(define (heap-permute! perm j callback)
    (with-context 'fixnum ;; same trick works with 'flonum for 64-bit floats
      (let ([n (length perm)]) ;; actually fxvector-length
       (let generate ([k (- n 1)]) ;; actually fx-
         (if (< k j) ;; fx<
           (callback perm)
           (begin
              (generate (- k 1)) ;; fx-
              (do ([i j (+ i 1)]) ;; fx+
                ((>= i k)) ;; fx>=
                (if (even? (- j k)) ;; fxeven?, fx-
                (swap perm j k)
                (swap perm i k))
                (generate (- k 1)))))))) ;; fx-

And BTW I misspoke earlier, of course Chez is AOT rather than JIT. From one approach it's sort of a hybrid: really fast on-the-fly AOT kinda looks like JIT, tongue-in-cheek you could say "NoT compilation" (nick-of-time). But proper JIT of course has huge advantages. If you reeaaaallly wanted to sabotage readability, Chez makes it easy to invoke the compiler at runtime, so along with the C FFI I think you could hack together some sort of JIT. But wow, what a mess that would be! You'd better be getting a PhD thesis out of it :) And if the performance is that critical you'd be much better off with F#.

My statement is an opinionated position on how we should direct our research efforts and ascertain what is plausible: the behavioral similarities between humans and cats are much more relevant to the question of consciousness than the behavior similarities between humans and Claude, because cats are obviously conscious and that's not true for Claude. The fact that there are almost no behavioral similarities between cats and Claude suggests to me that "Claude might be conscious" is just a ridiculous statement not worth engaging with, even at the level of pre-science. At the very least, the burden is on Amanda Askell and Dario Amodei to explain why nonhuman animals are irrelevant to the question of Claude's consciousness. They have not offered anything like that; instead they seem fully ELIZAed by the chatbot, high on their own supply.

Your response is too condescending to engage with. You should have assumed I know what neuroscience is. Please don't ever email me about anything.

The problem with the "computational functionalist" argument is that a) there's ZERO evidence other animals brains are computational, that is begging the question; and b) pretty much any embedded system is a device that reacts to its environment in a way that requires computation, and none of them have anything close to the psuedoconsciousness of a bacteria. let alone an insect. Point a) is the more important one: only humans have meaningfully Turing-complete brains. Other animals might be hardware-capable but they'll never be trained to correctly execute a program, nor does their own intelligence seem especially amenable to being described by a classical symbolic algorithm - e.g. animals are very good at object identification, quantity discrimination, causal reasoning, and we don't have anything close to a symbolic algorithm for any of these[1]. Computation is linked to the ability to communicate symbolically, and most animals do not regardless of intelligence. The idea that "the brain is a computer" has always been a poetic description, not a scientific fact. It is more correct to say humans have the ability to think computationally because we think symbolically. Again, maybe someone can identify that animals do think symbolically even if they don't communicate that way, or (somehow) we will have a non-symbolic theory of computation. Perhaps a beautiful symphony. Absent either of these two things, "the chimpanzee's brain is like a computer" is simply not scientific.

The supposed "sense/think/act cycle" is just you begging the question again, applying a computational aesthetic in place of understanding; this time it's blatantly false. Animals do not have a "cycle": sensing is an act and processing senses is a thought. Thinking is an act and many animals can perceive themselves thinking (demonstrated in crows and chimps). Dogs think very deeply while they smell, and the manner in which they sniff (tentative whiff versus greedy huffs) is itself an act requiring thought. Most importantly: even in animals, thoughts can be totally disconnected from actions and senses. Actually this might be the most major difference between a pigeon and Claude: their thoughts and actions are not directly tied to environmental stimulus, whereas Claude can only think and act according to a short-term context provided by a human. You can fake an agentic loop with a prompt, but it's not convincing agency the way a nematode has convincing agency. It's just a chatbot in a loop. If you expose it to real sensory data like a webcam, the agentic behavior becomes even more brittle and unconvincing. It's just nothing like an animal.

[1] I know there's work being done on formal causal reasoning, I thought this monograph was interesting: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/3451/Actual-Causal.... I am not convinced by it. The funny thing about these causal theories... they don't have a causal explanation :) :) :) The argument works by going through cases until you agree it works, empirically, possibly after complicating things further by patching out oversights and inadequacies. Very amusing. Causality is a tough nut to crack!

If you grant that humans are conscious, then surely domestic cats are as well. It is simply irrational to talk about Claude's "consciousness" without actually engaging with this: cats, humans, pigeons, fish, etc etc all share some common features we associate with consciousness (I don't mean sensory awareness, I mean the fuzzy cognitive concept). Claude really does not. In fact Claude doesn't even have much in common with uncontacted hunter-gatherers! Claude imitates the solipsism of formally educated human philosophers.

