March 2024⌗
23 March:
Hexdump of a 526-byte Mersenne Twister program (ELF64, takes decimal seed as input, writes output as a sequence of 4-byte LE fields). Approx. 1.5GiB/s on my machine. I wonder if I can do better.
00000000: 7f45 4c46 0201 0100 0000 0000 0000 0000 .ELF............ 00000010: 0200 3e00 0100 0000 7800 4000 0000 0000 ..>.....x.@..... 00000020: 4000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 @............... 00000030: 0000 0000 4000 3800 0100 4000 0000 0000 ....@.8...@..... 00000040: 0100 0000 0700 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................ 00000050: 0000 4000 0000 0000 0000 4000 0000 0000 ..@.......@..... 00000060: 0e02 0000 0000 0000 ce2b 0000 0000 0000 .........+...... 00000070: 0010 0000 0000 0000 488d 358f 0100 0048 ........H.5....H 00000080: c7c2 1000 0000 0f05 31c0 4489 c10f b60c ........1.D..... 00000090: 318d 51c6 83fa f672 0d6b c00a 41ff c001 1.Q....r.k..A... 000000a0: c883 e830 ebe4 8905 6221 0000 4831 c948 ...0....b!..H1.H 000000b0: ffc1 4c8d 0555 2100 0048 81f9 7002 0000 ..L..U!..H..p... 000000c0: 740f 69c0 b517 0000 4189 0488 48ff c1eb t.i.....A...H... 000000d0: e866 bb70 0231 c041 b900 0000 804c 8d15 .f.p.1.A.....L.. 000000e0: 2201 0000 4831 ff48 ffc7 6681 fb70 027c "...H1.H..f..p.| 000000f0: 3f31 c948 81f9 e300 0000 743e 418b 1488 ?1.H......t>A... 00000100: 4421 ca45 8b5c 8804 4489 db81 e3ff ffff D!.E.\..D....... 00000110: 7f09 d3d1 eb41 83e3 0143 8b14 9a41 3394 .....A...C...A3. 00000120: 8834 0600 0031 da41 8914 8848 ffc1 ebc3 .4...1.A...H.... 00000130: 480f bfcb 418b 0c88 eb7f 31c9 4881 f98c H...A.....1.H... 00000140: 0100 0074 3b41 8b94 888c 0300 0044 21ca ...t;A.......D!. 00000150: 458b 9c88 9003 0000 4489 db81 e3ff ffff E.......D....... 00000160: 7f09 d341 83e3 0143 8b14 9a41 3314 88d1 ...A...C...A3... 00000170: eb31 da41 8994 888c 0300 0048 ffc1 ebbc .1.A.......H.... 00000180: 8b15 442a 0000 4421 ca8b 0d7f 2000 0041 ..D*..D!.... ..A 00000190: 89cb 4181 e3ff ffff 7f41 09d3 89ca 83e2 ..A......A...... 000001a0: 0141 8b14 9233 1593 2600 0041 d1eb 4431 .A...3..&..A..D1 000001b0: da89 1513 2a00 0031 dbff c389 cac1 ea0b ....*..1........ 000001c0: 31ca 89d1 c1e1 0781 e180 562c 9d31 d189 1.........V,.1.. 000001d0: cac1 e20f 81e2 0000 c6ef 31ca 89d1 c1e9 ..........1..... 000001e0: 1231 d189 c289 0c96 ffc0 3d00 0800 000f .1........=..... 000001f0: 85f5 feff ffba 0020 0000 4889 f80f 0531 ....... ..H....1 00000200: c0e9 e4fe ffff 0000 0000 dfb0 0899 ..............
