I'm not a mathematician, but I feel the "syntethic"/"analythic" distinction in mathematics is an interesting and useful concept.
"In modern mathematics, an analytic theory is one whose basic objects are defined in some other theory, whereas a synthetic theory is one whose basic objects are undefined terms given meaning by rules and axioms"—Michael Shulman
In programming terms, I guess "synthetic" mathematics feels a bit like programming to an abstract interface.
> However, even for these tasks, its performance has dropped measurably since the early 2060s and is now considered subpar compared to more recent uploads. This is primarily attributed to MMAcevedo's lack of understanding of the technological, social and political changes which have occurred in modern society since its creation in 2031. This phenomenon has also been observed in other uploads created after MMAcevedo, and is now referred to as context drift.
Holy shit, I read the article and assumed I heard of the term before since I kinda of remembered the definition, but I didn't make the connection. I'm not sure how to feel about that it has turned into a term AI people actually use.
The terms concept drift and (to a lesser extent) context drift have been used in AI for decades. The NannyML article uses the term concept drift. Here [1] is a 1996 paper that uses both terms.
> Purifying an (unnecessarily-) IO function into an ordinary function is a good exercise.
Agree! And I would add that you can "purify" a monadic function without having to rewrite it in non-monadic style. You can make it polymorphic over all monads and relegate the "impurity" to monadic functions that you pass as arguments/dependencies. A trivial example:
twice :: IO ()
twice = do
putStrLn "foo"
putStrLn "foo"
twice' :: forall m. m () -> m ()
twice' action = do
action
action
This is not that different to having a Spring bean that doesn't perform any effect directly—say, a direct invocation to "Instant.now()"—but instead receives a "Clock" object through dependency injection.
Haskell lets you express the idea of "program logic that only has effects through its dependencies" by being polymorphic over all monads.
> Consequently, while al-Qazwīnī was wont to include tales about islands at the end of the world where women grew on trees and other dubious mirabilia, his purpose was lofty indeed.
Collections of marvels and extraordinary things were their own genre called ‘aǧā’ib. Here is an open-access example, "The Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands" https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46307
That is absolutely wonderful! I've also ordered the book "Wonders and Rarities". I love reading about an unexplored world full of wonder, but it's difficult to find good books about such esoteric things.
"Sisters with Transistors" is a superb film. Before I watched it, the only one of the many extraordinary women presented therein that I knew of was Delia Derbyshire.
I had no idea that the soundtrack to The Forbidden Planet (which may very well be the greatest Science Fiction film ever made), was by Louis and Bebe Barron on equipment they pretty much entirely built themselves. Today, we plug in a laptop, back then you were a true pioneer.
+1 Sisters with Transistors. I watched this in the dark at the Metrograph, a theater in the outskirts of Manhattan, with maybe six other people, and the experience was transcendental.
I tried to keep the domain logic in the upper layer and only push down "dumb" queries -- in the sense that the queries were allowed to be somewhat complex but not allowed to contain domain logic.
This way the DB layer was not written in a "re-usable" way because it contained specialized queries like "get all users that match this and that criteria", but they usually translated directly to SQL.
Encoding domain logic in stored procedures is something I didn't try yet. It would be very nice if SP weren't second-class citizen in multiple ways. But even then, at some point I guess there has to be an interface between the domain logic and SQL queries, so the problem isn't actually solved, just moved into the database.
From this article about a different emperor: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n04/christopher-kelly/a-...