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00:50 feedbot http://verisimilitudes.net/2020-12-28 << A Syndication of Verisimilitudes -- von Neumann Machines Lack Structure
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~ 10 hours 37 minutes ~
11:27 trinque morning asciilifeform, any chance you know if there's a knob to manually set the timestamp that's used in ali files? I'll spelunk through src otherwise, just curious if it's in your cache.
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11:28 * trinque is narrowing down the nondeterminism in his build toolchain
11:29 nubs` Hey nerds
11:29 nubs` What’s new
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11:34 trinque hello nubs`, nothing under the sun. how are you?
11:36 nubs` Can’t complain! Heard ol’ what’s-his-face gave up on irc so figured I’d float on in and see how everyone is doing, post-cult
~ 40 minutes ~
12:17 asciilifeform ACHTUNG isp folx ! 20m power outage in cage on acct of upstream fuse change 'oops'. RK users, plox to set clocks! all who report in, will be credited +1d of service.
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~ 31 minutes ~
12:48 asciilifeform http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-12-29#1027708 << can't say that i do. and haven't thought to do this (.ali are debug barfola, used by e.g. gnat2html, gdb, several other utils)
12:48 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-29 11:27:51 trinque: morning asciilifeform, any chance you know if there's a knob to manually set the timestamp that's used in ali files? I'll spelunk through src otherwise, just curious if it's in your cache.
12:49 asciilifeform imho the Right Thing re determinism would be patch for ~back end~ , to put an end to 'stuff date in binary'
12:52 asciilifeform http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-12-29#1027711 << lol, see 4y of log!11
12:52 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-29 11:29:36 nubs`: What’s new
12:53 asciilifeform $ticker btc usd
12:53 btcinfobot Current BTC price in USD: $26498.27
12:53 asciilifeform !w poll
12:53 watchglass Polling 0 nodes...
12:53 asciilifeform hmm
12:56 asciilifeform !w poll
12:56 watchglass Polling 15 nodes...
12:56 watchglass 205.134.172.26:8333 : Could not connect!
12:56 watchglass 205.134.172.28:8333 : Could not connect! (Operator: whaack)
12:56 watchglass 205.134.172.4:8333 : Could not connect!
12:56 watchglass 205.134.172.6:8333 : Could not connect!
12:56 watchglass 54.39.156.171:8333 : (ns562940.ip-54-39-156.net) Alive: (0.112s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663527
12:56 watchglass 71.114.46.209:8333 : (pool-71-114-46-209.washdc.fios.verizon.net) Alive: (0.106s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663527 (Operator: asciilifeform)
12:56 watchglass 143.202.160.10:8333 : Alive: (0.176s) V=70001 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.7.0.1/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663527
12:56 watchglass 208.94.240.42:8333 : Alive: (0.206s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663527
12:56 watchglass 213.109.238.156:8333 : Alive: (0.260s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663399
12:56 watchglass 185.85.38.54:8333 : (tlapnet-38-54.cust.tlapnet.cz) Alive: (0.334s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663527
12:56 watchglass 176.9.59.199:8333 : (static.199.59.9.176.clients.your-server.de) Alive: (0.285s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=391693 (Operator: jurov)
12:56 watchglass 185.163.46.29:8333 : (185-163-46-29.mivocloud.com) Alive: (0.353s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=504839
12:56 watchglass 103.36.92.112:8333 : (terebe.ns01.net) Alive: (0.573s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=663411
12:57 asciilifeform loox like some folx don't have their trb in cron.
12:57 watchglass 84.16.46.130:8333 : Violated BTC Protocol: Bad header length!
13:11 billymg http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-12-29#1027714 << thanks for the notice, updated
13:11 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-29 12:17:39 asciilifeform: ACHTUNG isp folx ! 20m power outage in cage on acct of upstream fuse change 'oops'. RK users, plox to set clocks! all who report in, will be credited +1d of service.
13:11 asciilifeform billymg: ty!
13:25 asciilifeform http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-12-29#1027707 << the only fully general-purpose genuinely non-vonneumann arch i'm familiar with, is dataflow (explicit dependency graph) . (otoh -- single-purpose non-vonneumann comps are not uncommon. e.g. here's a battlefield-deployed one of asciilifeform's design.)
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13:25 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-29 00:50:23 feedbot: http://verisimilitudes.net/2020-12-28 << A Syndication of Verisimilitudes -- von Neumann Machines Lack Structure
13:33 * asciilifeform believes that it is disingenuous to refer to a vn machine with N cpus, regardless of N, as 'non-vn'.
~ 26 minutes ~
14:00 verisimilitude The bottleneck is exacerbated by the unnecessary traffic. It's fair to write that reducing C+NM instructions to but one for any M dramatically eliminates the bottleneck.
