Badlands and Days of Heaven are definitely his most conventional films and thus good starting points. Badlands especially is a great film, Days of Heaven is a bit uneven in terms of plot and pacing, but the cinematography is beautiful.
Then you have The Thin Red Line and The New World, which to me feel like a transitional period between the more conventional films and The Tree of Life, which is the first film that is characterized through and through by Malick's extremely divisive style. I personally love The Thin Red Line, but I can see why it's not for everyone. (I would skip The New World.) All later films have a very recognizable style, for which I think The Tree of Life is the best starting point.
Long story short: I'd start with Badlands, then watch The Thin Red Line, then The Tree of Life. If you like the last one, watch any of his later films.
Hey Sergio! I applied for the role of founding engineer a couple of months ago and passed the different stages. We had even been talking about the exact salary package and start date, decided to talk again in a couple of weeks about the specifics, but then I never heard back, despite reaching out to you again.
It’s totally fine if plans change and you decide not to move forward with a candidate, but I think a short email isn’t too much to ask after spending multiple hours on the various interviews.
That said, the interview process was otherwise pretty good and the work you’re doing sounds really interesting, so I would still encourage others to apply. Best of luck with Formal!
The linked pdfs on that page are wonderful. I reread Wirth's Plea for Lean Software and it still holds up remarkably well. It reminded me of Alan Kay's VPRI and the STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming which unfortunately ended in 2012. Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell. Are there any similar projects that are still being actively worked on?
> Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore
That's pretty much it, for maybe 10+ years now. There was a successor project BlueBottle with some promise, but it did not deliver. Later it was renamed to A2. Surprisingly, it did not help.
IMO the authors of BB/A2 bet heavily on XML/Java hype, and were trying to make Oberon more like Java. The result was something without much internal consistency and not very usable.
Not being able to use a major browser and not having the resources to write one from scratch did not help either.
Then some of the major figures of this project left. And that was it.
There are some hobbyists and some small businesses which use it for niche projects and that is all
The paper archive is still up. There were various interim reports generated for STEPS. I assume there was a final report as well, but I don’t remember reading it, myself. Vpri.org still works.
Are there any "guided" walkthroughs for someone who has never used Oberon (or any of its later versions like Bluebottle or A2) that demonstrate its most unique UI/UX aspects? Something along the lines of Russ Cox' Tour of the Acme Editor[0] but for Oberon?
Oberon seems fascinating and I would like to eventually play around with it in an emulator, but any resources that show how it's being used (as opposed to a description of its design like in Wirth's book for example) would be appreciated.
Not all of those abstractions are equally leaky though. Automatic memory management for example is leaky only for a very narrow set of problems, in many situations the abstraction works extremely well. It remains to be seen whether AI can be made to leak so rarely (which does not meant that it's not useful even in its current leaky state).
Since all programs have to be compiled to boolean gates and these gates have to be encrypted, there is a difference of a few orders of magnitude between running programs natively on a CPU (which can of course use highly optimized arithmetical instructions) and running programs over MPC.
In the end, it all depends on the complexity of the program: For simple programs like the Wordle guess/solution comparison (about 40 lines of code, compiled to < 2k gates) the communication overhead is more significant than the computational overhead. The Garbled Circuits protocol used by Tandem needs 7 rounds of communication, so with a round-trip time of 50ms the whole execution takes 350ms.
For more complicated programs, the computational overhead becomes a bit more significant. For programs of > 100k gates, the time to execute a program can range from a few seconds to about a minute. For example, an AES 256 computation requires ~ 9k AND gates and 40k XOR gates.
Right now I would not use it for programs with more than a couple 100k gates, but the engine has not yet been optimized very much, at the moment the focus is on providing a good UX and an easy way for people to experiment with MPC. I'm pretty sure that with a bit of optimization efforts it will be possible to speed it up significantly.
That's only true for systems where the principle of explosion actually holds though, isn't it? So it wouldn't apply to paraconsistent systems.
In the end, Gödel is actually giving us a choice: Either accept incompleteness or accept inconsistency. Of course it's true that historically incompleteness has been perceived as the only viable choice, but at least a few paraconsistent logicians like Graham Priest have argued for (non-explosive) inconsistency instead.
Assuming that "crypto" was meant to refer only to cryptocurrency, there are a few companies working on non-blockchain/non-cryptocurrency crypto(graphic) tech which are paying as much as web dev jobs.
For example, I stumbled upon ockam.io during my last job search (no affiliation, and never interviewed with them as they weren't actively hiring when I wrote to them last year). I vaguely remember there being a few others, though I can't remember any names off the top of my head (it has definitely gotten harder searching for those kinds of companies as most job ads are drowned out by all the blockchain jobs). Old job posts on https://this-week-in-rust.org/ often contain a few interesting companies.
(Shameless plug: If anyone is interested in working at a non-profit focusing on non-blockchain cryptography in the field of multi-party computation, the company I'm working at is hiring at the moment and the salary ranges [for a 4-day work week] are listed: https://sinefoundation.notion.site/SINE-Job-Board-d28eda00c5...)
Unfortunately the situation is bit complex for Ludwig Wittgenstein (who died in 1951 and whose works should enter the public domain in countries with death + 70 years copyright).
Wittgenstein only published the Tractatus during his lifetime (which will enter the public domain), but all of his later works were compiled and published posthumously (as the "Nachlass") by his literary executors, most importantly the Philosophical Investigations. At the moment, Trinity College Cambridge hold the copyright to most of the Nachlass and they have more or less publicly said that they do not consider the Nachlass to go out of copyright in 2022, as there seems to be an obscure exception in British copyright for posthumously published manuscripts that would extend the copyright duration to 2039 [0].
Of course British copyright law does not directly apply to the rest of the world, but I sadly do not expect to see many public domain editions from academics in the coming years, since most of them want to stay on good terms with Trinity College. Others would perhaps like to publish an edition, but are unsure about the copyright situation.
Are there any non-profit organisations that provide legal clarification in these rather complicated situations for individuals that want to publish new editions of these works? IANAL, so I would be reluctant to sink too much time into such a project if there is the chance that I might be sued into oblivion by Cambridge.
(The whole interview is actually quite nuanced on the question of whether math is discovered or invented and well worth a watch. There are also interviews with other mathematicians and physicists in the series, for example with Roger Penrose, but most other researchers seem to hold a rather dogmatic and platonist view, which is why I found Chaitin's perspective refreshing.)
Then you have The Thin Red Line and The New World, which to me feel like a transitional period between the more conventional films and The Tree of Life, which is the first film that is characterized through and through by Malick's extremely divisive style. I personally love The Thin Red Line, but I can see why it's not for everyone. (I would skip The New World.) All later films have a very recognizable style, for which I think The Tree of Life is the best starting point.
Long story short: I'd start with Badlands, then watch The Thin Red Line, then The Tree of Life. If you like the last one, watch any of his later films.