Comment : on Aesthetics in Programming Language Design

 ( link ) 

I view it as a [human-computer interaction] / industrial design / civil architecture problem.

( Caveat : links I posted are mostly just my own desk study notes which are messy. )

I'm designing a tooling language, myself. I am still spending most of my time on the architecture from lexeme design to memory layout, than doing any coding.

1. The most fun part is comparative history of PLs. You can see which trope comes from which origin. Every operator, conventional name for a mechanism, and decision of implicit/explicit control has a genealogy. It's basically philology for PL.

2. The three main layers for me to encapsulate are

• formal grammar : universe of UI

• IR : hardware independent description of language semantics

• implementations

Formal grammars are the cosmetic differences which casual users think of as "the language" and so the toolchain I want is something where I can change the formal grammar, and see the implications it has on difficulty to compile to IR, as well as downstream effect on specific architectures under different compile time and runtime situations (small vs big code base, few vs many contributors etc.)

I am incredibly annoyed that there is not one IR standard for information interchange 'IRSII' , and so this is the one of the things I think about with every design decision. "How is X done in each of the N other languages I already know how to use?" Anyway, all design decisions about language semantics basically filter down to some sort of IRSII, which can represent any computing idiom, and the language designer just uses it to express what they dis/allow their language to do. This is where decisions about type systems, and object paradigms, and guarantees of all sorts for safety, concurrency, performance, and ergonomics, come in.

Finally the harder CPU sequencing and memory layout stuff. For ease of headspace, as a hobbyist with limited resources, I just think about how to implement it on a VM, using a simplified model of where registers, cache, stack, heap, and how memory is de/allocated. Because I am very poor, and noob, it is useful to target JS first, with a view to do other backends later.

Rough epistemic model

 Rough epistemic model : 

• 1. Truth, to an individual human, is a hormonal cascade which stabilises a neural holding pattern, and subsequently a broader physiological holding pattern, associated with positive well-being ( 'pleasure' ). 
• 1.1. It results from recognition of semantic coherence, between the expectation of what a sign means, and the reified discovery of what a sign means. ( Phew, anxiety alleviated, risk-off, etc. )
• 2. Truth, to groups of humans, is determined by the establishment of semantic coherence in communication within the group, synchronising each individual's notion (1.) of truth.
• 3. Truth, to an anthropomorphic machine, is a model of (1.)

Sometimes the discipline of maths is stupid.

Today's research into the historical and contemporary use of [proof assistants] and [automated theorem provers] is a sobering reminder of certain idiocies which annoyed me as an undergraduate :

• 1. many professional mathematicians are not practitioners of formal mathematics - this may not be news for many, but it was certainly an irritating discovery for me  back in the day ( and it remains irritating to be reminded of this today )
• 2. the entire concept of relying on intuition and a closed community-of-the-intuitively-attuned to uphold norms of any sort, let alone scientific norms, is just ass-backwards and needs to die; or you know, it should be made explicit who is a low-context/explicit mathematician, and who is a high-context/intuitive mathematician, so that others can pick their associations, pedagogical paths, and strategise about any other work appropriately

I am happy with my decision at the time to set all of this aside, and to focus the first part of my career on accumulating other knowledge. Now the time has come for me to do the harder work. Hopefully something will come of it, which I will be happier with, than I am with the state of the world as it is.

Unsupervised Learning is mainly good for Feature Detection

Unsupervised learning is useful for low-level wetware emulation ... feature detection, signal recognition, etc. 

However, most of what we call civilisation and social life, depend on higher-level constructs which are maintained by supervised learning in humans, so it is only reasonable that we should teach anthropomorphic machines using the same methods which we already apply to humans.

I can never understand people who believe it is more efficient to do otherwise - though I would be happy to consider proofs.

