Pasha Tsier

Building a proof assistant for fun

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@SamoBurja San Francisco might be the only city in the US where you don't NEED an AC - it gets 1-3 days of weather above 30C per year. But also, unlike Europe, you can just buy an AC and stick it in your window - that's what I did.

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@VictorTaelin What would that look like? To me "symbolic ai" = "there exists some formal model which the ai discovers and learns to manipulate". Not sure we could ever discover a formal model for language, or the real world which the language describes

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@theballisorange The 2014 spurs coming back after a devastating loss in 2013, making it back to the finals and then beating the heatles playing some of the most beautiful team basketball ever was pretty righteous.

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@JustDeezGuy I generally agree (which is why I've started building my own proof assistant), but I think it's a bit unfair to Lean. I don't think anyone has shown impredicative prop to be unsound, as long as you control large elimination.

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@SamQuinnCBS I think the problem is BITW is not well defined, even in this thread. My definition would be 'if you're drafting a team of NBA players to win a game (or a series), who gets drafted first'. In 2016 it's clearly Lebron

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

Sort unfotunately has to be its special value type, since there's no great way to express type(Sort(u)) = Sort(u + 1) inside the language.

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

A thread of random observations about developing a new proof assistant

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

This seems like a generically useful trick - introduce values that are opaque, so they can only be manipulated through the builtin functions, but can still be abstracted over in the usual ways

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

1. A simple way implement universes is to make universe levels a regular value of type 'Level' which in turn is a regular type. The trick is to not give levels any eliminators, so they can only be manipulated through builtin functions (max, succ)

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@stevedoesn @benlandautaylor Just went down a bit of a rabbit hole on gasification. My read is that it helps but is unfortunately still quite hard from both engineering and economics perspectives

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@deedydas (Or it's it's late and I'm tired and the solution I'm thinking of doesn't actually work)

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@deedydas The algorithm here seems conceptually fairly simple, but definitely a pain to implement

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@yishan @ESYudkowsky My favorite is still "monkeys should be very careful about inventing humans". I think it better captures how although the humans are not specifically out to kill monkeys, the existence of humans can still be terrible from the monkeys perspective

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@TaliaGraceSable At a bird's-eye view, all states' primary function pre 1945 was to support an army large enough to defend the state from invaders. The Romans had some economies of scale - good roads, internal trade. I wouldn't be surpised if their GDP% spend on army was less than the Sassanids

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@iroasmas The biggest part of the libertarian ethos is putting limits on what a representative government can do even if the majority wants those things. It's explicitly trying to solve the "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner" problem.

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@CJHandmer In 2023 Canada used 50 TWh of electricity for aluminum smelting. That would be ~30% of all grid-scale solar in the US. Seems unlikely we could build that in 2 years

[Pasha Tsier @Barraketh]

@eshear Coming late to this, but somehow no one's mentioned my two favorite shows: 'Better off Ted' and 'Gravity Falls'. 'Better off Ted' is an amazing comedy about technology development. 'Gravity Falls' feels like it cleanses my soul