20 March:
Applying any sort of entropy coding to lzw output seems like a lot of pain. Nominally you have a lot of invariants like e.g. US-ASCII packets that you could efficiently use FSE for to get a double digit CR, but the match packets (>256 + 2 for table clear and promotion) are so just random. the “simple” scheme of inserting trash into the LZW dictionary on almost every byte is moot and you end up with some sort of weird 16-bit alphabet to compress with sparse entries which occur once or twice per block. and then there’s the invariant that all the values are <= than currently seen maximum since last table clear, which UNIX “compress” seems to use for some sort of primitive entropy coding where you begin with 9-bit codes, promote all the way up to 16-bit codes and then freeze the dict and scrape it up when CR drops below delta of 1-3%. for purely technical reasons my program seems faster/stronger than unix compress but it’s a low bar. there’s nothing you can really do with this format, i can see why people ditched it in the 90s and never came back. … but now i’m reading up on some interesting schemes like LZW with 12-bit dictionaries that are selected by o0…o3 context and it clicked in my head that LZP/ROLZ are basically LZW, also looking into some other variations on LZW. probably won’t figure out a nice way to do EC on the LZW output though.
17 March:
weird:
fwrite(&x,1,2,out);significantly slower thanfputc(x>>8,out)and thenfputc(x&0xff,out);- glibc 2.37-15.1. some afterthought: maybe not so weird after all.
14 March:
Hoping to get the very first draft of my whole book printed today. With all the changes to reducing the font and diagram size (to 9pt) it’s 110 pages now.
12 March:
USB-C charging ports = planned obsolescence.
8 March:
Copilot-generated spaghetti left unchecked does almost as much damage to a codebase as an experienced Haskell programmer.
2 March:
The reason why we patch most buffer overflow vulnerabilities is not because they’re a potential RCE. You can’t reliably exploit most of these bugs to get a RCE. The real reason why they’re fixed is that they provide surface for a DoS attack. There’s negligible difference between a heap buffer overflow leading into a segfault and a
panic!("Out of bounds.").
January 2024⌗
14 January:
Bzip3 running on my boyfriend’s PC-98 (486, 66MHz). It seems to work when the block size is set to 1MB and compresses at 22KB/s. The performance can likely be improved.
5 January:
Feelings on GregTech New Horizons so far (got only to around midway LV, may not be representative of the modpack as a whole):
- I generally dislike the ore chunk mechanism; it makes it either too easy to obtain resources (encouraging manually digging out the chunk once you found the one you need) or too difficult (can’t find the one chunk that you need).
- The threshold to being able to stop manual labour and start automating things is rather offputting, given the amount of stuff that needs to be done and manually crafted to do some elementary automation with steam age tools is very time-consuming.
- A lot of things that were familiar to me from mods (BC pipes, IC machines, RP circuits, etc) are no longer available. Me no likey.
- The amount of grind required to get to Thaumcraft and other fun mods is absurd.
December 2023⌗
12 December:
People who think that
is better than
Can not be trusted.
11 December:
I feel like my use of decentralised social media has been a spectacularly failed experiment. A lot of the places I have chosen to stay in have turned out to be echo chambers, further incited by federation which gives me even more surreal echo chambers once I step in. A lot of the content I find uninteresting and usually don’t find myself interacting with people. Actually, The Algorithm is really cool, because if you put in the effort to make your experience better (by blocking, muting, following, etc) you will be able to connect with people like you and be more likely to make friends. I have actually met a lot of friends on Twitter, but I could never say the same about any decentralised “algorithm-free” network. Very little people seem to actually enjoy this experience and the ones who do claim that it’s as simple as following people and talking to them (and they think that it’s great, only because /they/ have found their place). Today marks the second year of me using Matrix and in total I have had productive conversations with under 10 people throughout my stay. The public chatrooms, OTOH, are either full of tinfoil hat-aligned people (of either political denomination), or quite literally have swastikas in the room profile picture. I have (not very concrete) plans of stopping my use of most decentralised services, as the only few people I met here actually turn out to infrequently use them and prefer other media of communication (e.g. Discord)
10 December:
Getting slowly bored of AoC. Too many uninteresting, cookie cutter imperative problems.
