TechTakes

it’s the actual fucking worst when the topics you’re researching get popular in TESCREAL circles, because all of the accessible sources past that point have a chance of being cult nonsense that wastes your time

I’ve been designing some hardware that speaks lambda calculus as a hobby project, and it’s frustrating when a lot of the research I’m reading for this is either thinly-veiled cult shit, a grift for grant dollars, or (most often) both. I’ve had to develop a mental filter to stop wasting my time on nonsensical sources:

• do they make weird claims about Kolmogorov complexity? if so, they’ve been ingesting Ilya’s nonsense about LLMs being Kolmogorov complexity reducers and they’re trying to use a low Kolmogorov complexity lambda calculus representation to implement their machine god. discard this source.
• do they cite a bunch of AI researchers, either modern or pre-winter? lambda calculus, lisp, and functional programming in general have a long history of being treated as the magic that’ll enable the machine god by AI researchers, and this is the exact low quality shit research that led to the AI winter in the first place. discard this source.
• at any point do they casually claim that the Church-Turing correspondence has been disproven or that a lambda calculus machine is superturing? throw that crank shit in the trash where it belongs.

I think the worst part is having to emphasize that I’m not with these cult assholes when I occasionally talk about my hobby work — I’m not in it to make the revolutionary machine that’ll destroy the Turing orthodoxy or implement anyone’s machine god. what I’m making most likely won’t even be efficient for basic algorithms. the reason why I’m drawn to this work is because it’s fun to implement a machine whose language is a representation of pure math (that can easily be built up into an ML-like assembly language with not much tooling), and I really like how that representation lends itself to an HDL implementation.