Hacker News: Antibabelic

WikiLambda the Ultimate

Antibabelic — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:14:42 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-05-22/Recent_research

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48493218

Points: 62

# Comments: 12

New comment by Antibabelic in "They’re made out of weights"

Antibabelic — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:33:14 +0000

A language is a set of sentences.

A sentence is a finite sequence of symbols drawn from an alphabet.

In this sense, mathematical operation tables are absolutely a language. As are natural languages.

New comment by Antibabelic in "Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching"

Antibabelic — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:33:56 +0000

> Here we ask whether, in a task where gestures are particularly useful—namely, spontaneous demonstration in which no real object is present—speakers of a high-gesture (Italian) and a low-gesture (Dutch) culture show similarities or differences in how they teach to adults versus children.

Solo tabletop role-playing games

Antibabelic — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:34:37 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_role-playing_game

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259824

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by Antibabelic in "Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results"

Antibabelic — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:59:23 +0000

I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.

New comment by Antibabelic in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

Antibabelic — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:30:49 +0000

> That human would be turning down a potential Fields Medal for this discovery.

While interesting, this result is not Fields Medal material.

New comment by Antibabelic in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

Antibabelic — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:12:56 +0000

The end result is the same: an SVG file. Definitely doesn't matter to an LLM what produced it.

New comment by Antibabelic in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

Antibabelic — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:31:06 +0000

Second place is small?

New comment by Antibabelic in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"

Antibabelic — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:25:14 +0000

I think the parent comment is wondering if it was originally drafted in English and then translated to Latin.

New comment by Antibabelic in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

Antibabelic — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:20:29 +0000

This is a lot of very confident assertions.

> you do decide to actively go against it for decades because you like doing things your way

Perhaps there's a good reason why a developer or a group of developers decide to do things a certain way.

> This is why Krita is sweeping the floor with gimp

Aside from the fact that these programs are intended for pretty different things, the impression I have is that GIMP has a much larger install-base than Krita and more people are aware of it. Far from "sweeping the floor".

> GNOME is hanging on by nature of being the default

Or perhaps some people (and enterprises) want a polished OOTB desktop experience without having to deal with KDE's bugs and Windows-like design language. There are plenty of GNOME installs on Arch Linux for example, where you can't speak of any "defaults" with regards to desktop environments.[0]

[0] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/cur...

New comment by Antibabelic in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

Antibabelic — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:53:32 +0000

I don't understand this response. Human artists can and do make SVGs.

New comment by Antibabelic in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

Antibabelic — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:24:29 +0000

My day job is not in the tech industry. I am an editor. Literally nothing has changed for me in the last four years.

New comment by Antibabelic in "Prolog Coding Horror"

Antibabelic — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:48:04 +0000

Prolog is an elegant abstraction. One of the points of abstractions is that they let us concentrate our optimization efforts in one place. Prolog benefits from many decades of research into how to make it work fast. When your problem does require a Prolog-shaped solution the most sensible thing to do is to use a highly optimized Prolog system instead of reinventing a naive algorithm yourself. Your "inelegant" solution will not be faster.

(This is also the problem with "I'll just quickly implement a Prolog-like DSL when I need it". Sometimes not a bad idea, but you have to be realistic. Your "lightweight" Prolog will be worse in every way compared to serious Prolog implementations).

New comment by Antibabelic in "Prolog Coding Horror"

Antibabelic — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:42:41 +0000

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

[1] https://github.com/terminusdb/terminusdb

New comment by Antibabelic in "Prolog Coding Horror"

Antibabelic — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:40:41 +0000

Richard O'Keefe in The Craft of Prolog: "Elegance is not optional".

The Mercury logic programming system

Antibabelic — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:12:40 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/Mercury-Language/mercury

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176384

Points: 95

# Comments: 23

New comment by Antibabelic in "Prolog Coding Horror"

Antibabelic — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:00:30 +0000

Erlang has very little in common with Prolog, which is a language in an entirely different paradigm (logic programming).

Early versions of Erlang were implemented in Prolog, which is why Erlang's syntax looks a whole lot like Prolog's, but beyond that they're not very similar.

New comment by Antibabelic in "The Emacsification of Software"

Antibabelic — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:08:39 +0000

It's not clear to me what you mean, can you elaborate?

New comment by Antibabelic in "What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?"

Antibabelic — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:09:28 +0000

... I mean, yes? People object to AI art (and generative AI in general) on ethical grounds, not just aesthetic ones. This is something anti-AI people are quite explicit about.

New comment by Antibabelic in "The Emacsification of Software"

Antibabelic — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:33:33 +0000

Is you actually look at the Lisp ecosystem as it exists today (even just Emacs by itself) you'll quickly realize that none of this is true in practice. Other people have pointed this out.[0]

[0] https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.ht...