( Updated my vocabulary today, with 'feature' and 'blackboard' : for concepts which I am already quite familiar with. ) 

A Machine for Hypotheses : which Judges from Experience

Hypothesis [formation] and [determination of falsifiability], followed by [evidenced non-falsification of a falsifiable hypothesis], are all language constructs, which all of science depends on. If nothing else, this part of linguistics and the philosophy of language is what science students should be fully oriented with.

A [falsifiable hypothesis] is [a set of predicates, with a missing object]. If the object is found, the hypothesis is falsified. This part is fairly straightforward. ( But a miraculous leap of logic must occur at the point at which all language does not support itself : once the object is found, the linguistic construct about the object must be updated to reflect this. In other words, it is a non-trivial phenomena in language use that we say, "there is a red apple on that table", based on what we see in the world. )

This leads us to notions about the [picture theory of language], and [its tribe, the correspondence theories of truth]. The readings about this sort of thing are fun and wholesome reflections for children and adults of all ages, but they do not concern a machinist. A machinist only needs to know, how to [implement the tribe in a machine]. And this is where computer programmers start to get excited, because it turns out this part is fairly easy.

The machinist only needs to hook up certain inputs, from [imaginary ( software ) worlds], or from [hardware sensors], which modify data within a target buffer, which we can call an "experiential buffer". Then, the machinist only needs to specific what values of the experiential buffer need to exist, which would then force data in what we might call a "judgment buffer" to evaluate to some state. The type and state of judgment may be arbitrarily complex, but where [the simplest example of a judgment buffer is a single datum, whose type is boolean/2-ary-logic, and whose value has only two possible states]. This, being the reified concrete definition of a machine which forms judgments according to experience : any other source code leading to this, ultimately refers to this.

Where do people work?

A kid wrote, "I'd like to work for the top-three firms just to see how smart the people are there." I said, "wrong filter".

I find the main differentiator among staff in top paybrand / not-top paybrand firms isn't "how smart are they". Rather it is "how much are they willing to do, to make top pay". Because the latter NARROWS who you aim to work for, and BROADENS the scope of work which you offer them.

This is a fundamental pattern. 

• Do you want to be rich? 
• And what are you willing to do? 

The difference in answers send people down different networks, quite entirely.

For example I'm pretty much willing to do anything in the name of work. But getting rich has been a really low priority for me. That clearly explains why I would work in F&B, and resultingly have a criminal record. You can imagine what it would be like if I were to modify my preference to maximise for income.

Canon : the lexicon of possibility

Frege's Über Sinn und Bedeutung ( Sense & Reference ) can be summed up as

• 1. any signal, takes a form
• 2. the form may have loose connotations ( sinn, sense )
• 3. the form may have firm connotation ( bedeutung, reference )
• 4. the connotations, may be interpreted differently by any emitter or receiver of the signal

Further canonical efforts to nail this down to tighter language may just make it worse : see Kripke's 'possible worlds' bike shedding 

Using AI : in force multiplication via coaching

So, when I work with junior staff, and some higher ups ... I would typically be sitting next to them and pointing out the basic inefficiencies like posture, sequence of operations, and angle of attack of specific tasks. 

AI assistants really can't do better than this ... so using them in any OTHER way is basically an antipattern. This, I think, is the simplest way to explain how AI is a force multiplier : it displaces the human coach which used to sit with you as a force multiplier.

( Literally, same issues as people graduate to more senior / larger tasks. Starting with things like how to type, and how to clear emails quickly, how to build decks, how to analyse financial statements, how to visualise data, how to find legal governance loopholes, how to manipulate consumers, how to manage team hierarchies, how to architecture distributed systems, etc. etc. )

Vomit Diving

Studying the body of human literature as a whole, is like swimming in a river of vomit. Most of what is written is trash. Some of what is written in internally coherent. Many things which could be coherent, are not yet strung together. It is the last bit which I am mainly concern myself with.

College was a great time to started on this. Then I put it on the bench for 18 years and now I must drown myself again in this river of shit.

Today : there are about half-a-dozen leading maths proof assistants, and maybe two score systems worth mentioning. And no standard interchange format. What the fuck is this ...

