Sometimes, yeah! There was a classic theory of metacompilers in the 1960s with examples like META II. In the 1980s, partial evaluation was put onto solid ground following Futamura’s programme, and in the 1990s the most successful team wrote The Book on the topic. My current weekend project is a fork of META II and it evolves by gradual changes to the compiler punctuated by two self-rebuild cycles.

I guess that I’m the resident compiler engineer today. Let’s go.

So why not write an optimizing compiler in its own language, and then run it on itself?

The process will reach a fixed point after three iterations. In fancier language, Glück 2009 shows that the fourth, fifth, and sixth Futamura projections are equivalent to the third Futamura projection for a fixed choice of (compiler-)compiler and optimizer. This has practical import for cross-compiling; when I used to use Gentoo, I would watch GCC build itself exactly three times, and we still use triples in our targets today.

[S]uppose you built an optimizing compiler that searched over a sufficiently wide range of possible optimizations, that it did not ordinarily have time to do a full search of its own space — so that, when the optimizing compiler ran out of time, it would just implement whatever speedups it had already discovered.

Oh, it’s his lucky day! Yud, you’ve just been Schmidhuber’d! Starting in 2003, Schmidhuber’s lab has published research on Gödel machines, self-improving machines which prove that their self-modifications will always be better than previous iterations. They are named not just after Gödel, but after his First Incompleteness Theorem; Schmidhuber et al proved easily that there will always be at least one speedup theorem which a Gödel machine can never reach (for a given choice of axioms, etc.)

EURISKO used “heuristics” to, for example, design potential space fleets. It also had heuristics for suggesting new heuristics, and metaheuristics could apply to any heuristic, including metaheuristics. … EURISKO could modify even the metaheuristics that modified heuristics. … Still, EURISKO ran out of steam. Its self-improvements did not spark a sufficient number of new self-improvements.

Once again the literature on metaheuristics exists, and it culminates in the discovery of genetic algorithms. As such, we can immediately apply the concept of gene-oriented evolution (“beanbag” or “gene pool” reasoning) and note that, if goals don’t change and new genes don’t enter the pool, then eventually the population stagnates as the possible range of mutated genes is tested and exhausted. It doesn’t matter that some genes are “meta” genes that act on other genes, nor that such actions are indirect. Genes are genes.

I’m gonna close with a sneer from Jay Bellou, who I hope is not a milkshake duck, in the comments:

All “insights” eventually bottom out in the same way that Eurisko bottomed out; the notion of ever-increasing gain by applying some rule or metarule is a fantasy. You make the same sort of mistake about “insight” as do people like Roger Penrose, who believes that humans can “see” things that no computer could, except that you think that a computer can too, whereas in reality neither humans nor computers have access to any such magical “insight” sauce.

That still puts Larry Ellison in the danger zone, at least.

It’s been such a letdown watching him transition from Cosmic to Alex. He’s become such a milquetoast and can barely hold an opinion upright. It feels like he gets more out of fart-sniffing than actually doing logic and coming to conclusions.

Or at least what people are thinking of as “software” is wrong; neuroscience is 100% “hardware”. Can’t expect techbros to understand memetics or iatrogenic illnesses, though, not when they’re fixated on the idea that people with depression/schizophrenia/etc. are having “issues” rather than experiencing society.

IQ is a little bit heritable. But there are plenty of things which are very heritable and also not genetic to use as comparisons, like accents or posture or little societal rituals of communication, compared to which IQ is barely heritable at all. And that’s without cracking into memes/tropes/narremes, skills, maths, or other more-abstract inheritance.

As David says, that was a fork, under this GH org. Source: I ran one of the stars, claimed here. However, it turns out that there’s only maybe two dozen people interested in a far-left Lojbanic fork of Urbit, and the network is moribund.

CC @[email protected]; your dreams are fulfilled, sort of.

If you don’t respect the NSFW rules, then I’m not going to reply to you again.

Oh, you misunderstand. It’s not for me.