9 December:
I wish mailing lists were more common. E-mail feels a bit like a forgotten medium to me, but it helps me stay organised and safe with OpenPGP signing & encryption.
November 2023⌗
18 November:
9 November:
Interesting benchmark results for general-purpose data compressor performance on Brainfuck code (compiled tiny_sk from the asm2bf distribution):
% wc -c * 29446 tiny_sk.b 1188 tiny_sk.b.br 1405 tiny_sk.b.bz2 1368 tiny_sk.b.bz3 1345 tiny_sk.b.gz 1392 tiny_sk.b.lzma 1097 tiny_sk.b.paq8l 1269 tiny_sk.b.zstRemarkably: While PAQ8L wins, its closest contender is actually Brotli. Then Zstandard, to be followed by gzip, bzip3, lzma and bzip2.
8 November:
Figuratively, trying to bite off twice as much as I can chew sounds like a good way to wrap up the last few years for me. Seemingly, I can chew more and more as time passes. This can’t be sustainable.
July 2023⌗
13 July:
Some musings about register allocation.
Before you read this, remember that this is a highly hypothetical scenario completely disconnected from how CPUs work. Registers do not have to be 8 bytes, there are caches for registers, etc…
Consider a special variant of register allocation where outside of wanting to minimise the amount of spills interprocedurally, we also want to put another constraints on how the registers are allocated. For example, instead of using the first available temporary register as many code generators for MIPS do (unfortunately further away from optimal on x86 due to register requirements for div, etc…); we want to pick a register such that the last referenced register is the closest to the currently considered register. In particular, consider some function f(x, n, m) which models the runtime of the two operand instruction being currently executed. Long division p <- p/q has the computational complexity of O(q^2), hence our function f(x,n,m)=(xm)^2, where x signifies the cost of loads from p and q. Loading Q after having loaded Q again is cheap (caching), but loading P after having loaded Q or vice versa is more expensive. The cost x is defined as |R_p - R_q| - i.e. the distance between two registers in the register file. This may come useful in scenarios where registers are large and the computer has multi-level cache that quickly evicts unused data and eagerly caches new data.
For example: div r1, r4 has the cost factor |1-4|=3 further applied to the worst-case (r4)^2 amount of operations - the instruction would take 3*(r4)^2 cycles. The cost factor of div r2, r1 would be only |2-1|=1, hence the instruction takes only (r1)^2 cycles.
Hence the question posed is: What is the most efficient algorithm to model this particular register preference? The answer to this question would probably provide answers to other similar questions regarding register preference that are ubiquitous on platforms where the exact register you choose for a particular variable does matter (e.g. x86; due to how certain instructions like to store output/take input from a hardcoded register).
A crucial thing to notice is that the problem of register allocation with a preference on the closest register available is essentially equivalent to a modified variation of the 1-D Travelling Salesman Problem where every node can be (and is encouraged to be) visited multiple times if possible!
It just so happens that compilers appear to emit low numbered registers, but that’s due to preferential treatment for volatile registers, as used by calling conventions and then coalesced etc. since using a higher numbered (typically where non-volatile/callee-save live) amounts to spill + reload insertion. In graph colouring, one could use a heuristic to select free colours as closest to an already selected colour. Hence the compiler backend developer’s solution to the problem would be prioritising colours closest to the direct neighbours already assigned colours assuming an ordering to the colours, obviously where colours are numbers to produce a non-optimal but relatively good result.
Notice how similar this approach is to the nearest neighbour search approximate solution to the Travelling Salesman Problem. Hence, to connect the dots: I think that this particular solution is the best one considering speed and how close the output is to being optimal. An optimal analogue would be the exhaustive search TSP solution, while a considerably less optimal but way faster in terms of computational complexity option could be applying the Christofides algorithm.