Price Positioning in F&B

 If you're not sure how to get started with price positioning in F&B, may I recommend : 

• 1. Use the Big Mac index : 1x, 2x etc., for meals.
• 2. Use the Coke can index : 1x, 2x, etc. for beverages.
• 3. Simply aim to have a better margin than the index, at base=1
• 4. Where base>1, consider chopping margins as long as you raise NI per cover.

Finance is full of cynics

Finance is full of cynics.

• On the SHORT end of timeframes, VCs commit to the notion that the global population's ignorance is overwhelmingly unfixable, and so scalping is the key to capital accumulation, which can then be redeployed at the fancy of those who exit - some of whom are wiser, and/or more benevolent than others.
• On the LONG end, empaths commit to the notion that fixing the global population begins with fixing the individual, and so individual reparations and upgrades are executed piecemeal, in the hope that gradually the average improves.
• Somewhere in the MIDDLE, bureaucrats commit to the notion that the shorts are too vicious, and the longs are too stupid, and that happiness lies in avoiding either extreme, and simply persisting with administrative life in the middle.
• Artists, generally seem to flutter ACROSS these frames, associating from time to time with whomever they can find alignment with on a piecemeal basis.

Rudimentary Capital Dynamics

Ordinary everyday language is made from vested economic interests. Whether children are taught economics or not, is a matter of public policy about which children are supposed to grow up into which adults.

For example, we speak of "ethnic rights", "religious freedom", "freedoms of ( cultural ) expression and association", often in relation to some sort of legislation ( law ). Private life centres around such concepts, correspondingly, "I eat ethnic food F, and plays sports ST", "I practice religion R", "I ingest and think about arts and letters AL", "I enjoy friends and family FF, and buy goods G and services SE". Very few private interests fall outside these subjects. 

The public institutions established around these private interests are many, and romantic, but the narrative often cuts off there, and it is hidden from innocents what, the economic implications of such laws and institutions, are. So it is a very old hat, but generally a useful reminder : most of our common lives are lived in constructed worlds, and the underlying value may or may not be ceded maximally to the members of such institutions, rather than to the maintainers of such institutions who may not themselves be obvious.

Force Multiplicaton : in 2025 Philanthropy

This note is on politics and logistics.

My father and I are of different creeds ... he's a career Methodist, and I focus on a STEM agenda. We had a short chat yesterday while I drove him about a family event. I proposed that the commonality of our work lies in the logistical components.

I suggested to him that his people can pay more attention to the use of technology and market intelligence in the deployment of their non-commercial operations. The phrase 'force multiplication' was unfamiliar to him, but I'm sure he already knows the concept - *his* dad was an officer in the KMT.

If you believe that there is a mysterious spirit at the heart of every human, you will probably be somewhat limited in your architectural scaling plans. But even then, there are aspects which can be automated without infringing upon your spiritual delicacies : 

• - the administration of logistical tasks
• - the teaching of general skills and knowledge ( personal physiology, home economics, etc. )
• - the expert recommendation of paths through obscure bodies of knowledge ( local law, any body of techne, any vast account of history, etc. )
• - all of these are relevant from birth to death

If your charity is not using these, other charities with different interests are using these. So there is a degree of skill involved in the exercise of charity, in terms of optimising for resource efficiency in ops, based on strategic goals. Where interests are conflicted, this has specific competitive outcomes.

On the other hand, if you do not believe that there is anything spiritually different between humans, other meat animals, and machines or physics in general, then this all has even greater implications for success.

