I know some German, though have forgotten a lot over the years due to lack of use. Can generally speak enough to get my point across, at least. Can read Spanish some though I've forgotten even more of that (elementary school in south CA was bilingual).

As for computer languages besides the usual HTML/CSS... I write C# and VBA on a fairly regular basis, there's also APDL scripting for ANSYS (FORTRAN based), Javascript and a little Lua. I think that's it for what I'm active in right now. There's a dozen or so other languages that I've used extensively in the past that would take me a few minutes to spool up again (TI, MATLAB, LaTeX, various application/game scripting engines, some C++...)

English.

I misremembered why the solver works. I did use Horn clauses, but only to simplify the language implementation - it has union and set minus, so you can do something like

2 lbs gold
4 lbs silver or platinum
2 lbs other shiny metal

and it works too. (Union is equivalent to "or" in set construction.)

The simplifying assumption is actually that each category must be either a subset, superset, or disjoint of all others.

So it was a ring? Did you ever give it a measure?

baby i need ur credit card so we can chat more hehe

From what I noticed though Markov chain bots really suck.

Which sorta makes the joke all the more insulting. You know, the old line about failing the Turing test.

According to the link to the topic I linked to on Wikipedia, the gibberish posted by Mark V Shaney didn't stand out at all on the singles Usenet group.

I don't think the Turing test is that informative. I think a better test is "how long could an AI seem human". Because no AI could deceive a person forever, unless if there's some large (unprecedented?) development, but I doubt that's coming anytime soon. So really I see it as a matter of degree.

I could also just be an idiot, it's only an idea I had.

.

Failing the Turing test doesn't make you autistic. It makes you indistinguishable from a bot who feeds back your own statements in modified form, like ELIZA or Spook.

"Autism" would be super hard to simulate, since it would require something closer to actual creativity.

I kind of misread your post I guess. You just like calling yourself autistic and weren't talking about the Turing test by then.

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The million dollar question is, does "autistic" behavior result from using online discussion boards, or do online discussion boards attract such people?

Third and fourth options: I'm projecting, or just making a hasty generalization from a single data point? And by having done so, do we now have two data point? Makes you think.

I assumed everyone here was autistic.

I don't see another option really.

Y'all kinda ableist

The word gets thrown around a lot, but in all seriousness, introversion ≠ autism. In fact, AFAIK, scientists have yet to really understand just what autism is, biologically.

We're all half autistic.

Yeah. Probably shouldn't use autistic that way. I'm using it to mean "awkward as ****" when obviously it's a real disease that's not a joke so.. yeah.

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And we all stack cans and have special talents.

I was 12.

with all this autism talk, did Massassi ever have an anti-vaxxer? I don't recall any, but it would come as no surprise to me.

I wish that anti-vaxxer were still around. I'd like to learn a thing or two.

9/11 truthers? I bet there's one or two lingering around...

Artistic. Not autistic. The second one is a 4chan meme and an indicator of low self-esteem when applied reflexively.

So I'm pretty sure that it would be possible to define an additive set function and turn the space of tables into a measure space. I don't know if that would ever be of use, but it's pretty cool. What.. uh.. subject are you talking about? Programming language theory?

I think some academics about 50 to 100 years ago in the age of Kleene and Godel still harbored the illusion that computer science was math.

Dijkstra

https://pron.github.io/posts/correctness-and-complexity

No, I was thinking of the Russian complexity theorists.

I think today people like Stephen Wolfram are an approximation of this approach.

It's not math... Or maybe it's a "new kind of" math.

(Or according to his critics, maybe not so new.)

Kolmogorov

That's one person.

Actually, I believe Markov was another.

No, I was thinking of his son, Andrey Markov, Jr..

But in his case, it looks like he was considering math to be computer science (constructivism), rather than the other way around.

Yes I should't have either. What I meant was that all of us here are the insufferable kind of people who might blame our unpersonable manner on 'autism' in an offhand remark, or are perhaps even the people who want to identify as autistic outright to avoid the responsibility of becoming people who can be liked by others (a real insult to people who actually have autism to use it in that manner, and I have run into it a lot with STEM students) or to lord our self identified genetically superior niche intelligence over other people.




I thought I remembered Sarn saying something about that? But I am probably confusing people from long ago. For some reason when I combine Massassi and vaccines in my head the Navy pops up so that's what I'm going off of.

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As for making fun of disease, I'm going to stop using autistic in that derogatory sense. I do want to comment though on how much nicer humans are in general nowadays. I've been writing an essay on ancient Greek religion and it's hard to comprehend how cruel their culture was at times. Literally, there was a festival where, in order to keep out pestilence and famine, they would pick a person to exile (or sacrifice/holocaust when things got bad), and they would pick someone ugly and/or diseased, beat them with sticks and chase them out of town with stones. Sometimes they would throw the person off a cliff.

However, it's important to emphasize that they would pick the ugly and diseased. The sticks they used were from so-called fruitless plants, which over a wide variety of texts appear to symbolize the same thing, infertility and uselessness. They would adorn these people with crowns of this sort of necklaces of wild figs, symbolizing the same.

I'm not in any way trying to justify my use because it was wrong. But holy ****, society has come a long way in our thousands of years.

Not only can we take solace at being better humans than the Greeks, but also than the POTUS, in just about every dimension (well, to the extent that the president has dimensions to speak of).

Except, perhaps, that he (and Charlie Sheen) are far, far more adept at "winning" than most of us.

I'm not sure what that would mean. The output of every function is disjoint subsets of the input set, defined using some predicate and a goal quantity (= cardinality, if the input has unit quantities). It's like a way of converting an input set into a bunch of disjoint subsets, such that the desired predicates and cardinalities of those disjoint sets are satisfied.

I'm talking about programming language theory, but only to the extent that it is a programming language, and it's usefulness is theoretical. I wouldn't pretend to be competent at the actual theory of programming language design.

I more or less designed this language on a lark (and for a bunch of undergrad credit). I'm not sure I really "get" the language anymore, assuming I ever did. Probably running out of steam explaining it though.

Why wouldn't computer science be math? The Curry-Howard isomorphism shows that both computer programmers and mathematicians share an elementary kind of reasoning. It's just as valid to say that computer programming is math, as it is to say that math is computer programming, or that both are special cases of something more fundamental that we haven't yet discovered.

Fair warning: I glanced at it, but I didn't read it closely, so I'm not sure how much terrain this page covers. However, I'm not gonna let that stop me from sharing my opinion on the subject (as someone who has worked on or with every single kind of tool or method listed on that page).

Program verification academics is a lot of hand wringing about problems that don't usually turn out to be that important in practice. Every real bug I've ever encountered has been a failure of specification correctness, not a failure of implementation correctness.

Know what's actually good at handling failures of specification? Putting contracts in your specification.

The statically enforced kind (types)
The dynamically enforced kind (assertions)
The manually enforced kind (acceptance criteria / passing tests)

All of these are ways in which you formally express your specification, in ways that can be evaluated automatically.

The best static analysis checkers are the ones that automatically enforce some badly specified contract, like catching when code fails to check the return value from a standard library function that can return null. Those kinds of things are easily enforced through a competent type system, as long as you take the time to do it, but most don't.