If you are still wondering what is the use of it, I have to disappoint you and refer you to reading and comprehending this article: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck
6 July
A good example of this (red: “It’s not that computers are getting slower, it’s that software is becoming less efficient”) on a completely different layer is JS engines. Notice how stuff like V8 is extremely fast and complicated for what it does. If the web ran on QuickJS or PUC-Rio Lua it would be completely unusable. And this all is because of how much awful horrible JS code there is around, so instead of fixing the very obviously wrong code we simply make better interpreters/compilers, which in the long run, is significantly more complicated.
Instead of putting in the effort to write high quality optimising runtimes for functional or formally verified languages which would actually push computing forward in the long run, we keep trying to make a 30 year old, insignificant or even regressive from a theoretical standpoint, language run fast because the code written in it sucks.
1 July:
Reddit is currently in the cadaveric spasm stage, Twitter is becoming the next Gab, Facebook is a nursery house already, Instagram is for brainless zoomers who miss their childhood, TikTok is a spyware and data harvest tool for CCP with no real utility. Youtube is a clickbait sponsored content view farm full of ads if you don’t use a desktop PC or a laptop with an adblocker. Google, StackExchange and Quora are flooded with AI-generated garbage quicker than they can be cleaned, zoomers don’t know how to use a RSS reader and gen alpha can’t copy a file onto a thumb drive or explain where the downloaded file went because hierarchical file systems are the new black magic.
Sad times are coming. I hope that you have enjoyed the public internet, because it’s all over.
Mobile devices are becoming more locked down, it is currently happening to laptops now. There will be no demand for usable phones without ads in the system settings UI because nobody except select few who are interested in tech whose knowledge spans a little over the Unix directory structure.
Is it good that tech is becoming more accessible? Certainly. But making tech more accessible does not mean removing all power user tools and locking down the entire device “just in case”. This is not improving accessibility. This is an attempt at building a market monopoly where almost every internet-connected device is a trojan horse in its most literal version.
Regarding the recent WHO decision to classify aspartame as a potential carcinogen, remember that being a hairdresser or eating pickled food according to the medical literature is also potentially carcinogenic.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19755396/ & https://aacrjournals.org/cebp/article/21/6/905/69347/Pickled-Food-and-Risk-of-Gastric-Cancer-a
June 2023⌗
30 June:
I have just removed 99% of JavaScript code that used to be on my website. The remaining 0.5KB is used for the mobile navbar to work. So, technically speaking, my website is now completely the same as if you disabled JS entirely. And it still has syntax highlighting in blog posts and math rendering. The only exception being the inherently dynamic subpages of my website (the SDL game ports, etc… - these obviously won’t work well without JS)
26 June:
Most people would never tolerate common scams in a physical setting but if you make one small change as to the technology being used, the mentality in some people changes.
This phenomenon of distancing layers via technology is actually really common; think of how many friends you have that would never fall for traditional multi-level marketing scheme, “get rich quick” scam, penny stock pump and dump, but then if you change the technology to, say, cryptocurrency, then some of those red flags just subconsciously go away. I’ve seen real-life examples of people who on one hand are aware enough to say all these influencers trying to shill this penny stock just want to pump and dump me but then later on they say “Yeah, I really do think that this doggy themed token with no utility whatsoever is going to become 100x more valuable so I better get in quick!” and you might even know somebody who went “I’m not going to give this RuneScape scammer my go- oh my goodness Obama’s doubling my Bitcoin on Twitter!!”.
So many new scams are just old scams with new technology because of this very same psychological distancing barriers that we subconsciously create.
25 June:
It would be nice if IRC didn’t die and someone came up with ways to extend the protocol to support E2EE and other stuff.
I remember being a pretty happy and frequent IRC dweller back in maybe 2019, but it has only gone downhill since (when it came to activity, quality of discussion, the entire freenode drama, etc…) and because I haven’t made that many particularly good friends, I didn’t end up being invited into mid-sized private networks which to my knowledge still thrive and do surprisingly well considering that they are IRC. I can only imagine a similar fate has met XMPP.
