Mr. Blue Sky

Erlang programming language fan. BEAM and OTP enthusiast. @joeerl admirer. Open source advocate. Jazz lover.

[Britain's Lost & Living Pubs @Britains___Pubs]

A fine place to smoke our pipes throughout the evening.

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

BLADE RUNNER turns 44 today.

[Mr. Blue Sky @massimo_cesaro]

@too_xedo È molto meglio di un Rolex.

[benoît chesneau @benoitc]

erlang-rocksdb 3.1.0 is out.

New: AES-256-CTR encrypted env for data-at-rest. Plus a CF/transaction iterator use-after-free fix.
#Erlang #RocksDB

https://t.co/DdmfJwtWtY

[AMD @AMD]

.@NeowinFeed highlights AMD Ryzen AI Halo, powered by Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and designed to give developers and creators the Windows 11 support, ROCm tools and high-capacity memory needed for powerful local AI performance.⚡

Read more here: https://t.co/JXqdLvwXHK

[benoît chesneau @benoitc]

hackney 4.3.0 is out: HTTPS connection pooling, TLS 1.3 session resumption, smarter SNI, and QUIC/WebTransport bumps for the Erlang HTTP client.
https://t.co/mMsyOBSMO2

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

During the middle ages, punishment of debtors and swindlers in Padua - Italy ....

Around 1200 AD, in Padua, the problem of insolvent debtors had become critical: the prisons were overcrowded with bankrupts and people ruined by debt. To ease the pressure on the prison system and impose a lighter but deeply humiliating punishment, authorities introduced a public penalty as an alternative to imprisonment.

The Stone of Vituperium (Pietra del Vituperio) can still be seen today inside the upper hall of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. It has a distinctive upside-down vase shape, with the inscription "Lapis Vituperii et cess. bonor." clearly visible along the rim.

The debtor was forced to strip in front of a crowd of at least a hundred people, left wearing only his shirt and linen underpants.
He then had to sit on the stone and slap his buttocks three times while shouting the Latin phrase "Cedo bonis" (“I renounce my goods”). After this intensely humiliating public ceremony, the man was banished from the city.

The Salone (Great Hall) of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua is considered one of the largest existing “suspended” halls, with extraordinary dimensions for the medieval period.

Measuring approximately 80m long and 27m wide, the hall is completely unsupported by columns, resting instead on the arches and loggias of the ground floor below. Its ceiling is a spectacular wooden structure shaped like an inverted ship’s hull, built between 1306-1309 AD, by the monk-architect Giovanni degli Eremitani.

The palace served as the seat of the city’s law courts and housed a covered market on the ground floor. After a fire destroyed the roof, the hall was rebuilt and re-frescoed between 1425-1440 AD, by Nicolò Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara. The four walls are entirely covered by a vast cycle of over 300 frescoes—one of the most extensive medieval pictorial cycles in existence.

Since 2021, it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Padua’s Fourteenth-Century Fresco Cycles.”

© DT Gomez

#archaeohistories

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Euro-Office launches June 9: Europe’s open-source challenge to Microsoft

On June 9, a coalition of European tech companies will release Euro-Office 1.0 to the public, a browser-based productivity suite built explicitly to break the continent’s dependence on American software platforms.

The project brings together IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian, BTactic, OpenXchange and https://t.co/7HcYA74FGv, a broad front of European firms that have decided collaboration beats competition when the shared enemy is a Washington-state monopoly worth trillions.

Euro-Office consists of four browser-based applications: a document editor, spreadsheet program, presentation tool, and a PDF editor, each enabling real-time collaborative editing. It supports Microsoft Office formats DOCX, PPTX and XLSX, as well as Open Document Format files.  In other words, you can open your existing files and get to work without a conversion headache.

The software is based on a fork of OnlyOffice’s open-source codebase, enhanced to meet the consortium’s goals of transparency, interoperability and long-term sustainability. That foundation comes with baggage: controversy already surrounds the software, with a licensing dispute over branding removal from the OnlyOffice codebase , though reports indicate the dispute has been resolved in Euro-Office’s favor.

The timing is not accidental. Euro-Office launches as European countries seek alternatives to American technologies amid deteriorating relations with the Trump administration. National and local governments in France, Germany, and Austria have already moved or pledged to move away from Microsoft software, driven by concerns over data privacy and US laws such as the Cloud Act, which compels American companies to hand over data to US law enforcement on request. 

For its first stable release, the development team has focused on improving the software’s underlying architecture, cleaning up source code, translating Russian-language code comments into English to support broader international collaboration, and implementing automated testing systems. 

