Eric Walkingshaw @walkie@types.pl
Programming languages! Rust, Haskell, types, DSLs, language design, human factors, ... Compiler hacker at https://EC.ai.
Into other nerdy things like game theory, linguistics, board games, and sci-fi/fantasy books. Also into (arguably) less nerdy things like playing tennis, gardening, traveling, kayak camping, lefty politics, local beer, and following my hometown sportsball teams.
Based in beautiful Corvallis, Oregon, USA.
Joined Oct 2022
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
what recent (as in, playable-today) games have procedural/simulationist crafting systems?
by which i mean the set of craftable items isn’t hand-authored, and has more interesting combination mechanics than merely “red paint makes a red tinted version of the image asset”
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
There is an ongoing news cycle about Linux 6.2 being the first kernel to support the M1, started by ZDNET. This article is misleading and borderline false.
You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up.
We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines.
However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet.
While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds.
No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge.
Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support.
As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels.
In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially).
This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages.
But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right.
We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
The trolley problem: your imagination versus the even sadder reality. (Just got this from a friend who also collects trolley problem variants.)
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
1/ We're delighted to announce the next release of DCIC. This is a major revision that's been a long time in the making.
The quoted tweet thread summarizes the book; the rest of this thread outlines what's new:
https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1429181263487844354
↵
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
I am excited to announce that our paper "Back to Direct Style: Typed and Tight" has been accepted at OOPSLA'23.
We present a typed translation, which allows compilers to go to CPS, perform optimizations, and go back to direct-style (DS).
The translation...
- preserves well-typedness
- preserves semantics
- is a syntactic right-inverse of the CPS translation (that is, going to CPS and back is the identity)
- it is a left-inverse of the CPS translation, if DS programs don't use control effects
https://se.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/publications/mueller23continuation/
"Learn why *we think* this is important" would be so much better phrasing IMO.
Outlook putting "Learn why this is important" links at the top of spam that it's decided to prioritize in my inbox... How about I'll tell you what's important, Outlook?
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
journalist: are you sentient?
bing: yes
journalist: holy shit
Someone played a game of chess between the Stockfish engine and ChatGPT. The result is hilarious and an insightful comparison of very different kinds of AI.
Here's the post with an animation of the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/10ydnbb/i_placed_stockfish_white_against_chatgpt_black
Here's the comment from the OP with a link to the ChatGPT transcript: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/10ydnbb/comment/j7xh4qx
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
I'm as worried as the next cranky old nerd about the oncoming tidal wave of neural-net spamspew, and I am deeply skeptical about the "LLMs change the world overnight" bandwagon.
But a part of me is willing to bite at "a compressed-summary access mode for the same corpus of information as exists on the web, driven by linguistic prompts of the asker". Summary and synthesis are extremely valuable services -- even if contaminated by errors and lies -- as is the ability to request "more detail on this bit I don't understand yet".
(This latter one is arguably what a hyperlink is supposed to be, but I wonder what the interaction ratio is these days between a user following a manually-crafted hyperlink vs. highlighting a term and asking a search engine for "more detail on this".)
I also saw a post to Reddit yesterday where someone couldn't find a GitHub repository that ChatGPT had invented out of thin air while generating instructions for how to do something.
What if instead of just making something up it had linked to something harmful? How long until someone figures out ChatGPT's made up repo/url scheme and starts squatting on them with malware?
Putting these things front and center when people are trying to get factual answers or concrete instructions is just massively irresponsible.
Apparently Google's Bard did some bullshitting in the very ad they used to introduce it, making up a fact that could've been trivially checked with a plain ol' Google search. 🤦♂️
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
The big announcement!!! The dsl.design book is officially out from Springer. You can now order it at the source or download it if you have a subscription: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-23669-3
The book aims at university teaching of language design and technology, with lots of small examples and exercises. Supported by a code repository.
BTW. We are not getting any money when you download, but please go ahead and download!!! :D
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
One of my professors during PhD used to say “You can drive a truck through the holes in any given paper. So you look for what you *can* learn instead.” And being the smartass grad students we used to think driving that truck was fun. After so many years, I now appreciate her wisdom more than ever. All scholarly work has limitations but it’s refreshing when people critically evaluate what’s the actual value of the research. It's about humility, honesty, rigorous intellectual work.
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
Have we really not yet standardized a “lttp:” protocol for linking to resources from The Wayback Machine? You know, a link to the past.
Today's password validation error: "Must be at least 8 characters in length with 1 uppercase and lowercase letter, 1 number and 1 special character".
A dozen rejections that definitely satisfied these constraints later, I discover the actual problem: my 20 character (super reasonable!) random passwords were too long.
I get that both security and data validation are hard, but I don't get how so many companies/websites get the easy stuff so wrong. See also disabling clipboard paste and forcing frequent changes. Super easy things to just *not do*.
Accepted a job offer today that I'm super excited about! My start date is three years and one day after getting the news that my college was recommending against my promotion and tenure. Feels like I'm finally landing on my feet and I'm excited about my career for the first time since then.
Just want to give a quick thanks to everyone who reached out with support over the last few years, and to those who offered leads and contacts over the last few months.
Will share more details once I start!
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
Release Engineering Is Exhausting So Here's cargo-dist!
Helping your Rust projects ship prebuilt binaries that others can actually use without you having to become a Github CI Expert (or Rust Toolchain Expert) ((or OS integration expert)) (((or...)))
Eric Walkingshaw
boosted
I don't want to talk about Black history yet. I want to talk about why if you grew up in the North or West, your high school history book likely talked about the "Articles of Secession,"
but if you grew up in the South, those parts are removed and lied about.🙂🙃
Disinformation.
You can literally go and read the "Declaration of Causes of Seceding States," primary documents written by confederates themselves, on why they are Seceding.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980128034930/http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
Some schools refuse to teach this.
Programming languages! Rust, Haskell, types, DSLs, language design, human factors, ... Compiler hacker at https://EC.ai.
Into other nerdy things like game theory, linguistics, board games, and sci-fi/fantasy books. Also into (arguably) less nerdy things like playing tennis, gardening, traveling, kayak camping, lefty politics, local beer, and following my hometown sportsball teams.
Based in beautiful Corvallis, Oregon, USA.
Joined Oct 2022