OTOH, most quality internet places are slowly moving away from centralised services and slowly dig themselves underground. It’s getting harder and harder to tell AIs apart from humans, some of my friends are particularly paranoid about their messages being used to train LLMs. Internet is slowly becoming an useless sea of spam again.
My main issue with python is the GIL, mess with venvs and other nonsense, bad performance. Python itself is not very embeddable, lacks a proper “type” system. It would be nice if we had some sort of an unintrusive typing system that would help to catch a lot of embarrassing mistakes we make while writing js/python/lua/other untyped languages; I feel like gradual typing from TS actually solves this problem pretty nicely!
A reasonably fast lisp/scheme built on top of a lua-like VM with a gengc & jit compiler + gradual typing of TS and a ground-up implementation of a rich standard library that doesn’t make the programmer reinvent hashtables, graphs or linked hashsets would also be nice. To me what makes a scripting lang good is reasonable (not C-level but still okayish) performance, a substantial amount of software you can graft code from to speed up development (see: python’s ecosystem), some sort of largely inference-based static verification with minimal amount of decorators and other crust to prevent certain classes of errors in the runtime, etc.
22 June:
I have 3 job offers piled up and they are all so interesting… I literally have an interview in 9 minutes (at 4pm)!! The first offer is related to things that feel very interesting to me, on-site, with a reasonable salary; the second is considerably less interesting but it’s remote and (probably) pays better. The third is being a TA. I am certainly going to do the first over the summer break, and then after the summer break I will probably both TA and work the second job concurrently to University. I am the least excited for the TA job, but free credit points are free credit points, and I am not going to be able to TA after I graduate, so I might as well do it while I can.
20 June:
A gentle reminder of the still unsolved issue that I had with the Linux Kernel ever since I started using a M.2 drive:
If you use LUKS to encrypt a M.2 SSD drive and then perform intensive I/O from within the system, it is going to lock up your entire machine. Impressive, isn’t it?
Debian has dm-crypt worker I/O queues enabled by default and they’re written very poorly, so the kernel waits until they are full or near-full before trying to sync them to the disk, and with multiple queues all fighting for disk access, the disk dies under the load and the system locks up. Now, a linux nerd is going to cry me a bucket of tears that the queues are written perfectly with no flaws whatsoever. The problem is that i don’t care, whatever iotop shows is the truth revealed.
I also can’t run any of my VirtualBox VMs because of this bug in VBox reported 10 years ago: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10031?cversion=0&cnum_hist=14. Obviously, VBox hates I/O latency and eventually gives up if access to the host’s storage takes too long so the hypervisor turns back around to the guest VM and says that the read/write is impossible and the Windows instance in the machine randomly bluescreens.
Situations like these make me miss Windows pretty badly. Shame that W8, W10 and W11 are essentially spyware unless you go through heights to debloat them.
19 June:
Calling all C language lawyers for help: I am wondering whether empty structures are allowed or not. assuming either c99 or c11, whichever more favourable. To quote the standard,
6.2.6.1 Except for bit-fields, objects are composed of contiguous sequences of one or more bytes, the number, order, and encoding of which are either explicitly specified or implementation-defined.
This could imply that an empty struct has a non-zero size (so a C++ like behaviour), however, 6.2.5-20 says: “A structure type describes a sequentially allocated nonempty set of member objects”. So I thought that I can circumvent it the following way:
struct { int dummy: 0; } variable;One would have to remove the declarator, yielding
struct { int : 0; } variable;, per 6.7.2.1.4: “The expression that specifies the width of a bit-field shall be an integer constant expression with a nonnegative value that does not exceed the width of an object of the type that would be specified were the colon and expression omitted.) If the value is zero, the declaration shall have no declarator.”So finally, whether we can have empty structs or not depends on whether int : 0 counts as a member object, but i can’t find anything that would be conclusive on this matter. I have already observed that the C standard treats zero size bit-fields specially, but the only relevant bit of information I could find was 6.7.2.1.12: “As a special case, a bit-field structure member with a width of 0 indicates that no further bit-field is to be packed into the unit in which the previous bit-field, if any, was placed.”
