Best thing on the Internet this week. Thank you.

1. TFA argues that malloc is for dynamic memory allocation and that arrays are for fixed counts. Sort of. In modern C, you can always char someArray[someValue]; what you cannot do is char someArray[someValue] = { '\0' }; making malloc good for the case where you need some initialization, but then you should probably be using calloc or some other call.

2. TFA indicates that top will tell you how much memory your process is using. Uh, sorta kinda maybe not always? Reporting memory utilization is a black art, top was built before current opacity, and this area is never as clear and clean as it seems. I have a tab group called "true memory usage" which consists of a dozen or more pages to remind how many edge cases there are here. hic sunt draconis

3. TFA kinda sorta implies that malloc means a system call and a change to brk, but TFA also mentions that malloc isn't a system call but a libc call: if you have previously called malloc and freed memory, or if your task's space is large enough, malloc might not involve a system call at all and brk/srbk might not be involved, since libc may have satisified your memory request from your existing task space.

It reads like a fine, clear, and correct article, but it isn't, really. Sad to say, because it did read really well.

With synchronous intra-machine calls we mostly take it for granted that pending modifications die with the caller.

But with inter-machine communications we mostly take it for granted that the sending machine and its entire local area can disappear and operations it sent will complete.

Of course, there are exceptions, especially when APIs/systems offer atomicity, consistency checks, etc.

But without express design intent, or preferably caller intent, one can argue both sides of the asynchronous intra-machine case and be right.

I guess my thinking isn't so much that this happens as that it happens implicitly.

Rivers are mathematical only because we have so improved our mathematics in recent times (when my parents were born, they were random and non-deterministic, mysterious).

We've seen commentary along these lines re AI productivity gains Vs code maintenance costs and quality concerns for months/years now, but somehow, for me at least, viewing this through the lens of code ownership (literal ownership, not metaphorical/moral ownership in the 'take pride in your work and do it well, regardless' sense) makes this extrinsic risk all the more clear.

It also makes me think of the estimated billions lost to spreadsheet errors: non-programmers unaware that they were programming creating spreadsheet macros that appeared to do exactly what they wanted, but that in reality only did so most of the time, with edge cases and error handling omitted entirely, leading to significant financial losses for their employers.

In that case, the lack of sanction is far clearer: They were not programmers, they did their best, no one noticed and it wasn't their job to do so, etc.

The case of AI isn't that different, especially since it is just as available to the non-programmer as it is to the cavalier, or to the pressured junior, or to the responsible, take-ownership-and-maintain developer.

AI without governance and program management leads organizations to assume unqualified and unquantified risk with diffused responsibility; outside the small class of take-ownership-and-maintain professional, all risks are extrinsic to individuals so why should they care if it gets the job (mostly) done?

They don't and they won't.

(Reaches for popcorn to watch imminent train wrecks whilst hoping his water supply remains uncompromised.)

But when did humans first perceive the sun as white? We can only reliably say "sometime on or after 12 April 1961", the day Gagarin went into space. Prior to that, as far as we know, all humans saw the sun as some other colour, most often yellow or red, depending on the time of day.

Since Newton's prism, we had pretty good reason for believing it was likely white, reasons that got stronger in the 19th C with improved theories of optics, the discovery of atomic spectra, etc. I'm curious to know when we confirmed for sure its whiteness, and whether this was before October 1957 (Sputnik) or after Gagarin or somewhere in between.

As a multilingual Canadian capable of understanding most English and French accents, I'm grateful for those who preserve and persevere with their home patois.

Funnily enough, I had a hard time with Bradley's accent the first time viewing Hot Fuzz but many hours of BritBox and Acorn and a few hours of HarbourCustoms later, no problems at all!

I'm in no way asserting that Colville restored the human form to art either, just observing that Hockney was far for alone in using the human form to convey aspects of his meaning.

Just musing....

In a nutshell, the paper basically says that the lateralization that led to the predominance of right-handedness occurred around the time humans became bipedal and around the time of neuroanatomical expansion, possibly related to bipedalism.

In other words, before these two changes, we used all four limbs for locomotion and had no preference for either forelimb for grasping. Then one or two things happened and right-handedness predominated. It seems that that neuroanatomical expansion took over the areas of the brain that previously allowed our left hands to be as capable as our right hands.

I write "one or two things happened" because it wasn't clear to me from the paper whether the neuroanatomical expansion that led to lateralization was necessary to and part of bipedalism, i.e., caused by our locomotion bits taking over other parts of the brain to manage our balance, or whether it was merely coincident with it.

Interesting questions asked and answered, more research needed.

My understanding of positivism is, in a nutshell, that its goal is to reduce everything to physics, including social, inter-personal interactions. My read of the article is that Rovelli is focused on the intra-personal, so to that extent it isn't positivism, or is at least a limited, focused positivism. Extending Rovelli's thinking to the inter-personal would be, IMHO, a categorical error: While we may one day be able to fully describe the physics (and electrochemistry, etc.) of everything inside the person, physics is insufficient to describe what happens between people, at least to the extent that what is happening is a result of each person's actions, choices, etc.

I think this where bringing qualia in as a level of abstraction is useful: Everything about us is ultimately operating on our physical hardware, but not everything about us is "just physics", since our "us" (our OS, if you will), makes observations and chooses actions that are determined at least to some extent by the "us", and not just by the physical operations.

At this point, one could bring in Skinner and make everything operational conditioning, or Kahneman for a slightly different take where much of what we observe or consider consciously (the energy-hungry slow system) has been pre-filtered by physical processes that are not available to us (the energy-efficient fast system).

If those lines of thought are correct - and that remains an open question - then we could potentially arrive at a complete positivism wherein everything is determined primarily by our internal physics, though we wouldn't get predictability for the same reason that we cannot solve the three-body-problem analytically or predict the weather accurately for all time or predict with certainty the motions of the planets, etc.: There are too many inter-dependent variables, and modelling will always lag actual behaviour.

I think we are on safe ground saying that intra-body behaviour is all physics, and on safe ground describing some of the physics responsible for what we call thought, e.g., neuropsychological processes, but at some point we need to model things differently to continue to make sense, make progress. We get away from just-physics at higher levels of abstraction, with the challenge being to describe the transitions from one model level to another (corporeal electro-chemistry to reflective thought and action to inter-personal relations to sociology and economy).

Sort of like how we know that everything is quantum mechanics at the appropriate scale, but that QM isn't terribly useful for modelling weather, planetary motion, etc.

Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.

It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).

Anyway. I live closer to James Bay than DC. Let that sink in a moment (and sink is what you will do if you attempt the drive).