One Hacker News commenter says it's worse, another retorts it's a step change and even includes emphasis! Will the first commentor retort back that it's been a double dog step change in the opposite direction? Can't wait to see how this comment thread unfolds!
It's in private beta but sometimes they have a public beta, like just last week. They were supposed to have released this month but they pushed back to October.
Also check out Adrullan Online, it's also an EQ clone but Minecraft voxel style. More like alpha status, they don't seem as far along.
I still don't get what is the advantage over an unsigned integer. Yes, fp64 has unused bits. But why are you going to involve the FPU at all when a uint64 does the trick as well? Plus with a uint64 you get all the flexibility of what bits to dedicate to the address vs metadata.
Edit: I guess one advantage is that, if we later treat the handle like a pointer, NaN math gets you NaN again, whereas the uint64 math might get you an invalid address, or you'd need extra logic to check that the uint64 is not a valid handle?
The benefit is that floats are allowed to be unboxed values - without NaN-boxing, you must heap-allocate them. The tradeoff is that immediate/unboxed integer values end up being smaller than the full machine word range (i.e. you have either a 24-bit or 48-bit mantissa you can use to hold data), but that's usually worthwhile because most integers are small anyway, so you box larger ones. Similarly, pointer values can't use the full address space, but that's also usually worth it since rarely do you actually need to do so in VMs where this technique is used.
Using unsigned integers is only a better choice if your VM doesn't need efficient floating-point operations.
Honestly I’m with you there I use uint64, but I guess if you’re already storing f64 as a base number type then you just keep everything in a float and it’s more convenient.
Rapid prototyping was always possible in PL design. It was very possible to go from idea to a working proof of concept language with a couple weeks' work. There are thousands of POC projects like this that popped up before LLMs existed.
What LLMs are doing now is allowing people to take prototypes and to publish them with an entire 200 page book no one (not even the author) has read, and a polished-looking website filled with marketing verbiage and a cute logo.
What would be interesting to me would be to see the process of rapidly refining the design, but I keep checking back on these "Here's my exciting new 400kLOC LLM language project I made in 3 weeks" and they all seem to die very shortly after the splashy announcements a few weeks later, as the author seemingly lost interest.
Which is not surprising because that's the way it always went with little languages -- writing a language has always been a marathon, not a sprint. It's just before, a 200 page book was an indicator of author dedication. Now, a 200 page book is just more bytes for digital kindling.
Yeah, early on in my evaluation of this thing was to check out the contributors and their work. Was expecting this to be the product
of at least a small group. Imagine my surprise to see… one person…
"If you don’t understand the terms, don’t pretend you do"
The comment you're replying to explicitly says "This language looks interesting, but I don’t understand the concepts." so I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Their note about physics/metaphysics was about "someone [they] knew", not TFA.
I indeed was insinuating that OP may be in the early stages of AI psychosis - or, if you don’t believe that’s a thing, at least in a mildly delusional or hyperactive state.
If I’m wrong, I don’t think any of the advice I gave was harmful. Really it’s good advice for anyone sunk deep into a problem to periodically take space, relax and recharge - and potentially allow their brain to work on it in the background while they do.
My questions came from a genuine place of wanting to understand the system though.
That was the intended result. The story isn't that people were escorted out, it's that they knew they were going to be escorted out and proceeded anyway. That they felt the need to break the rules is the story, because... why did they feel so strongly? Maybe there's a reason behind it?
So what? I pay taxes too, and I want social scientists to be paid using tax dollars for the work they do, which I find valuable. There's plenty I take issue with my taxes being paid for but I just put up with it because we live in a society where my priorities aren't the only ones. Why can't you take that approach with social scientists?
> Why should it bother you that my interests don’t align perfectly with yours.
That's exactly what I'm saying! It doesn't bother me that your interests don't align with mine, I help pay for them anyway... why can't you take that position with social science?
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