But you posted this to a site that is literally called Hacker News... To be clear, I am not supporting any attempt at undermining your project, but people are pointing out to you that your results will be called into question if your only defence against "hacking" is "I hope people don't figure out how to do that".
> jay_gridbach: @oefrha I am afraid I had to flag your comment.
OP! This isn't cool. @oefrha basically did a free security audit for you and instead of being grateful for that, you get defensive and flag them? How is this cool?
I also had the same question as tromp about how you're validating that clients aren't cheating. @oefrha's analysis shows you aren't validating. How can we be 100% sure that none of the clients cheated? What if there is a counterexample to the conjecture but one of your clients didn't report it because they cheated? Math results require rigor and without rigor the bold claim is only a "claim" right now, not a fact!
I don't have much to contribute, but the name "Rephsis" seems borderline unpronounceable to me (maybe that's why the empire is crumbling? :P). I don't know whether you had some inspiration behind it, but to me it has a strong "I combined letters until I had a word that looked new" vibe.
The screenshots in the Steam page do look impressive though! As an outsider, I could mistake this for a recent Civ game. Congrats on making it here!
Do they? I think it's mainly about how much energy you are willing to invest into making rational decisions over emotional/"gut" ones. I mean, in the end, it probably doesn't matter which kind of shaving cream you buy, so it's easiest to go with the one that (due to e.g. ad-created familiarity bias, or just "niceness" of visual presentation) you have the best feeling about.
In other words, you introduce an invalid state to every object and make constructing objects a lot more cumbersome. The first is the exact opposite of the (imo highly desirable) "make invalid states unrepresentable" principle, and the second is also a pretty extreme cost to productivity. I wouldn't say this is never worth it, but it's a very high price to pay.
A better solution than what rmholt said is to have a static method that returns std::optional<T>. This way if T exists, it's valid.
Later you get into another whole debate about movable types and what T should be once it's moved from (for example if you want to turn that std::optional<T> into a std::shared_ptr<T>), if it only has non-trivial constructors. An idea that just popped into my head would be to have a T constructor from std:optional<T>&&, which moves from it and resets the optional. But then it's not a real move constructor. With move constructors, a lot of times you just have to accept they'll have to leave the other object in some sort of empty or invalid state.
I'm not saying it's perfect but it's better than dealing with C++ exceptions. At least with error codes you can manually do some printing to find out what went wrong. With C++ exceptions you don't even get a line number or a stack trace.
You do get invalid states with exceptions in much worse way. Think exception thrown from a constructor, or, even better, from a constructor of one of the members even before the constructor's body is reached. Not to mention managing state becomes much more complicated when every statement can cause stack unwinding unexpectedly.
Thanks for this, it provides an intriguing approach to thinking about transformers (or predictors in general)!
For extracting the fractal from the residual stream, did I understand it correctly as follows: You repeatedly sample the transformer, each time recording the actual internal state of the HMM and the (higher-dimensional) residual stream. Then you perform a linear regression to obtain a projection matrix from residual stream vector to HMM state vector.
If so, then doesn't that risk "finding" something that isn't necessarily there? While I think/agree that the structure of the mixed state representation is obviously represented in the transformer in this case, in general I don't think that, strictly speaking, finding a particular kind of structure when projecting transformer "state" into known world "state" is proof that the transformer models the world states and its beliefs about the world states in that same way. Think "correlation is not causation". Maybe this is splitting hairs (because, in effect, what does it matter how exactly the transformer "works" when we can "see" the expected mixed state structure inside it), but I am slightly concerned that we introduce our knowledge of the world through the linear regression.
Like, consider a world with two indistinguishable states (among others), and a predictor that (noisily) models those two with just one equivalent state. Wouldn't the linear regression/projection of predictor states into world states risk "discovering" the two world states in the predictor, which don't actually exist there in isolation at all?