14:00 asciilifeform verisimilitude: a bottleneck is still a bottleneck, even w/ no traffic ('machine switched off')
14:02 verisimilitude Sure, but a wine bottleneck is fine for pouring wine, not relieving a dam.
14:03 verisimilitude In any case, I like the explanation I provided; once the machine is given structure, the bottleneck could be eliminated more transparently.
14:03 verisimilitude Of course, I'll be perfectly blunt and acknowledge I'm just burning topics off a list I've had for a ways.
14:03 asciilifeform verisimilitude: vm sucks even w/ arbitrary memory bandwidth / channels / # of cpu. because brings in whole spittoon of architectural retardation revolving around locking
14:04 asciilifeform *vn
14:04 verisimilitude I think, were I to own a LispM, I wouldn't care that it's von Neumann.
14:06 asciilifeform verisimilitude: funnily enuff, the builders of e.g. bolix's lisp gnawed at the vn leather straps quite a bit. hence the inclusion of various oddball special-purpose cpus (the 1 in the FEP; the 2 (!!) in the console ; possib. others)
14:06 asciilifeform *lispm
14:06 verisimilitude I don't believe I've mentioned the Reduceron, a Haskell machine, here before.
14:06 verisimilitude I'll link to the paper.
14:06 asciilifeform verisimilitude: iirc there was >1 of these, even
14:07 verisimilitude It takes advantage of some parallel evaluation and hardware memoization to be competitive with a new Intel running GHC.
14:07 asciilifeform iirc that one sat on a xilinx, and had sumthing like iron gc
14:08 verisimilitude Yes.
14:08 asciilifeform verisimilitude: fwiw it aint esp. hard to 'competitive w/ new intel' on fpga if correctly chosen benchmark (the most well-known example is prolly btc mining, i.e. sha2 brute)
14:09 * asciilifeform actually owns the XUPV5 demoboard, of the type used by the reduceron folx
14:10 * asciilifeform not into haskellism, however.
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14:10 verisimilitude Here's a link: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/reduceron.pdf
14:11 verisimilitude It's difficult for me to satisfactorily think about a truly ``everything happens at the same time'' machine; it's easier, were one to imagine such a machine composed out of many von Neumann machines, similarly to the Internet or Chuck Moore's GA144, however.
14:12 asciilifeform verisimilitude: imho fg is a good example of 'all at once'
14:12 asciilifeform and quite easy to understand.
14:13 asciilifeform for that matter, your physical machine is invariably an 'all at once' , because that is how actual meatspace works, lol
14:13 verisimilitude I took a glance, but I don't know Verilog nor VHDL.
14:14 verisimilitude A cellular automata is all-at-once, but those aren't usually used for practical computation.
14:14 verisimilitude It's simply not as mind-bending or however one would phrase it, when it feels the sequential calculations are merely better hidden, is all.
14:15 asciilifeform verisimilitude: it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the whole lang fits on a sheet of paper. e.g. reg [max:min] name = initvalue; creates a storage (of flipflops) of max+1 bits. wire name = someotherwire; or wire name = reg; or, wire foo = a ^ b etc connect things together, optionally via a logical op
14:16 asciilifeform <= is permitted inside 'always' blocks; and in'em, you specify the clock trigger (e.g. 'posedge clk' if clk is yer clock wire)
14:17 asciilifeform it assigns new value to a register. e.g. a state machine's state reg.
14:18 verisimilitude How much chip design still happens from a text editor, instead of dedicated tooling?
14:18 asciilifeform verisimilitude: ~100%
14:18 asciilifeform a 'case' statement results in an electrical switch (i.e. each case 'exists' at all times, but 'fires' only if the switch variable equals the given value)
14:18 verisimilitude Only Chuck Moore comes to mind as a counterexample I recall well.
14:19 asciilifeform verisimilitude: moore, and in general 1980s processes. for that matter symbolics co. had a 100% cl top to bottom ic design thing, 'ns'
14:19 verisimilitude Neat.
14:20 asciilifeform verisimilitude: basic mechanics, however, are the same. verilog/vhdl can be considered 'syntactic sugar' ; the underlying primitives are same in all known fab processes (e.g. flipflop is still a flipflop no matter out of what made)
14:20 verisimilitude Say, asciilifeform, I've mentioned before how I first came across loper-os many years back, and it's been an influence, regarding what machines should be. One of my major ideas is that text shouldn't be used for programming at all, and that dedicated tooling is, or should be, the future of programming; have I been anything of an influence in this respect?
14:23 asciilifeform verisimilitude: i actually started from a 'softer' version of this position : i.e. 'if there is a more effective human-to-comp i/o than text editor, then it then oughta be used.' so far not encountered any that impressed upon me the 'this cannot be achieved with text editor, even augmented one'. tho admittedly have not played extensively w/ interlisp.