Any ideas?
N.B. the wording in 6.7.2.1.4 says “non-negative”, not “positive”, meaning that the width of 0 is technically allowed as a “normal” width.
18 June:
One thing that I feel very thankful for is my university helping me to completely 180 my opinion of academia: from “It would be cool to be an uni-affiliated researcher after I am done with my studies” to open resentment.
My opinion is rather long and nuanced, but my main issues are the issues with publishing, how hierarchic academia is, especially when you look at freshly graduated M.Sc’s and B.Sc’s who were by chance allowed to TA in B.Sc-level classes.
In academia, you don’t even get to validate the results of “novel algorithms” yourself, let alone get any timings. Papers usually never publish source code, derivations - nothing. I wonder where is the outrage for the piss poor state of academic research, where you keep seeing lots of papers just rehashing known ideas, calling them new, presenting claims of SOA without even checking what’s out there, and providing no way to reproduce it? In image compression most are just based on MatLab simulations and cherry picked results on 4 or 5 low resolution images. Doesn’t help that most reviewers for scientific journals are completely illiterate when it comes to data compression. A lot of the papers are cryptic, seem difficult to implement, there’s no way to verify the claims so you have to trust the charts and tables, even if there was a reviewer motivated by hell knows what (reviewers are, usually, unpaid) the paper authors could corner him by saying that his re-implementation of their highly abstract paper is inefficient so the timings or memory usage don’t compare. And of course, nobody in academia ever publishes source code because by doing so you basically hand a loaded gun to the reviewer, as it’s simple to go through some ready made code, compile it and verify it rather than follow a dense math expression that looks like a 8th grader learning about “complex math notation” and try to reason whether that’s practical or not - not including the code makes it less likely for your fraud to be discovered. This problem isn’t even exclusive to data compression, but it’s specifically prevalent there. Many medical paper frauds aren’t properly uncovered for decades even though clinical trials can usually be repeated in just about every hospital around the world. The amount of people who want to go through a poorly typeset 70 page paper in some niche journal full of math gibberish that promises to turn lead into gold and spaghetti trees is probably close to zero. When you publish something, what you want on your cv is usually the only thing that matters. The people who will read and attempt at understanding your paper will probably be only you, the reviewer and that one random hobbyist who found it on google scholar and gave up when he saw the 3rd page.
May 2023⌗
5 May:
This has to be the most curiosity-inducing error messagge that I have seen in a long while.
In static member function ‘static constexpr std::char_traits<char>::char_type* std::char_traits<char>::copy(char_type*, const char_type*, std::size_t)’, inlined from ‘static constexpr void std::__cxx11::basic_string<_CharT, _Traits, _Alloc>::_S_copy(_CharT*, const _CharT*, size_type) [with _CharT = char; _Traits = std::char_traits<char>; _Alloc = std::allocator<char>]’ at /usr/include/c++/12/bits/basic_string.h:423:21, [...] /usr/include/c++/12/bits/char_traits.h:431:56: warning: ‘void* __builtin_memcpy(void*, const void*, long unsigned int)’ accessing 9223372036854775810 or more bytes at offsets -4611686018427387902 and [-4611686018427387903, 4611686018427387904] may overlap up to 9223372036854775813 bytes at offset -3 [-Wrestrict] 431 | return static_cast<char_type*>(__builtin_memcpy(__s1, __s2, __n)); | ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Turns out that this is actually a compiler bug - https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=105329 and the comments on this thread are awesome. Creating a new string instance using the (int n, char c) constructor basically causes warnings to break due to some issue with Ranger, it’s been a known bug for 2 minor versions of GCC, and there is no good fix for it. And you need a PhD in compiler design to understand why.
April 2023⌗
18 April:
Realisation: When I was working on my ELF infector post, I once didn’t properly sandbox it from the rest of my system. This way I accidentally got cargo and a bunch of other binaries infected and when they randomly started behaving weirdly, I finally figured out what was going on and reinstalled Rust.