Again, I'm not doubting the conclusions/explanation of how, in the article, that transformer models that world. I am only hypothesizing that, for more complex examples with more "messy" worlds, looking for the best projection into the known world states is dangerous: It presupposes that the world states form a true subspace of the residual stream states (or equivalent).
Would be happy to be convinced that there is something deeper that I'm missing here. :)
> I think that they should not have allowed to overload = and , operators
Comma operator I would agree is really only used for shenanigans. But operator= is as crucial as the copy/move constructors for ownership, so I'm not sure how you picture this...
> apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length
> I think it should be possible for your own structure or union type to overload any operators that are not already defined
I see that you are trying to solve the problem of "when reading this code, I don't know if these are the built-in operators or custom ones". I would be interested in learning about situations in which this was a problem for you, because I have not made that experience myself. From my perspective, you need to know the types of x and y to know in the first place which operations are possible - default or custom - so this rule does not really buy you much. But again, I don't think I understand your problem well enough.
FWIW, you can define a custom operator-> and operator* (they have to return pointers, or types that themselves have operator->/operator* which are then applied recursively). I am not convinced that mixing pointer-related semantics into e.g. object assignment is a sufficiently elegant solution from a conceptual perspective though.
A structure with no members can be made to have zero length as a member of something else but not as part of its own definition. I.e., the `[[no_unique_address]]` attribute is a property of the member, not of the struct on its own. It's somewhat annoying that you can't flag an empty struct as being really empty, and have no-unique-address-ness applied everywhere it's used automatically; you have to flag every use with the attribute manually.
As a younger programmer, I used to listen to people hating about everything C++ does, offers, or wants to be. Specifically https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ [1]. Then I tasted the RAII (probably up there with Dynamic Programming for "horribly named but super powerful paradigms") koolaid, and threw my caution to the wind. It's been a pleasant ride since, even if I've been living in a somewhat comfy C++ environment with few third-party integration woes and a reasonable compiler upgrade pace.
Sure, I agree, you should carefully evaluate which language best serves your needs, and what tools in a language you should use or stay away from. But some game dev ranting about which C++ features they consider useless (without even articulating their background or constraints) is worthless imo. Especially if this is the credit they give to their name:
> After over 20 years working with C/C++ I finally got clear idea how header files need to be organized.
[1] Yes, that FAQ parody is now very outdated, seeing as it precedes even C++11. I can believe that it was on-point at the time of writing, but C++ grew up since then.
C++ indeed has many gems like RAII, and many turds. My hope is that one of the last unavoidable turds (mandatory header files) gets replaced by modules but that seems eternally on the horizon.
Frankly I haven't used C++ since LLM copilots dropped, so that would address a lot of the tedium with managing headers in rapid greenfield development.
I have very mixed thoughts about headers, there is something I kind of love about being able to document the public declarations in one slim text file; and put the definitions elsewhere. There are lots of ways to do that, but other languages don't seem to bother. There are automated solutions, to pull these out, but I rarely see, for example, a python file will often just be a series of functions with no way to tell.
But they have a ton of warts, and require duplicate maintenance.
Python does enable this, actually. __init__.py can act as a "header" file that lets you define your porcelain interface separately from internal interfaces.
Regardless of all the "he said, she said", libel or not libel, email response times, GMP, threats and whatever drama:
Is there anyone who is seriously contesting the "it is intended to cure/prevent a disease, therefore it is a drug, therefore it needs FDA approval to be sold legally" line of reasoning?
Except it's not at all. The FDA regulates plenty of live organisms as drugs if they're claimed to be used to treat diseases.
For example, fecal transplants are regulated by the FDA. Rebiotix Inc is developing a bacterial fecal transplant, RBX2660, and Seres Therapeutics is developing an oral version (also live bacteria) called SER-109. Both of these are being regulated by the FDA.
There are hundreds of other live biotherapeutic products (LBPs) regulated by the FDA.
FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents.
However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.