14:24 asciilifeform verisimilitude: as for your item -- i admit , have not had chance to experiment in depth. so cannot answer re 'the win from non-text' in subj.
14:27 asciilifeform ( see also earlier thrd re subj, w/ verisimilitude et al )
14:27 snsabot Logged on 2020-08-08 21:47:05 asciilifeform: only ever used 1 type of 'non-text programming' system -- electrical schematic editors. and they're a nightmare imho
14:31 verisimilitude Well, just let me know if any interest to use mine MMC arises, and I'd be elated to step one through it. That most recent I've produced is more of a toy than that which preceded it, but its purpose is to test a better model more than anything.
14:31 verisimilitude I'd like to have a 6502 targeting finished, or at least started, within 2021.
14:32 verisimilitude There's a very heavy difference between ``What's the random instruction mnemonic again?'' and pressing a single key to answer questions.
14:32 asciilifeform verisimilitude: see, asciilifeform also uses heavily-customized text ~editors~ where 'press 1 key and get the asked-for 200-character name if need be'. but the representation is still a text.
14:33 verisimilitude http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-08-08#1027766 I've felt similarly, until lately; I'm interested in programming systems which make a recollection system, undo and redo, automatic and mandatory; the model of ``functional data structures'' seems it could be particularly suited to this.
14:33 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-29 14:10:03 asciilifeform: not into haskellism, however.
14:33 asciilifeform verisimilitude: when i hear 'programming w/out text', i think of schematic layouts (electrical, or 'labview'-type item) . or at least interlisp-style lisp-with-trees where can only edit the tree, but not insert/remove chars arbitrarily
14:34 asciilifeform thus far verisimilitude's item strikes me as simply a very good asmer (i had a similar one for msdos realmode, which 'knew' e.g. what regs are valid operands for MUL, and so forth)
14:34 verisimilitude That's how I'd prefer to program Lisp, yes; I've imagined a scheme were a LET is either unnecessary, or at least well-hidden, for using the same result from a function multiple times, without naming it.
14:35 verisimilitude There's another difference, however, asciilifeform.
14:36 asciilifeform verisimilitude: as in 'anaphoric macros' ? ( asciilifeform at one time thought these to be great idea, until tried to use, lol, and developed allergy for any kind of 'invisible' moving parts in programs )
14:36 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-16 20:37:03 asciilifeform: most of what is illustrated in these works, imho ought not to be done. e.g. anaphoric macros. 99++% of the time simply abused by folx who want to 'look clever', and in fact serves no useful purpose, proggy becomes ~less~ readable.
14:36 verisimilitude When I press one key and give it the answers, I'm not greeted by just whatever names or syntax an assembler wants; I'm given a description of what happens intended for a human, because it never needs to be fed to a machine.
14:36 verisimilitude No, as in ``Split this line and feed it to two inputs.'', but nicer.
14:36 asciilifeform verisimilitude: this still strikes me as 'very good editor'. imho all programming oughta happen inside such a tool.
14:37 asciilifeform but imho mistake to say this is 'escape from text'. the underlying representation is still a text, and my ~reading~ of it takes place w/ a text reader.
14:38 asciilifeform 'escape from text' would be if e.g. i needed a tree viewer or schematic renderer (say, w/ 3d ball!!1) simply to read the thing.
14:38 verisimilitude Well, I also have a heavy distaste for what passes as text in modern systems.
14:40 verisimilitude I mustn't let current restrictions inhibit mine ideas for when I'm finally free of them, asciilifeform, and I've considered nice diagrams and other things I could add to mine MMC model, but it's still fundamentally using digits and text and other things to tell the human what's happening.
14:41 verisimilitude All I can do is what led to the current state, which is pursue things for their own worths, and then find ways to integrate them into mine other programs as I notice niceties they bring.
14:41 asciilifeform aha. and not only 'uses digits, text' but it is entirely readable as a text, i.e. you could dictate it over a telephone and it'd make sense. (which imho is an adequate litmus re 'is text')
14:42 verisimilitude It's text in the absolute sense, but it's not a character stream to be fed into something, and so it's not text in the computing sense.
14:43 verisimilitude Now, I can't avoid some character sequences no matter what, such as names, unless I want to enable replacing them with arbitrary drawings, but this is a tad different again, in that assembling character sequences is how humans name most things with language.
14:44 verisimilitude When it comes to machine code, I think I'm at least close to the limits of programming it without text.
14:44 verisimilitude So, I'm not a zealot wanting to entirely eliminate it, but I damn sure don't want it where it's unnecessary.
