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DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz

<p>I&#39;m a philomath (many interests; call it polymath-wanna-be) professional computer programmer in Silicon Valley, specializing in operating systems, languages/compilers, sometimes AI, usually non-traditional parallel software and hardware architectures.<br />Also:<br /><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/computer_science" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>computer_science</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/unicode" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>unicode</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/unix" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>unix</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/linux" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>linux</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/bsd" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>bsd</span>

Posts

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    RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@paysmaths/117468417570249709 @skewray What he said.

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    Cool! &amp;gt; One Hash Bloom Filters &amp;gt; While much cheaper than going to disk, computing k independent hashes per key is still a bit expensive for very high performance systems. &amp;gt; &amp;gt; In 2008, Kirsch and Mitzenmacher wrote a paper demonstrating that two hashes can get you the same output https://www.calabro.io/ohbf

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    RE: https://ieji.de/@vnikolov/117293039439013487 I&#39;ve always loved that humor. I know @ed1conf@bsd.network has seen it a million times but I&#39;m linking them to this full original copy anyway: From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti) Subject: The True Path (long) Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT Path: ai-lab!mintaka!olivea!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!patl Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack Organizati...

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    RE: https://masto.ai/@hackaday/117269814563752444 @screwlisp@gamerplus.org I just forwarded this to Amen, but it did make me think of you, too. Just the spirit, not the retro-BASIC. 🙂

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    @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz I probably don&#39;t overlap with you there at all, whatever you&#39;re talking about, but I have no problem with microcontrollers. It&#39;s nice that in this day and age, the venerable (although no longer super popular) 8048/8051 has even become fast. In the original, a NOP took 11 cycles. But perhaps you meant all the way down to the level of discrete transistors, which are always fun, not that I have particular expertise (custom multivibrator, anyone?). Although th...

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    &quot;Super-intelligence or Superstition? Exploring Psychological Factors Influencing Belief in AI Predictions about Personal Behavior&quot; https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06602

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    RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@sprout/116760372707116149 Control structures in programming languages From goto to algebraic effects Xavier Leroy July 13, 2026 This is a preview of a book to be published by Cambridge University Press. It is distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Contents Preface Introduction Part I Control structures for imperative languages Chapter 1 Early programming languages Chapter 2 Structured programming Chapter 3 Non-local control Chapter 4 Control i...

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    RE: https://mstdn.ca/@teledyn/116864715315063072 @aartaka POV coincidentally fits in with your pondering:

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    RE: https://infosec.exchange/@tbortels/116852900384279950 Continuity of access is what many of us want, when we&amp;#39;re not just enjoying ownership for its own sake. E.g. we used to buy music. Now we rent access, which has some advantages, but there&amp;#39;s nothing to prevent that access disappearing without forewarning. When we bought music, third parties couldn&amp;#39;t just take it away from us again.

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    @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz &gt; You should call it &#39;entropy&#39;, for two reasons. &gt; &gt; 1. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. &gt; &gt; 2. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage. &gt; &gt; -- John von Neumann to Claude Shannon From a post with quoting turned off: https://mathstodon.xyz/@pustam...

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    &quot;I’ve been learning and applying math for a long time now, and I’m still learning things that were known hundreds of years ago....You have to do original research to get a PhD, so the aim grad school is to get you to the frontier of some narrow bit of math as quickly as possible, rushing past everything along the way that you won’t need in order to write a dissertation. I learned 20th century math in college, and I’ve been learning 18th and 19th century math ever since.&quot; John D. Cook h...

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    RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@paysmaths/116760621857866253 Anyone have pointers to anyone discussing why it can be hard to define mathematics? I find it easier to think of ways to try to succeed in the attempt, but I&#39;m interested in points about difficulties therein.

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    @slava I must say that you&#39;re making this simple-seeming mathematical topic look more interesting all the time, day by day. Not that it was boring to start with.

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    @thalia @benjamingeer @j2kun @munificent Very true!

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    @Mr0@privacysafe.social @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz &gt; flying dragons is easy Big talk -- wanna race?