It is uncharitable and curmudgeonly but totally scientific to dismiss people in camp #3 as unserious and not worth engaging with: they ignore scientific criticism and don't provide any themselves, it's just a mishmash of sci-fi-adjacent philosophy. There's nothing "functional" about ignoring animals and there's nothing scientific about waving your hands and saying "computationalism." That's certainly how I feel. I know this isn't a very nice comment. But I am so sick of AI folks thinking they can ignore animals and still have an honest conversation about machine consciousness. It's just sci-fi ghost stories.

The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.

According to this company plus some sketchy math I just did, the relative humidity can swing between 15% and 40%: all over the place, but generally pretty dry. https://www.vaisala.com/en/blog/2024-12/can-you-handle-heat-...

With the obvious preface of "thoughtlessly adding." Of course it's not a real law, it's a tongue-in-cheek observation about how things have tended to go wrong empirically, and highlights the unique complexity of adding manpower to software vs. physical industry. Regardless, it has been endlessly frustrating for people to push AI/agentic development by highlighting short-term productivity, without making any real attempt to reconcile with these serious long-term technical management problems. Just apply a thick daub of Claude concealer, and ship.

Maybe people are right about the short-term productivity making it worthwhile. I don't know, and you don't either: not enough time has elapsed to falsify anything. But it sure seems like Fred Brooks was correct about the long-term technical management problems: adding Claudes to a late C compiler makes it later.

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

OTOH a lower-middle-class Joe like me really does have a lot of mundane social/professional errands, which existing software has handled just fine for decades. I suppose on the margins AI might free up 5 minutes here or there around calendar invites / etc, but at the cost of rolling snake eyes and wasting 30 minutes cleaning up mistakes. Even if it never made mistakes, I just don't see the "personal assistant" use case really taking off. And it's not how people use LLMs recreationally.

Really not trying to say that LLM personal assistants are "useless" for most people. But I don't think they'll be "big," for the same reason that Siri and Alexa were overhyped. It's not from lack of capability; the vision is more ho-hum than tech folks seem to realize.

I wasn't speaking to God. I was high on salvia. And I'm quite certain A.J. Ayer was high on oxygen deprivation.

I don't think these results are quite comparable because of slightly differing parallelism strategies; I'd expect the F# implementation of just spinning off threads to be more a little more performant than a Rayon parallel iterator, which presumably has some overhead. But that really just shows how hard it is to do a cross-language comparison; Rust and C++ can certainly be made faster than the F# code by carefully manipulating a ton of low-level OS concurrency primitives. This would arguably also be little misleading. Likewise Chez and Haskell have good C FFI; does that count? It's a tricky and highly qualitative analysis.

[1] FYI, one possible performance improvement with the Chez code is keeping the permutations in fxvectors and replace math operations with the fixnum-specific equivalent - this tells the compiler/interpreter that the data are guaranteed to be machine integers rather than bigints, so they aren't boxed/unboxed. I am not sure without running it myself, but there seems to be avoidable allocations in the Chez implementation. https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug/objects.html#./objec...

In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.

One I might suggest is scripting languages, defined loosely by programming tools which dispatch high-level commands to act on data pipelines: sed, AWK, the sh family, Perl, PowerShell, Python and R as honorary members. In practice I might say SQL belongs here instead of under Prolog, but in theory of course SQL is like Prolog. Bourne shell might be the best representative, even if it's not the oldest.

AWK et al share characteristics from ALGOL and APL, but I feel they are very much their own thing. PowerShell is quite unique among modern languages.

Idris absolutely is a general-purpose functional language in the ML family. It is Haskell, but boosted with dependent types.

OTOH if you really want to emphasize "intended to express proofs" then surely Prolog has that covered, so Lean can be seen as half ML, half Prolog. From this view, the Curry-Howard correspondence is just an implementation detail about choosing a particular computational approach to logic.

Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.

   Strings are immutable [in Scheme]. Functional point update operations are not provided, presumably out of time complexity concerns, but string-append and substring are provided, and there are functions to convert to and from lists of characters; I guess the idea is that fine-grained string construction will be done using lists and then converted. Amusingly, there’s string-copy, though it’s hard to see why one would ever use it.

The overall point you are making seems clearly correct: R6RS Scheme does not provide any "mostly functional" datatypes beyond basic s-expressions, so it would take a lot of work to develop Clojure/FSet-style tools. But it's strange to so badly misstate what strings in Scheme are like.