#theory of computer science

[philearning]

THEORY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE: AUTOMATA, LANGUAGES AND COMPUTATION, Third Edition by Mishra and Chandrasekaran

Fulfills the needs of undergraduate degree and postgraduate courses students of computer science and engineering as well as those of the students offering courses in computer applications.

The book is available for purchase on our website. Click ttp://social.phindia.com/2doLtmpv.

Also available on Amazon, Kindle, Google Books and Flipkart.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There Were Always Enshittifiers

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TONIGHT (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND TOMORROW (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

My latest Locus column is "There Were Always Enshittifiers." It's a history of personal computing and networked communications that traces the earliest days of the battle for computers as tools of liberation and computers as tools for surveillance, control and extraction:

https://locusmag.com/2025/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/

The occasion for this piece is the publication of my latest Martin Hench novel, a standalone book set in the early 1980s called "Picks and Shovels":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

The MacGuffin of Picks and Shovels is a "weird PC" company called Fidelity Computing, owned by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. It sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punchline is deadly serious: Fidelity Computing is a pyramid selling cult that preys on the trust and fellowship of faith groups to sell the dreadful Fidelity 3000 PC and its ghastly peripherals.

You see, Fidelity's products are booby-trapped. It's not merely that they ship with programs whose data-files can't be read by apps on any other system – that's just table stakes. Fidelity's got a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve – for example, it deliberately damages a specific sector on every floppy disk it ships. The drivers for its floppy drive initialize any read or write operation by checking to see if that sector can be read. If it can, the computer refuses to recognize the disk. This lets the Reverend Sirs (as Fidelity's owners style themselves) run a racket where they sell these deliberately damaged floppies at a 500% markup, because regular floppies won't work on the systems they lure their parishioners into buying.

Or take the Fidelity printer: it's just a rebadged Oki­data ML-80, the workhorse tractor feed printer that led the market for years. But before Fidelity ships this printer to its customers, they fit it with new tractor feed sprockets whose pins are slightly more widely spaced than the standard 0.5" holes on the paper you can buy in any stationery store. That way, Fidelity can force its customers to buy the custom paper that they exclusively peddle – again, at a massive markup.

Needless to say, printing with these wider sprocket holes causes frequent jams and puts a serious strain on the printer's motors, causing them to burn out at a high rate. That's great news – for Fidelity Computing. It means they get to sell you more overpriced paper so you can reprint the jobs ruined by jams, and they can also sell you their high-priced, exclusive repair services when your printer's motors quit.

Perhaps you're thinking, "OK, but I can just buy a normal Okidata printer and use regular, cheap paper, right?" Sorry, the Reverend Sirs are way ahead of you: they've reversed the pinouts on their printers' serial ports, and a normal printer won't be able to talk to your Fidelity 3000.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because these are the paleolithic ancestors of today's high-tech lock-in scams, from HP's $10,000/gallon ink to Apple and Google's mobile app stores, which cream a 30% commission off of every dollar collected by an app maker. What's more, these ancient, weird misfeatures have their origins in the true history of computing, which was obsessed with making the elusive, copy-proof floppy disk.

This Quixotic enterprise got started in earnest with Bill Gates' notorious 1976 "open letter to hobbyists" in which the young Gates furiously scolds the community of early computer hackers for its scientific ethic of publishing, sharing and improving the code that they all wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates had recently cloned the BASIC programming language for the popular Altair computer. For Gates, his act of copying was part of the legitimate progress of technology, while the copying of his colleagues, who duplicated Gates' Altair BASIC, was a shameless act of piracy, destined to destroy the nascent computing industry:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Needless to say, Gates didn't offer a royalty to John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the programmers who'd invented BASIC at Dartmouth College in 1963. For Gates – and his intellectual progeny – the formula was simple: "When I copy you, that's progress. When you copy me, that's piracy." Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

For would-be ex-pirate admirals, Gates's ideology was seductive. There was just one fly in the ointment: computers operate by copying. The only way a computer can run a program is to copy it into memory – just as the only way your phone can stream a video is to download it to its RAM ("streaming" is a consensus hallucination – every stream is a download, and it has to be, because the internet is a data-transmission network, not a cunning system of tubes and mirrors that can make a picture appear on your screen without transmitting the file that contains that image).

Gripped by this enshittificatory impulse, the computer industry threw itself headfirst into the project of creating copy-proof data, a project about as practical as making water that's not wet. That weird gimmick where Fidelity floppy disks were deliberately damaged at the factory so the OS could distinguish between its expensive disks and the generic ones you bought at the office supply place? It's a lightly fictionalized version of the copy-protection system deployed by Visicalc, a move that was later publicly repudiated by Visicalc co-founder Dan Bricklin, who lamented that it confounded his efforts to preserve his software on modern systems and recover the millions of data-files that Visicalc users created:

http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm

The copy-protection industry ran on equal parts secrecy and overblown sales claims about its products' efficacy. As a result, much of the story of this doomed effort is lost to history. But back in 2017, a redditor called Vadermeer unearthed a key trove of documents from this era, in a Goodwill Outlet store in Seattle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/5vjsow/found_internal_apple_memos_about_copy_protection/

