this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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it’s the actual fucking worst when the topics you’re researching get popular in TESCREAL circles, because all of the accessible sources past that point have a chance of being cult nonsense that wastes your time
I’ve been designing some hardware that speaks lambda calculus as a hobby project, and it’s frustrating when a lot of the research I’m reading for this is either thinly-veiled cult shit, a grift for grant dollars, or (most often) both. I’ve had to develop a mental filter to stop wasting my time on nonsensical sources:
I think the worst part is having to emphasize that I’m not with these cult assholes when I occasionally talk about my hobby work — I’m not in it to make the revolutionary machine that’ll destroy the Turing orthodoxy or implement anyone’s machine god. what I’m making most likely won’t even be efficient for basic algorithms. the reason why I’m drawn to this work is because it’s fun to implement a machine whose language is a representation of pure math (that can easily be built up into an ML-like assembly language with not much tooling), and I really like how that representation lends itself to an HDL implementation.
oh absolutely! I get too much exposure to the crank side of all of those topics from my family, so I can definitely relate. now I’m flashing back to the last couple of times my mom learned the artificial sweetener I use is killing me (from the same discredited source every time; they make the “discovery” that a new artificial sweetener causes cancer every few years) and came over specifically to try and convince me to throw out the whole bag
that too! processed sugar was the devil too, as if granulizing cane sugar imbued it with the essence of evil. she also claimed they used bleach to make white refined sugar? I think the end goal was to get me to reject the idea of flavor. joke’s on that lady, my cooking is both much better than hers and absolutely terrible for you
Oh boy, I have thoughts about Kolmogorov complexity. I might actually write a section in my textbook-in-progress to explain why it can't do what LessWrongers want it to.
A silly thought I had the other day: If you allow your Universal Turing Machine to have enough states, you could totally set it up so that if the first symbol it reads is "0", it outputs the full text of The Master and Margarita in UNICODE, whereas if it reads "1", it goes on to read the tuples specifying another TM and operates as usual. More generally, you could take any 2^N - 1 arbitrarily long strings, assign each one an N-bit abbreviation, and have the UTM spit out the string with the given abbreviation if the first N bits on the tape are not all zeros.
You could use the recent-ish Junferno video about Turing machines to demonstrate that point as well
doing work that's not trying to free us from the tyranny of century-old mathematical formulations? how dare you! burn the witch!
(/s, of course! also your hardware calculus project sounds like a nicer time than my batshit idea (I want to make a fluidic processor.. someday..))
fuck yeah! this sounds like the kind of thing that’d be incredibly beautiful if done on the macro scale (if that’s possible) — I love computational art projects that clearly show their mechanism of action. it’s unfortunate that a majority of hardware designers have a “what’s the point of this, it’s not generating value for shareholders” attitude, because that’s the point! I will make a uniquely beautiful computing machine and it won’t have any residual value any capitalist assholes can extract other than the beauty!
if I ever finish this thing, I should make a coprocessor that can trace its closure lists live as it reduces lambda calculus terms and render them as fractal art to a screen. I think that’d be fun to watch.
Yep. I love beautiful machines with beautiful action in the same way.
One of my favourites I’ve seen was a clock with a tilt table, switchback running tracks running widthwise across that table, and switches by the track ends. A small ball would run across the track for 60s until it hits the switch, which would cause a lever system to flip the orientation of the tilt table (starting the ball movement the other way).
Saw it in the one London collection of typically-stolen antiquities, I don’t recall the origin of it.
For the processor: yep, something larger is the intent, but I think I’d have to start with a model scale first just to suss out some practical problems. And then when scaling it, other problems. God knows if I’d want to make this “you can walk in it” scale, but I’ll see 😅
Nonsense, we all know the robot god will be hacked together in Perl.