14 April:
One way to allow RC without a cycle collector would be to enforce an unidirectional heap. And the actor model will surely help in avoiding atomics too.
13 April:
Seems like bzip3 wipes the floor with lzma when it comes to java class files. What if i told you that the size of the average jar you see online could be 2x-4x smaller?
94136320 lisp.tar 6827813 lisp.tar.bz3 13984737 lisp.tar.gz 7693715 lisp.tar.lzma 8292311 lisp.tar.zst 130934896 total
February 2023⌗
22 February:
Day ∞ of people telling me to rewrite KamilaLisp from Java to Rust, C++, JS or [insert your favourite language here].
NO.
Frankly, none of these people seem to understand how language choice affects a project. There are many languages, all of them are fundamentally different in a way that affect the entire design, prototyping and development process. Java has a good garbage collector (in fact, one of the best ones available to my knowledge - a concurrent, regionalized and generational garbage collector that meets a soft real-time goal with high probability or Shenandoah with sub-nanosecond pauses for multi-gigabyte heaps according to Shipilëv), meaning that in my tree-walk interpreter workloads (adhering to the generational hypothesis) it performs substantially better than standard non-generational Cheney garbage collectors (as present in functional languages, I’m thinking of Idris because some madcap suggested me to rewrite KamilaLisp in that) or atomic reference counting that would need a hand-made cycle collector anyway. Java, for my purposes, is comfortable and flexible enough to implement my designs as I like (e.g. chaining i/o streams, collections, etc…) while focusing on what needs to be implemented, not various roadblocks that make it difficult (oops, my linked list destructor just overflowed the stack! oops, circular reference! oops, making a GUI takes forever! oops, Arc’s atomic inc/dec takes 70% of my runtime!). I have implemented a full hybrid tiling and floating window manager, terminal emulator all inside a remote IDE that communicates with KamilaLisp instances over the network with platform-agnostic UI in two days. And my application still stays portable as a single JAR that you can execute on Windows, Linux, MacOS and your friend’s old AMD Athlon machine from 2010 with no changes.
Which brings me upon the final point. If you pester OSS maintainers to [rewrite X in Y], most of the times you are just an idiot. And on top of that, from my experience you rarely get anything worthwhile done and constantly yak-shave even the simplest design decisions. Language choice is usually well reasoned in the mind of the main developer and there are usually reasons as to why we don’t rewrite our entire 40k lines/2 megabytes of code in [popular modern language with lots of hype around it]. There is not and will not be a place for people who suggest me to alter fundamental design decisions of my projects with little to no reasoning behind it. Nowadays I just block people like this on sight because I assume upfront that they’re not worth my time and never regret it.
16 February:
It’s alive…
13 February:
I have decided to decommission Lovelace (the i5-7400 16G server) and sell it. Primarily because it’s not very power efficient and I can move my services to VPSes anyway.
9 February:
An interesting method of computing permutation parity using the 3-cycle composition property:
Unsurprisingly, translates horribly into array logic languages. I wonder how would I implement it in my Lisp…
January 2023⌗
14 January:
A (hopefully) interesting idea: A virtual machine with a rich standard library and instruction set, procedural, functional, based on the Actor model. I plan to use only reference counting and cycle collection, have it be variable-based (no manual register allocation and no stack to make matters worse). Fully immutable, but it’s possible to implement functional data structures using a cute way built into the interpreter. Likely JIT-compiled using either cranelift or llvm. Can send code over the LAN or even the Internet for transparently parallel execution. Provides some cute utilities for number pushing; completely statically typed and ideally the code is monomorphised before being passed to the VM.
December 2022⌗
20 December:
I hate programmers who have very big mouth and tunnel vision eyes that together jump to form the most radical and nonsense views I have seen in my life. And nothing to back their redundant opinions with.
