or prolog. H
2.
by Peteragain 9d ago
Well c does look much like the hardware of a PDP11 and verilog LUTs look like FPGA hardware. But my wife (a. CS prof) says the same: programming is what programmers do.
3.
by Peteragain 9d ago
Okay. I like this article and I've thought about it regularly since it last made the rounds here. 1) C is a low level language for a PDP11, or for a single core on a GPU. 2) But what would a low level language look like for an FPGA? Pr
4.
by Peteragain 4mo ago
Some friends and I are having a conversation about "caring" - not necessarily for others but care in what you do. Wim Wenders 2023 film "Perfect Days" is relevant here.
5.
by Peteragain 5mo ago
I'm not sure the situation has changed for AI. For a real scientific agenda we need to at least attend to the things a demo can't do, not just what they can. The trouble with such analysis of current ai systems is that the negat
6.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set up the production line to make one small one, an
7.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
.. and soon to be dependent on US military funding? Controlled by someone who has run-ins with universities? This'll end in tears.
8.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to sma
9.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
More how they exist.
10.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever t
11.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the automated control means this is not a boat but somethin
12.
by Peteragain 6mo ago
I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't want that "made better".
13.
by Peteragain 7mo ago
I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a b
14.
by Peteragain 7mo ago
I'm going to use that stat. Even if 78.4% of quoted stats are made up.
15.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would i
16.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering -
17.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)
18.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
I used gopher before mosaic! And yes the issue is not the tech, but the social engineering of a community. Git(hub) has a community; IMHO GitHub users need to put more cool things on there like blogs.. perhaps..
19.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
The original idea was there with html 1.0. The lesson we needed to learn was that some think you can't sell stuff to do things if doing them is simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis.
20.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Basically w
21.
by Peteragain 8mo ago
The point is the opportunity created by trump's tariff policy. Saying do what I want or I'll burn your house down, and then burning your house down - you no longer need to do what is demanded. An opportunity has appeared.
22.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
My great, great grand dad carted telegraph poles for the construction of the southern half of that! Family oral history.
23.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
And the Chomskybot analysis is quite enlightening..
24.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
Fair. The background reading is the EMCA stuff - conversation analysis cf Sacks etc at, and Ethnomethods (Garfunkel). And Vygotsky cf Kozulin. People such as Robert Moore at IBM and Lemon at Herriot-Watt work in this space but there is no c
25.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
There are two things happening here. A really small LLM mechanism which is useful for thinking about how the big ones work, and a reference to the well known phenomenon, commonly dismissively referred to as a "trick", in which hum
26.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
I think it will absorb at least as many hours as doom scrolling, and be much better for me.
27.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
Programming languages were originally designed by mathematicians based on a Turing machine. A modern language for FPGAs is a challenge for theoretical computer science, but we should keep computer literate researchers away from it. This is
28.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
The real reason it won't end up in a park is not the engineering. The problem is the same one as NPCs in computer games: synthetic characters are, to date, just really transparent and boring. The real research question is why.
29.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
Thanks for the confirmation!
30.
by Peteragain 9mo ago
Exactly! I am going for "glorified auto complete" is far more useful than it seems. In GOFAI terms, it does case-based reasoning.. but better.

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