I would give the same review, without seeing any of this as a positive. NKS was bloviating, grandiose, repetitive, and shallow. The fact that Wolfram himself didn’t show that CA were Turing complete when most theoretical computer scientists would say “it’s obvious, and not that interesting” kinda disproves his whole point about him being an under appreciated genius. Shrug.
That CA in general were Turing complete is 'obvious'. What was novel is that Wolfram's employee proved something like Turing completeness for a 1d CA with two states and only three cells total in the neighbourhood.
I say something-like-Turing completeness, because it requires a very specially prepared tape to work that makes it a bit borderline. (But please look it up properly, this is all from memory.)
Having said all that, the result is a nice optimisation / upper bound on how little you need in terms of CA to get Turing completeness, but I agree that philosophically nothing much changes compared to having to use a slightly more complicated CA to get to Turing completeness.
Glad you updated on this front-page post. Your Twitter post is buried on p3 for me right now. Good luck on the recovery and hopefully this helps someone.
Note that study suggests that coffee consumption decreases arrhythmia. (The title is horribly confusing, I know.)
From a quick skim, the protocol seemed to be “advise the patient to drink at least one cup of coffee per day or continue drinking your usual amount.” So it seems the results don’t track with your experience (or my own experience of improved stress and happiness when I cut down on coffee) which is why I think it’s surprising / possibly a fluke.
The quick summary is that being advised to drink coffee (for habitual coffee drinkers with arrhythmia) leads to less arrhythmia, not more. This is surprising since caffeine is a stimulant and usually thought to be pro-arrhythmic.
They were advised to drink at least one cup per day IIUC / maintain their current lifestyle. So there is no consistent amount, but it’s still meaningful vs being advised not to have any caffeine.
‘git blame’ is often more handy for finding the reason that the change was made, assuming you know the location of the bug. It tells you the commit and the commit message.
Automated code formatting, in my experience, never decreases diff sizes, and frequently increases them. Some of those diff size increases support git-blame, some of them hinder it. Around the boundary between two possible formattings, they’re terrible.
Code formatters do tend to force some patterns that may make the line-oriented git-blame more useful such as splitting function calls into many lines, with a single argument on each line; yet that’s not about the code formatter, just the convention. (And the automatic formatters choose it because they have no taste, which is necessary to make other styles consistently good. If you have taste, you can do better than that style, sometimes far better.)
Depends on the language and the available formatters really, I find the black/ruff formatting style in Python to be very consistent, which helps with git blame. For C++ there's no good default formatter for "small diffs" since they all, as you say, add random line breaks dependending on position of parameters and such.
With style you can do better, but having style is impossible in anything except single developer projects.
Try agents like Claude code. My experience was that the initial code was conceptually correct with some type errors on the first pass. It then iterated on compile errors about 6 times, tweaking the code to resolve the issues. Then it compiled and ran correctly.
This was about 500 lines of working rust in about 10 minutes, approximately 25x my pace at writing rust. (I’m a bit of a beginner.)
It occurs to me that the gamma ray hypothesis has a fairly easy check. Light sources pass through the telescope’s optics (typically mirrors or occasionally lenses) which leads to a characteristic “point spread function” for point sources like stars. If it were an errant gamma ray exposure directly on the film, it’s extremely unlikely to have the PSF of the standard light sources.
You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.
The brightest stars in all of the images have a clear 4-pointed pattern. The brightest transients _do not_ show this pattern.
This is obviously not definitive, and the fainter stars are harder to eyeball the PSF, but it does provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the brighter transients could be due to gamma ray exposure of the film rather than flashes in the atmosphere or space.