Whether Euro-Office becomes a genuine challenger or remains a niche tool for the sovereignty-minded will depend on one thing: whether it actually works as well as the product it wants to replace. That answer arrives June 9.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[benoît chesneau @benoitc]

hackney 4.1.0 adds a WebTransport client. Same shape as the WebSocket API, just swap the ws_ prefix for wt_.

Runs over HTTP/3 (or HTTP/2), with many streams multiplexed over one session plus datagrams. Drop-in addition, no breaking changes.

https://t.co/zkcOaxTNGi

#erlang #elixir

[Tito Costa @tito]

The biggest arbitrage of all is right in front of our eyes

[Mr. Blue Sky @massimo_cesaro]

@quotesdaily100 AI hallucination. Amalfi has no station or railway.

[Mr. Blue Sky @massimo_cesaro]

@SciFiArchives Rollerball vibe

[Mr. Blue Sky @massimo_cesaro]

@famaisano @elenavilla3 Da non esperto di giurisprudenza provo sgomento in questa pornografia giudiziaria. E nausea, nel pensare che praticamente tutti i "divulgatori" dei mass media lucrano su questa storia che bene illustra la nostra decadenza.

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

The Voight-Kampff Testing Machine from Blade Runner, 1982

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A 34-year-old physics graduate student spent years writing a strange 800-page book in 1979 about a logician, a Dutch artist, and a German composer. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It quietly became required reading at every AI lab in the world.

It is the only book in history that makes the deepest ideas in computer science feel like a dream you cannot stop thinking about.

I read it across 3 months on a single side table next to my bed and walked away seeing intelligence, consciousness, and AI in a way I cannot un-see.

His name is Douglas Hofstadter. The book is called Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Almost nothing in modern AI makes sense without this book. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, the entire architecture of self-attention, the alignment problem, the strange feeling that LLMs sometimes seem to understand and other times seem to be playing an elaborate symbol-shuffling game, all of it traces back to questions Hofstadter laid out in a single book published before most of today's AI engineers were born.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you about how the book came to exist.

Hofstadter was the son of Robert Hofstadter, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961 for measuring the size of the proton. He was supposed to follow in his father's footsteps.

He started a physics PhD at the University of Oregon. He was miserable. He could not focus. He did not love the work. He kept getting pulled toward something else.

The something else was a single question that had haunted him since childhood.

How can meaning emerge from meaningless symbols? Specifically, how does a brain, which is made of nothing but cells firing electrical signals at each other, produce something that feels like consciousness, like understanding, like a self?

He could not let the question go. He left physics. He started writing. The book took him years. He wrote it largely in isolation, working in the basement of his parents' house and at Indiana University, where he eventually finished it. He thought it would be read by maybe a few hundred logicians and AI researchers. Basic Books published it in 1979 as a 777-page hardcover.

The next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award for science.

The book is structured in a way that almost no other book has ever attempted. The chapters alternate between two layers. One layer is technical chapters about logic, computability, neuroscience, and AI. The other layer is fictional dialogues between a tortoise and Achilles, characters borrowed from a paradox by Lewis Carroll.

The dialogues play with the same ideas the technical chapters explain. Read in order, they do not feel like a textbook. They feel like a strange house with rooms that loop back into each other and corridors that change shape behind you.

The first thing the book does is explain Gödel's incompleteness theorems in a way no math textbook had ever managed.

Kurt Gödel, an Austrian logician working in 1931, proved something that broke mathematics. He showed that any formal system powerful enough to describe arithmetic contains statements that are true but cannot be proven inside that system. Mathematics, the most certain thing humans had ever built, has holes in it that can never be filled.

Hofstadter spends hundreds of pages making you understand this proof not just as a mathematical theorem, but as a structural fact about every sufficiently complex system. Including the brain. Including any AI. The reason AI alignment is genuinely hard is not just engineering. It is structural.

Any system smart enough to model itself will contain truths about itself it cannot reach from inside itself. Hofstadter showed this 50 years before AI safety was a field.

The second thing the book does is introduce his core idea. He calls it the strange loop.

A strange loop is what happens when a system, by climbing through layers of itself, somehow ends up back where it started. Escher's drawings of staircases that always go up but somehow loop back are visual strange loops. Bach's musical canons that modulate up through keys and end on the original note are auditory strange loops. Gödel's self-referential statements that talk about themselves are logical strange loops.

Hofstadter argues that consciousness is a strange loop. Your brain builds a model of the world. Inside that model, it builds a model of itself perceiving the world. Inside that self-model, it builds a model of itself thinking about itself perceiving the world. The recursion does not bottom out. The self is what the loop feels like from the inside.