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    @Mr0@privacysafe.social @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz &gt; &quot;back in my day, we didn&#39;t have cars, we had to fight off a lion and tame a dragon to fly us back home&quot; Well, it&#39;s true.

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    @AmenZwa Photography technique has certainly gotten easier, which sure as hell helps with crowd journalism (along with sheer quantity/universality of camera phones). But on the artistic side it was always about composition, and why the better photographers (casual, journalists, and artists) take many many photos of almost exactly the same scene, to get small differences, and later choose the best of the crop. Shortly we&#39;ll have machines doing all that, too, which will make your assessment...

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    @AmenZwa &quot;Automation complacency&quot; was the older phrase; recently people have been saying about LLM use that the user has &quot;cognitive surrender&quot;. https://gizmodo.com/cognitive-surrender-is-a-new-and-useful-term-for-how-ai-melts-brains-2000742595 The one that astonished me the most was the lawyer who submitted an LLM-produced brief without reading it, and it had things like hallucinated cases. That one probably hit you especially hard. Nasty.

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    @AmenZwa People needing to land planes after all the pilots die is of course a popular movie plot. In the future it&#39;ll be the same, except the AI pilot will be insane or something.

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    @AmenZwa Since I&#39;m not a pilot, I have no idea that you mean shit in = shit out. Flawed input data creates flawed output actions.

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    @AmenZwa All true. And yet my ancient comprehensive vision of systems still serves me. Beats the people who think that covering the frontend and backend of web software defines the entire universe.

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    @AmenZwa Hey, I&#39;m a leet vibe coder, and I&#39;ll have you know that vibe code will work one day...any day now! I&#39;ve been doing FPGA work (usually at the architectural level with specialists doing the hard work of implementation) since the 1980s, on and off, and I must admit I usually didn&#39;t have to know much about the topics you list. But anyway; we *really* need better algorithms that avoid the need for billion dollar data centers.

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    @AmenZwa Not long ago I urged some physicists to distinguish the different kinds of probability, particularly whether we&#39;re talking about future events, or merely our ignorance of past events, and how extremely different those are (complete with wikipedia links). It fell on deaf ears. Nay, bordering on hostile ears. (Or maybe there was just silence and I assumed the worst; I don&#39;t recall.) Sigh. Anyway, &gt; they place the core probabilistic nature of AI, front and centre. Yes, tha...

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    @AmenZwa Thanks again; I&#39;ll take a look.

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    @AmenZwa Thank you.

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    @screwlisp &gt; What would a shell one-liner Since you said &quot;Is CLISP not your unix login shell?&quot;, I feel that you know I&#39;m talking about a new shell I&#39;m creating, not about a shell script, which is what your first phrasing implies. &gt; ...a shell one-liner that handles both the pathnames, trace and missing-file versions like my lisp handler-bind version be like? Yes, quite. @vnikolov @kentpitman @khinsen @holdenweb

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    @screwlisp &gt; While I appreciate that most people seem to be disagreeing with my interpretation, I am very happy that this discussion of what the common lisp condition system does and can do happening. I tend to both get distracted and to ramble, but what I had in the back of my mind was a wish for an example of clearly wonderful usage -- which on the one hand maybe you&#39;ve finally shown that, on the other hand maybe I&#39;m still confused about how to add that to my shell implementation...

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    @kentpitman Yes, good. One caveat is that, in the absence of hardcore unpredictable Lisp compiler optimizations, Lisp stack frames (and therefore things like unwinding) are much simpler than C. In Lisp &quot;as she is spoke&quot; [1], without optimization, doing e.g. evaluation of a polynomial at a point involves a bunch of function calls, period. In C it is a bunch of register operations. So the stack is wildly different between the two languages. Common optimizations will, you might say, mak...

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    @vnikolov Ha ha! Thanks! ...I think. @kentpitman @screwlisp

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    @kentpitman @vnikolov @screwlisp &gt; I&#39;m being kind of deliberately sloppy about notations here, though I have not so much so that you can&#39;t figure out what I&#39;m generally getting at. As you have doubtless noticed, it is extremely common for arguments, on perhaps any topic, to devolve into an argument that ultimately is about notation, but that said underlying issue remains a mystery to the conversationalists.