14:48 verisimilitude Most programming is with text represented as character streams, which is both weak and, I think, entirely unnecessary. After enough removal, something such as written language names may stay as a good and necessary idea, although I'd like to experiment with a higher-level language which even elides those.
14:49 verisimilitude This language is still but an idea, and even then it's still text in the absolute sense, but it's text in the sense a human puts on paper, not as a teletype punches.
14:55 asciilifeform fundamentally what program 'is' , is ast. and if canonical representation were sane, rather than 'stream of text', then could much more meaningfully vdiff'em; and avoid idiocies in the vein of 'tab vs space' holywar, etc. but presently we haven't an agreed-upon canonical ast representation 'for errything'.
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14:55 verisimilitude Well, machine code isn't an AST.
14:56 asciilifeform verisimilitude: is simply a very comb-like ast.
14:56 verisimilitude Yes, I've given thought to how my model passes text in enabling some such manipulations.
14:56 verisimilitude Sure, and this conversation is just atoms, but some models lose their usefulness at a point.
14:57 asciilifeform verisimilitude: how does it lose usefulness ? the instrs still take params, which are constrained (e.g. a shortjump vs long takes diff. bitnesses of target, on whatever machine)
14:58 verisimilitude I simply don't see much point in thinking of machine code as an AST. My latest model uses a flat doubly-linked list, but that's merely the internal representation I've found least prone to error so far.
14:58 asciilifeform it's still an ast, and the 'a' is illustrated in that e.g. you don't actually care if it's 'mul' or 'MUL', 'jmp' or 'JmP', or whether preceded by a tab or 4 spaces, and whether space after comma !
14:58 asciilifeform or rather, you and i might care, but asmer does not
14:59 verisimilitude I don't care about the mnemonics, because there aren't any.
14:59 verisimilitude My model entirely avoids those concerns.
14:59 asciilifeform aha, you care about the underlying item. which is.. ast
14:59 verisimilitude It's a sequence of bits.
15:00 verisimilitude I care about the numerical representation.
15:00 asciilifeform observe that -- even in verisimilitude's machine -- not all possible seq's of bits are equally-interesting programs.
15:01 verisimilitude Yes.
15:01 verisimilitude I've located a link which is interesting from earlier.
15:03 verisimilitude http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-08-08#1027817 This was a reasonably interesting read, although I disagree with the author's thesis.
15:03 snsabot Logged on 2020-12-29 14:55:03 asciilifeform: fundamentally what program 'is' , is ast. and if canonical representation were sane, rather than 'stream of text', then could much more meaningfully vdiff'em; and avoid idiocies in the vein of 'tab vs space' holywar, etc. but presently we haven't an agreed-upon canonical ast representation 'for errything'.
15:05 verisimilitude Now, the author believes weaker languages are the solution to programs manipulating programs, but I think dedicated tooling is the true solution. When reading this, I remarked on how mine MMC model allows transparent renaming, as an example, because it ``knows'' names intimately, and programs reference them directly, not by their identifiers.
15:05 asciilifeform verisimilitude: illustrative of 'we need ~less~ powerful...' , is e.g. asciilifeform's 'peh', where went through great lengths to constrain the set of operations to where program can be reasoned about for safety-critical application
15:06 verisimilitude As for diffing and whatnot, I've found it's much easier to reason about combining machine code programs and whatnot when they're represented as doubly-linked lists, compared to arrays.
15:06 asciilifeform verisimilitude: what does the doubleness of the links get you ?
15:06 verisimilitude The interface of my model heavily constrains the manipulations which are pleasant to consider, however.
15:07 verisimilitude It gets me what's effectively an array, but with convenient rearranging.
15:07 verisimilitude I foolishly failed to realize part of mine array scheme was just badly building a doubly-linked list-like model.
15:08 asciilifeform verisimilitude: right, not disputing that doubly-linked list is easier to rearrange; but how does it help in diffing ?
15:08 verisimilitude Oh, it's just generally easier to reason about, when combined with some other changes.
15:09 verisimilitude An example would be no shifting around to align subprograms, say; this isn't difficult with an array, but it's much easier with a doubly-linked list; I could think of another example given enough time.
15:10 asciilifeform i admit, is mystery to me, how (in doubly-linked list, think of what kind of degenerate structures can exist! vs. in single-linked, the only dangerous -- and even then , only in the context of mark&sweep gcism -- is cyclic)
15:11 verisimilitude They're interesting; my D shows a Lisp-flavoured approach to them.
15:12 verisimilitude Singly-linked lists conveniently avoid many questions, yes, but finding satisfactory solutions to them is fun. My D:LENGTH returns three values, as an example.
15:13 verisimilitude The weaknesses of singly-linked lists allow for more concise interfaces.
15:15 * asciilifeform bbl:teatime
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