Grammar theories : concerned with the concept of the writer / reader

( source ) 

My question is motivated by the concern of how to represent natural language in machines. (I am working on a broader model, of which this will be a part.) With regards to the semantics of sentences, my question comes from the following observation :

• Given, for example, (0.) "Red trees are bland.", the COMPLETE recognition of this sentence can occur to various degrees, for example :
• (1.) This is a sentence in the English language of 2025, which attaches a well-known predicate to a well-known subject, without any further context.
• (2.) It may be further noted that whomever made observation (1.) has the capacity to evaluate the context provided by the full sentence (1.) in addition to the original (0.) ... and this recurses furthermore as any entity which thinks (2.) may or may not be self-aware that it thinks (2.) etc. So we have 2.1., 2.2., etc. in this branch.
• (3.) Furthermore, there is the open question of what the further context of (0.) is, and it may be that (0.) occurred one of 3.1/3.2 etc. contexts ... whereas you and I know, it happened in (3.n) exactly, this discussion on Reddit.

So yeah, I was just wondering if grammatical theories had addressed these aspects of how a sentence is read, but I might have gotten off on the wrong foot if this is generally regarded as a semantic concern, not a grammatical one. That being said ...

--

... thanks so much for this pointer. I'm sorry for the late response, I have been crash coursing myself in the canon of linguistic theory on Wikipedia. It's been a bit slow as there seem to be dozens/hundreds of theoretical frameworks which aren't organised in a single structural taxonomy. Fun. Nature of fuzzy language, I suppose.

The particularly concepts which I have found to be most relevant to my question are :

• - 'focus' where, encoded information requires the sentence processor to semantically construe a number of possible contexts, and then to pick the right one
• - 'cognitive linguistics' wherein the use of language in humans is viewed as supervenient upon anatomical concerns ( reducing basically to information theory and processing )

Mirror Universe : Reverse Entropy

 There's a charming myth, about how we currently live in hell. Correspondingly, the physics of heaven should be backwards, in our mirror universe. Things would fall into place of their own accord, and conflicts would require net energy inputs, perhaps for entertainment. You would get smarter just by sitting still. You might dream of dying, but never expect it to happen.

Decoding Narcissism

 Decoding narcissism :

• 1. Calling someone a narcissist doesn't make them a narcissist.
• 2. Narcissism implies a blindspot about the needs of others - yet ignoring others needs is not objectively a bad thing, it's difference of subjective interests.
• 3. Someone who knows exactly how much pain you're in, but prefers that you feel it anyway instead of inconveniencing themselves, may not even qualify as a narcissist under any definition.
• 4. Narcissism is too hard to spell. Pls shorten.

Textual Interpretation in Machines

 'A turn of phrase' is a metaphor, which refers to metaphors in general. In the resolution of indirect pointers, perhaps the machine architecture for this is pretty similar to the machine architecture for banal memory address and final data resolution. That is insightful. 

So we can have sensory data structures which depict an interpretation of a sign, let's call them 'visualisations' or 'imaginations' and then we can have pointers from imaginations to imaginations which eventually resolve to a reified state. The meaning of the original sign ( 'text' ) however, is not merely the final reified interpretation, but the entire chain of interpretations, in a possibly cyclic digraph.

Am I Smart?

 'Am I smart', is basically the most common question on people's minds these days.

It is particularly amusing at this junction of history to observe how much people struggle to figure out what they have which distinguishes themselves from 'artificial' intelligence.

The practice of philosophy is simply reflective of the fact that the little meat computers we call brains aren't factory flashed with concepts of 'society' ( and therefore 'self', as the concept of 'self' has no definition without 'society' ), and constantly struggle to hypothesise mechanics about what each 'self' is in relation to other things in the 'world'.

Fragility as as National Value

It is quite comfortable living as a non-Muslim in Malaysia. But it is less comfortable than being a Muslim, as that is structurally legislated.

• 1. It is illegal to speak openly, if you are offended by Islam. So you cannot talk about why you don't want to be a Muslim. This is plainly legislated. You can do so, but if you cause irritation of emotion, you fall foul of the law.
• 2. Because of the above situation, you will be limited in your comfort. But the democratic principal of tyranny by majority means that, the majority feels that this a fair trade off.
• 3. Here I stop talking about Islam, and I start talking about Malaysian culture outside of Islam. Malaysian culture values fragility. And I don't, particularly value it. LOL