8 December:
Having implemented the Lerch transcendent and Riemann zeta, now it’s time for the Hurwitz zeta. Technically speaking, the Lerch transcendent is a generalisation of the Hurwitz zeta, so that ζ(s,n)=L(0,n,s)=Φ(1,s,n); However, my implementation of Lerch phi (which is still not as efficient as I’d like…) computes the upper incomplete Gamma function value as a factor in the final result, and when z=1 a!=1 we stumble upon a funny case where the upper incomplete Gamma function has a complex pole /yet/ the Lerch phi is defined at this point (as of course the Hurwitz zeta).
The game plan now is to implement a somewhat general Euler-MacLaurin summation function and derive the formula for the n-th derivative of the Hurwitz zeta function with respect to s (which should obviously be trivial) to speed up the “general” method.
This will have an interesting consequence: We can compute an arbitrary derivative of the Hurwitz zeta at any point we wish, meaning that computing the Glaisher constant defined in terms of the derivative of zeta at some integral point will become attainable.
The pieces of puzzle in SciJava are slowly coming together.
November 2022⌗
11 November:
I tasted vanilla Chai Tea for the first time in my life! And the first thing I did after coming back home from uni cafe was to try making it myself at home. Turns out i packaged some ginger when i moved, i had some cinnamon and i bought honey on my way home. I made it and the taste was rather mild and I realised that the tea I brewed from the leaves was too strong. Better luck tomorrow I hope.
29 October:
It feels sort of cathartic to scroll though my old posts here. I like looking back to my thoughts which are tame enough to post to the public, I like seeing how much the circumstances have changed since the posts that introduce some of my projects. From what I noticed, a well-maintained Fedi account is actually way simpler to keep clean compared to the same Twitter account. It’s great that Fedi accommodates for the tentative wordsmiths with a relatively long message length limit.
In other news: I have pieced together a small calendar plan for myself until the end of the year. I should probably incorporate some sort of a calendar application to my daily life instead of trying to remember it all and relying on notes to remind me things instead.
Speaking of notes, I’m getting slowly accustomed at my new university. There’s also a slim chance that some people who know me IRL read this! Our campus is super large, but it turns out that most of my lectures will take place in the largest lecture halls in just a single block of the university and also the university cafe seems to be in the same group of buildings too. I have noticed that most of the people in non-programming-related lectures usually take notes on iPads or other devices (such as Remarkable). I chose to stick with my Thinkpad, a note taking app and my flawless LaTeX skill.
To speak of some frustrations I’ve had, I can’t believe how awful women’s clothing tends to be in terms of quality and also I can’t believe that I haven’t noticed this issue before. I know plenty of women who shop in the men’s section - and I can absolutely understand that. Most of the clothes I own are certainly overpriced not that durable. But they’re pretty comfortable and stylish which is probably the main selling point. It also seems like I don’t vibe in with the style of people here, because it always takes me hours upon hours to find something I really like in retailers I sometimes visit on my way home.
28 October:
Words can not describe my frustration with asmjs. Why do I have to copy my buffers back and forth between Emscripten heap and the normal heap? Surely just passing the JS buffer should work, but the ticket in the Emscripten repository that would allow this has been hanging open for years now, so I have the choice between publishing absolute garbage that will run with maybe 5-10% of the speed of the native version and use 10 times more memory, or just forget that I wanted to make an web port of my thing.
August 2022⌗
30 August:
Taking another look at it, I feel like MalbolgeLISP (especially v1.2) might be the best thing I made in my life. It’s so weird to think that it’s been a year now…
29 August:
My thinkpad arrived today! Just E14 with a Zen 3 Ryzen 5 and 16G of RAM. Initially had a few issues with making it boot off USB and getting networking to work, but now it works pretty good and I’m happy with it.
May 2022⌗
23 May:
Good and bad news!
First, my compressor is assymetric now. The bad news is that it’s assymetric the wrong way around - compression is quite a bit faster than decompression…
4 May:
Once in a while, the circumstances allow to use the goes-to operator…