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I think Singapore will always scare (in particular) Americans.

Rule-following, restrictive, collectivist, inclusive, intellectual, anti-corrupt, high-functioning ...

A politician like Donald Trump would never come out of Singapore.

And also Singapore is very much an inspiration for modern day China.


I think the only thing you're wrong about is modern China is a lot more about face which also is part of Singapore's psyche but nowhere near as much. While there might be some book-cooking, it's nowhere near as bad as the blatant kpi fudging that provincial governments do in China. The CCP also is far more authoritarian than (yes) even the PAP. You do not have random ministers getting disappeared after they fall out of political favour with Xi Jingping.

OP likely just pointing out Singapore used to train a lot of CCP officials something like 50k (I think slowed last 10 years). One of the SG uni governance program is colloquially called "mayor's class", joke is it's overseas branch of central party school. LKY met every PRC leader in some sort of mentor relationship. Obviously national scale between PRC/SG different, hence SG more of model of mayor/municipal level.

What does the smallest (simplest in terms of complexity / lines of code) C-compiler that can compile and run SQLite look like?

Perhaps that would be a more telling benchmark to evaluate the Claude compiler against.


Not as simple as it could be but I doubt anyone will manage to beat Fabrice Bellard: https://www.bellard.org/tcc/

I don't know for certain that it can compile and run SQLite, but the smallest C compiler I know of is SectorC: <https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html>

ASML and its mostly European suppliers is still the key chokepoint that prevents highend semiconductor fabrication from moving to China.

If Trump was European he would have long ago said “i only allow export of ASML machines if openai/nvidia/tsmc build 5gw urgently here in Europe with advanced nodes”. Fair if you ask me tbh

Except China has fabs on smaller nodes than Europe, so why can't Europe?

Because they don't invest. It's always the same problem. Lack of capital directed in that field.

Well there you go. The EU talks the big talk on "domestic sovereignty" but never puts their money where their mouth is, or when they do, it's breadcrumbs, just enough to keep it on life support, let alone to be in the top contenders.

For Microsoft and its employees I hope it is a parody.

Someone mentioned his apparently failed earlier work ANKOS. I had to look that up - it is 2002 book by Wolfram with seemingly similar ideas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science

But exactly what is the problem here? Other than perhaps a very mechanical view of the universe (which he shares with many other authors) where it is hard to explain things like consciousness and other complex behaviors.


With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview.

He may be smarter than I am, but I'm smart enough to tell that he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.

And you were smart enough to verbalize this in a neat short humble sentence, a remarkable feat, bravo!

Wolfram has failed to live up to his promise of providing tools to make progress on fundamental questions of science.

From my understanding, there are two ideas that Wolfram has championed: Rule 110 is Turing machine equivalent (TME) and the principle of computational equivalence (PCE).

Rule 110 was shown to be TME by Cook (hired by Wolfram) [0] and was used by Wolfram as, in my opinion, empirical evidence to support the claim that Turing machine equivalence is the norm, not the exception (PCE).

At the time of writing of ANKOS, there was a popular idea that "complexity happens at the edge of chaos". PCE pushes back against that, effectively saying the opposite, that you need a conspiracy to prevent Turning machine equivalence. I don't want to overstate the idea but, in my opinion, PCE is important and provides some, potentially deep, insight.

But, as far as I can tell, it stops there. What results has Wolfram proved, or paid others to prove? What physical phenomena has Wolfram explained? Entanglement still remains a mystery, the MOND vs. dark matter rages on, others have made progress on busy beaver, topology, Turing machine lower bounds and relations between run-time and space, etc. etc. The world of physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and most of the others, continues on using classical, and newly developed tools independent of Wolfram, that have absolutely nothing to do with cellular automata.

Wolfram is building a "new kind of science" tool but has failed to provide any use cases of when the tool would actually help advance science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110


You can play around with this:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/


In my experience, Alpha works very hard to force you into a natural-language syntax that takes away much of the fun of the rule-based aspects of the Wolfram language.

I am struggling to understand what is new here - other than the word ruliad - which to me seems to similar to what we have in theoretical computer science when we talk about languages, sentences, and grammars.

It's just Wolfram explaining how he likes stuying things that can be describe by simple rules and how complexity can emerge in spite of (or because of?) the seeming simplicity of those rules. He came up with a word for it, and while I think "ruliology" sounds a bit silly, it does say what's on the tin.

The word he's looking for is "formal system".

For some reason he doesn't like doing mathematical demonstrations so he shuns the practice of doing them, and invented a new word to describe that way of using formal systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_system


To me it sounds like this stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

But maybe it is more like fractals and emerging complex systems?


It is wild that this is getting flagged!

Wait why IS this flagged? Is a fairly straight up tech topic - granted somewhat in a humorous vein, but still valid?

Flagging is the new downvote, with extra power. No one can say no to you, if enough people (who knows how many, 1, 5, 20? Definitely an order of magnitude less that upvotes least) do it the system automatically hides it. And unless the mods care, the system can be abused very easily.

I’ve seen posts with 500+ upvotes that were still flagged. I think the balance and automation around flagging is completely off and too easily abused.


>enough people

it's less than 5 :)


It should probably be a percentage of upvotes to be fair then.

100.000 lines of code for something that is literally a text book task?

I guess if it only created 1.000 lines it would be easy to see where those lines came from.


> literally a text book task

Generating a 99% compliant C compiler is not a textbook task in any university I've ever heard of. There's a vast difference between a toy compiler and one that can actually compile Linux and Doom.

From a bit of research now, there are only three other compilers that can compile an unmodified Linux kernel: GCC, Clang/LLVM and Intel's oneAPI. I can't find any other compiler implementation that came close.


That's because you need to implement a bunch of gcc-specific behavior that linux relies on. A 100% standards compliant c23 compiler can't compile linux.

Ok, yes, that's true, though my understanding is that it's not the GCC is not compliant, but rather that it includes extensions beyond the standard, which is allowed by the standard, which says (in section 4. Conformance):

> A conforming implementation may have extensions (including additional library functions), provided they do not alter the behavior of any strictly conforming program

Anyway, this just makes Claude's achievement here more impressive, right?


A simple C89 compiler is a textbook task; a GCC-compatible compiler targeting multiple architectures that can pass 99% of the GCC torture test suite is absolutely not.

This has multiple backends and a long tail of C extensions that are not in the textbook.

indeed

building a working C compiler from scratch is literally in my "teach yourself C in 24 hours" book from 30 years ago


Which book was that? Sounds excellent.

Might have been Compiler Design in C from 1990. Looks like that's available for free now: https://holub.com/compiler/


it's not that one, but it's in my parents house

you'll forgive me if I don't ring them in the early hours of the morning...

remember C was specifically designed to be easy to compile

(hence anachronisms like forward declarations)


How is this implemented? It must SpaceX/starlink that does the actual access/no access whitelist mechanism based on what they getting from the Ukrainian authorities?

Whitelists are updated daily. There are separate verification processes for private individuals, businesses, and military entities. Detailed instructions are available here: https://thedigital-gov-ua.translate.goog/news/technologies/w...

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