eholk

I used the Nano pass framework for my language when I was in grad school and loved it. I forget the exact count but I think we had 40 or 50 passes. Generally each pass either did some analysis that would be consumed by a later pass or it rewrote some higher level concept or feature in terms of more primitive operations.

Nanopass had a DSL for describing what forms you delete from each intermediate language and which forms you add. Each pass was generally pretty small then, usually just replacing one form with some set of other forms.

Be cause each pass was really small it was pretty easy to reorder them. Sometimes we figured out if we moved one optimization sooner then later passes worked better. Or we realized some analysis was useful somewhere else so we rearranged the passes again. The pass ordering made it really clear which analysis results are valid at each point in the compilation process.

I took it as meaning "perspectives of people in the Rust Project about AI."

You know, that's exactly how I learned to program.

I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.

I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.

Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.

When we were teenagers, one of my friends lit a guitar pick on fire. It was a lot more exciting than we expected! We thought it'd just shrivel up and melt, but instead it was like the pick was made of solid rocket fuel.

Bjarne Stroustrup is 74, so he probably counts as a senior too at this point, although surely more technically literate than the stereotypes.

Still, I'm in my early 40s and I find myself baffled when I help my mom with her iPhone. I've been an Android guy ever since that was an option.

For what it's worth, I've read both Bostrom's Superintelligence and AI 2027. Reading Superintelligence was interesting and for me really drove home how hard setting aligned goals for an AI is, but the timelines seemed far enough out that it wasn't likely to be something that would matter in my lifetime.

AI 2027 was much more impactful on me. It probably helps that I read it the same week I started playing with agent mode on GitHub Copilot. Seeing what AI can already do, especially compared to six months ago, and then seeing their projections made AI seem like something much more worth paying attention to.

Yeah, getting from here to being killed by rogue AI nanobots in less than five years still seems pretty far fetched to me. But, each of the steps in their scenario didn't seem completely outside the realm of possiblity.

So for me personally, my 80% confidence interval includes both things stagnating pretty much where they are now, but also something more like AI 2027. I suspect we'll be fine, but AGI seems like a real enough possibility that it's worth working on a contingency plan.

This was back when Internet Explorer was at version 7. Some Mozilla folks told me they used to get questions like "when are you going to upgrade to Internet 7 like Microsoft?"

If I remember right, after Firefox 4 they skipped a few versions and started the train model, while also trying to de-emphasize the version number in marketing.

If you're using Windows, in my experience Thunderbird is essentially unusable until you add a Windows Defender exclusion for your Thunderbird profile.

Would that mean Indiana goes back to the way they were before they started doing Daylight Savings Time?

Firefox adopted rapid version numbers basically because the rest of the browsers did. For years Firefox was on 3.something, and they'd get questions from people saying things like "Microsoft is already on Internet 7, when are you going to support Internet 7?" If I recall right, Firefox skipped versions 5 and 6, and starting with 7 they decided to use a rapid version number scheme and deemphasize version numbers in their marketing.

I'd be really interested to see a comparison of the relative risks between skin cancer and vitamin D deficiency.

A lot of what I've read lately suggests we're discovering a lot of benefits of vitamin D that were previously unknown, and some evidence that the recommended vitamin D levels should be higher than they are.

For a generation or so we've told people the sun is dangerous because of skin cancer, and obviously skin cancer is really bad. But I wonder if we have a case of need to weight risks that are high cost, low probability (skin cancer) compared with low cost, high probability (low vitamins D complications). What is the overall effect of these two things?

I think originally Roman numerals didn't have shorthands like IV instead of IIII. In that case, to add Roman numerals, you just write the letters all together, sort them, and combine smaller digits into larger digits as necessary.

Typically the way systems do this is by translating small sections of straightline code, and patching the exits as they are translated. So you start by saying translate the block at address 0x1234. That code may go until a jump to address 0x4567. When translating that jump, they instead make a call to the runtime system which says "where is the translated code starting at address 0x4567?" If the code doesn't exist, it goes ahead and translates that block and patches the originally jump to skip the runtime system next time around.

This means early on in the program's run you spend a lot of time translating code, but it pretty quickly stabilizes and you spend most of your time in already translated code.

Of course, if your program is self modifying then the system needs to do some more work to invalidate the translation cache when the underlying code is modified.

I see it as a way of focusing the discussion. The numbers we could plug into it are mostly all wild guesses, but the exercise of plugging in different numbers can still be instructive.

For example, we now know there are a huge number of planets out there, and even planets in the habitable zone. Yet we haven't found any extraterrestrial life, so that suggests maybe the other factors are smaller than we initially would have guessed.