This is the part that AI researchers cannot stop returning to. Modern transformer models use self-attention, which is technically a mechanism where a network attends to its own internal states across layers. Recursive reasoning, where a model thinks about its own thinking, is now a research area with its own conferences. Meta-learning, where models learn how to learn, is a direct descendant of what Hofstadter described in 1979 as the necessary structure of any conscious system. He wrote the philosophy. The engineers are now building the implementation.

The third thing the book does is the part that haunts every AI conversation today.

Hofstadter argued that meaning is not something separate from symbol manipulation. It is what symbol manipulation looks like from the inside, when the manipulation is complex enough and self-referential enough. A simple lookup table does not understand anything. But a system that processes symbols at sufficient depth, with enough self-modeling, with enough recursion, starts to look identical from the outside, and possibly from the inside, to a system that understands.

This is the deepest question in modern AI. When ChatGPT generates a response, is it actually thinking, or is it just doing very fast symbol shuffling? Hofstadter spent 800 pages arguing that the distinction may not exist at sufficient scale. If a system shuffles symbols according to the right structure, meaning is what the shuffling looks like from the inside.

You can read modern debates about AI consciousness from Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, and David Chalmers, and you will find that they are all, in their own ways, having the argument Hofstadter framed in 1979.

The fourth thing the book did is the one that took the longest to be vindicated.

Hofstadter argued, and continued arguing for decades, that the actual engine of human intelligence is not logic. It is not deduction. It is not pattern matching in any simple sense. It is analogy. The ability to see one thing as similar to another thing, to map the structure of one situation onto a different situation, is, in his view, the core of thought itself.

For decades this was unfashionable. Symbolic AI focused on logic and rules. Statistical AI focused on pattern matching. Almost nobody worked seriously on analogy.

Then large language models started working. And the people who looked closely at what they were doing realized something uncomfortable. LLMs are, fundamentally, analogy machines. They learn structural patterns from text and apply those patterns by analogy to new situations. They do not deduce. They do not reason logically by default. They map the shape of one thing onto the shape of another thing and produce output that fits the new shape.

Hofstadter saw this before any of it existed. His later book Surfaces and Essences, written with Emmanuel Sander, is 600 pages defending the claim that analogy is the core of cognition. It came out in 2013. It was largely ignored. The ChatGPT release in 2022 was, in some sense, a vindication of the entire argument.

The strangest thing about reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in 2026 is realizing how lonely the book must have felt when it was written.

In 1979 there was no GPT. No deep learning. No transformer. The dominant approach to AI was symbolic logic, and most researchers thought minds were going to be programmed top-down, rule by rule, like a complicated chess engine. Hofstadter said the opposite. He said minds were emergent. They came from the bottom up. They were strange loops in complex substrates. The programmers' approach would never produce real intelligence because it was missing the recursive self-modeling that made minds real.

He was right.

The book is hard. I had to use all the LLMs and NotebookLM to understand it. It is not a beach read. You do not finish it in a weekend. The math chapters require attention. The dialogues require patience. Most people who buy it never finish it. That is fine. The book is structured so that reading any 50 pages produces a permanent shift in how you think.

Bill Gates lists it among the books that shaped him. Steve Jobs read it. Almost every senior AI researcher in the world will tell you it was the book that made them fall in love with the question of intelligence in the first place.

Hofstadter himself has been in doubt about modern LLMs. He has said they may have proven him right about analogy and wrong about consciousness at the same time. He is still writing. He is still working on the same question that pulled him out of physics 50 years ago.

The 800-page book that explained intelligence before AI existed is sitting one click away from you.

Most people will never open it. The ones who do will see the world differently for the rest of their lives.

[Mr. Blue Sky @massimo_cesaro]

@Grady_Booch As the only engineer in a family with 2 anesthesiologists, what your doctor said resonates with me.
I stopped to Hofstadter and Dennet works because I was overwhelmed. So, utter respect for you sir.

[benoît chesneau @benoitc]

erlang_quic: a pure-Erlang QUIC and HTTP/3 stack https://t.co/4tukRQK4tE #erlang #quic #http3 #webtransport

[benoît chesneau @benoitc]

erlang_quic 1.3.0 is out.

First production-ready release. Pure-Erlang QUIC + HTTP/3, zero C deps.

- RFC 9000 / 9001 + 9114 / 9204
- Priorities, datagrams, CONNECT
- -proto_dist quic for clusters
- OTP 27+

https://t.co/LUd3cgN6TJ

[Mr. Blue Sky @massimo_cesaro]

@weppos @dnsimple @elixirlang 😢