Nonetheless I agree with your critique of the writing style; it’s got all the fake edge of a 20s frat boy learning about existentialism for the first time.

In the sense that TLP isn’t Blackbeard, no, we don’t. But I would suggest that, unlike Scott, TLP genuinely understands the pathology of narcissism. Their writing does something Scott couldn’t ever do: it grabs the narcissist by the face and forces them to notice how their thoughts never not involve them. As far as I can tell, Scott’s too much of a pill-pusher to do any genuine psychoanalysis.

Also, like, consider this TLP classic. Two things stand out if we’re going to consider whether they’re Scott in disguise. The first is that the dates are not recent enough, and indeed TLP’s been retired for about a decade. The second is that the mythology and art history are fairly detailed and accurate, something typically beyond Scott.

(In true Internet style, I hope that there is a sibling comment soon which shows that I am not just wrong, but laughably and ironically wrong.)

Show me a long-time English Wikipedia editor who hasn’t broken the rules. Since WP is editable text and most of us have permission to alter most pages, rule violations aren’t set in stone and don’t have to be punished harshly; often, it’s good enough to be told that what you did was wrong and that your edits will be reverted.

NSFW: When you bring this sort of argument to the table, you’re making it obvious that you’ve never been a Wikipedian. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that you’re going to get talked down to; even if your question was in good faith, you could have answered it yourself by lurking amongst the culture being critiqued.

He tells on himself by saying “Gerard” vs “Scott” and “David Gerard” vs “Scott Alexander”. What’s really pathetic is that he thinks politics on Wikipedia is about left vs right or authoritarians vs anarchists. Somebody should let him know that words are faith, not works.

Oh! My Firefox dictionary doesn’t have “shoggoth”.

Sometimes folks need a reminder that the Sun is an eldritch being, an elder one whose very presence scorches us and whose shrieking gibberish is blessedly quelled by the vast gulf of space, in order to appreciate the apt analogy of cosmic horror. Other times it’s more useful to think about a soggoth as, say, several hundred tons of artfully-arranged FOOF. Peace be with you, Mr. “it’s a computer doing math.”

I had to go digging for it, but previously, on Mastodon, I posted this video from “The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest”. I don’t know if this is where Yud got the idea, but it’s where I picked it up as a kid along with stuff like DNA-based computing and mind uploads. Similar stuff has been on the air ever since Carpenter’s version of The Thing in 1982, and there’s even older deeper sci-fi roots. Yud gets no more credit than Lovecraft.

I didn’t realize we had a #BigYud Fediverse tag. I gotta use that more often. Also ping @[email protected] @[email protected] to enjoy this.

I’ve thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.

Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a “cult”, watch how much more they flip out at being called a “high-control group”. It’s a very good disarming technique.

That’s 100% my weird late-night word choices. You can reuse it for whatever.

I agree with your sentiment, but the wording is careful. Scaffolding is inherently temporary. It only is erected in service of some further goal. I think what I wanted to get across is that Yud’s philosophical world was never going to be a permanent addition to any field of science or maths, for lack of any scientific or formal content. It was always a farfetched alternative fueled by science-fiction stories and contingent on a technological path that never came to be.

Maybe an alternative metaphor is that Yud wanted to develop a new kind of solar panel by reinventing electrodynamics and started by putting his ladder against his siding and climbing up to his roof to call the aliens down to reveal their secrets. A decade later, the ladder sits fallen and moss-covered, but Yud is still up there, trapped by his ego, ranting to anybody who will listen and throwing rocks at the contractors installing solar panels on his neighbor’s houses.

He’s talking like it’s 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it’s not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he’s lining the floors of hamster cages.

That sounds like a great way to get assaulted, perhaps battered too. I guess it’s cold comfort to know “hah, got 'em, they’re so easily triggered” while sitting in a hospital bed recovering from a head injury, but it just sounds stupid to me.

Yes, although the veracity of the quote is uncertain; see here for discussion. This is the commonly-cited form that you’ll find all over the Internet:

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, then the best way would be to start his own religion.~ Lafayette Ron Hubbard