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Chat Logs
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
- jreicherSorry I've been a bit incommunicado. The Purim madness is mostly over now.
- jreicherblue: I have to do some fact checking, but AFAIUI one of the things special about markov chains and associated techniques is that unlike "traditional" statistics you don't need to know/assume the underlying distribution of the population. So for example it might be meaningful to do a "traditional" statistical analysis IN GENERAL of how English words are used, but that doesn't provide a meaningful measure of how I, personally, use
- jreicherEnglish. A markov chain can do that by analysing my speech patterns without any knowledge of the distribution.
- jreicherThis is the kind of commentary I'm thinking of, although what I said is probably not completely correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Physics
- nevetMarkov chain - Wikipedia
- jreicherAlso, I think you were saying earlier that AI is really bad at programming. I believe my garlic press is also really bad at programming. It doesn't seem a significant point. I really like my garlic press. It's very useful.
- dreamrealhttps://github.com/jottinger/bytecode.news/issues/91
- nevetStar Trader: multi-protocol economic simulation game · Issue #91 · jottinger/bytecode.news
- dreamrealAdded some additional ideas here, this might be a viable idea
- dreamrealaight so has anyone looked at that issue?
- Chronosdreamreal: Make nevet scriptable so that things like simple games can be added using that scripting language itself.
- dreamrealChronos: problem is only registration, that's actually super-easy. I already looked at jactl, but the capability is too easy to do - right now, it's classpath-based but there's *nothing* preventing it from being discoverable at runtime besides interest and time
- ChronosNever heard of Jactyl before. Reading about it now...
- dreamrealhttps://jactl.io/blog/2026/03/01/jactl-2.4.0-release
- nevetAnnouncing Jactl 2.4.0 | Jactl
- Chronosdreamreal: I don't see anything in Jactl that prevents script writers from causing OOM
- dreamrealwell, you can limit API access, but yeah
- dreamrealit's not an actual sandbox
- ChronosCould start a second JVM with a strictly controlled max heap, and run Jactl in there
- * Chronos works on something at $WORK that can be scripted by customers, thus such things are always on his mind
- ChronosAny mistakes customers can make, they do make.
- Chronos(Alas, at $WORK, spinning up a JVM for customer scripts would not scale nearly enough)
- dreamrealChronos: I don't like the idea of running user-supplied code in nevet: arbitrary code is bad
- dreamrealI don't want to rebuild glot.io or whatever. It's doable, but ... nontrivial esp with later VMs
- Chronosdreamreal: Running user supplied code in process seems to be a pretty rare requirement.
- ChronosSomeday, I'd love to tackle a 100% safe in-process interpreter.
- ChronosMore of a "when I retire" project.
- dreamrealglot.io and ideone do it. I guess I'm not sure what you're wanting in nevet.
- Chronosdreamreal: It's largely a nostalgia thing with no place in this modern world. When I was very young, I used a CDC Cyber, and taught myself BASIC on it. It even had some rudimentary multi-user capabilities, so I wrote some multi-user programs. :)
- * dreamreal points at star traders
- ChronosMy nostalgia wants to build something similar for the modern world, even though, realistically, it's just not realistic anymore.
- dreamrealguess what system I first played startraders on
- dreamrealsentiment java
- nevetError: No recent messages found for irc://libera/java
- dreamrealsentiment #java
- Chronosdreamreal: Yeah, but just like my nostalgia, who is going to play nevet-based Star Traders in 20xx? Alas...
- dreamrealPffft, have you seen what I was planning on doing with it? :D And Star Traders has a RICH set of descendants... people play Elite:Dangerous every day
- ChronosHeh.
- dreamrealI loved the cyber-one at FSU
- dreamrealunreasonably, really, but even so
- ChronosOn the Cyber where I stole time (heh), the BASIC had, if memory serves, a SHR keyword, which stood for "share" or "shared", and all instances of the program running shared that variable. I think it was always an array too...
- ChronosSHR A$(100) — 100 shared strings, enabling rudimentary multi-user capabilities!
- ChronosIf memory serves. This was a *long* time ago.
- ChronosBut pre-teen me figured it out enough to get chat programs and such working.
- dreamrealI don't remember that being an aspect of the cyber, but I was just stealing time after school with one of my friends
- ChronosOn the CDC Cyber, I think it required an optional module called MULTI
- dreamrealwe played star traders, a dungeon crawler with rudimentary first person rendering, etc
- Chronosdreamreal: Ah, fellow timeshare thief. Excellent.
- ChronosI stole unbelievable amounts of time.
- dreamrealI had a friend whose dad worked in the support lab, so we'd hang after school and play games
- ChronosNice!
- dreamrealwouldn't say unbelievable amounts of time but it wasn't actually MINE, I was sort of borrowing my friend David's time which was given to him gratis :D
- ChronosLucky dog!
- dreamrealYeah, David's an imagineer now as far as I know
- dreamrealKeep wanting to talk to him, he's one of the best programmers I knew when I was young
- Chronosnice
- ChronosI'm a mediocre programmer, but *knowing* that helps a lot ;)
- dreamrealme too
- dreamreali think I'm all right as a programmer but that's about it: I've been very blessed to know some absolute UNITS in the field though
- bot[jottinger/bytecode.news] New PR #150: Bump @hono/node-server from 1.19.9 to 1.19.10 in /frontend - https://github.com/jottinger/bytecode.news/pull/150
- bot[jottinger/bytecode.news] New PR #149: Bump hono from 4.11.9 to 4.12.5 in /frontend - https://github.com/jottinger/bytecode.news/pull/149