Vaderrmeer find was a Apple Computer binder from 1979, documenting the company's doomed "Software Security from Apple's Friends and Enemies" (SSAFE) project, an effort to make a copy-proof floppy:

https://archive.org/details/AppleSSAFEProject

The SSAFE files are an incredible read. They consist of Apple's best engineers beavering away for days, cooking up a new copy-proof floppy, which they would then hand over to Apple co-founder and legendary hardware wizard Steve Wozniak. Wozniak would then promptly destroy the copy-protection system, usually in a matter of minutes or hours. Wozniak, of course, got the seed capital for Apple by defeating AT&T's security measures, building a "blue box" that let its user make toll-free calls and peddling it around the dorms at Berkeley:

https://512pixels.net/2018/03/woz-blue-box/

Woz has stated that without blue boxes, there would never have been an Apple. Today, Apple leads the charge to restrict how you use your devices, confining you to using its official app store so it can skim a 30% vig off every dollar you spend, and corralling you into using its expensive repair depots, who love to declare your device dead and force you to buy a new one. Every pirate wants to be an admiral!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/tim-cook-to-investors-people-bought-fewer-new-iphones-because-they-repaired-their-old-ones/

Revisiting the early PC years for Picks and Shovels isn't just an excuse to bust out some PC nostalgiacore set-dressing. Picks and Shovels isn't just a face-paced crime thriller: it's a reflection on the enshittificatory impulses that were present at the birth of the modern tech industry.

But there is a nostalgic streak in Picks and Shovels, of course, represented by the other weird PC company in the tale. Computing Freedom is a scrappy PC startup founded by three women who came up as sales managers for Fidelity, before their pangs of conscience caused them to repent of their sins in luring their co-religionists into the Reverend Sirs' trap.

These women – an orthodox lesbian whose family disowned her, a nun who left her order after discovering the liberation theology movement, and a Mormon woman who has quit the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – have set about the wozniackian project of reverse-engineering every piece of Fidelity hardware and software, to make compatible products that set Fidelity's caged victims free.

They're making floppies that work with Fidelity drives, and drives that work with Fidelity's floppies. Printers that work with Fidelity computers, and adapters so Fidelity printers will work with other PCs (as well as resprocketing kits to retrofit those printers for standard paper). They're making file converters that allow Fidelity owners to read their data in Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3, and vice-versa.

In other words, they're engaged in "adversarial interoperability" – hacking their own fire-exits into the burning building that Fidelity has locked its customers inside of:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

This was normal, back then! There were so many cool, interoperable products and services around then, from the Bell and Howell "Black Apple" clones:

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads%2Fbell-howell-apple-ii.64651%2F

to the amazing copy-protection cracking disks that traveled from hand to hand, so the people who shelled out for expensive software delivered on fragile floppies could make backups against the inevitable day that the disks stopped working:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_nibbler

Those were wild times, when engineers pitted their wits against one another in the spirit of Steve Wozniack and SSAFE. That era came to a close – but not because someone finally figured out how to make data that you couldn't copy. Rather, it ended because an unholy coalition of entertainment and tech industry lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which made it a felony to "bypass an access control":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/section-1201-dmca-cannot-pass-constitutional-scrutiny

That's right: at the first hint of competition, the self-described libertarians who insisted that computers would make governments obsolete went running to the government, demanding a state-backed monopoly that would put their rivals in prison for daring to interfere with their business model. Plus ça change: today, their intellectual descendants are demanding that the US government bail out their "anti-state," "independent" cryptocurrency:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-78/

In truth, the politics of tech has always contained a faction of "anti-government" millionaires and billionaires who – more than anything – wanted to wield the power of the state, not abolish it. This was true in the mainframe days, when companies like IBM made billions on cushy defense contracts, and it's true today, when the self-described "Technoking" of Tesla has inserted himself into government in order to steer tens of billions' worth of no-bid contracts to his Beltway Bandit companies:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawmakers-question-musk-influence-over-verizon-faa-contract-2025-02-28/

The American state has always had a cozy relationship with its tech sector, seeing it as a way to project American soft power into every corner of the globe. But Big Tech isn't the only – or the most important – US tech export. Far more important is the invisible web of IP laws that ban reverse-engineering, modding, independent repair, and other activities that defend American tech exports from competitors in its trading partners.

Countries that trade with the US were arm-twisted into enacting laws like the DMCA as a condition of free trade with the USA. These laws were wildly unpopular, and had to be crammed through other countries' legislatures:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

That's why Europeans who are appalled by Musk's Nazi salute have to confine their protests to being loudly angry at him, selling off their Teslas, and shining lights on Tesla factories:

https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2025/01/24/heil-tesla-activists-protest-with-light-projection-on-germany-plant-after-musks-nazi-salute-video/164398

Musk is so attention-hungry that all this is as apt to please him as anger him. You know what would really hurt Musk? Jailbreaking every Tesla in Europe so that all its subscription features – which represent the highest-margin line-item on Tesla's balance-sheet – could be unlocked by any local mechanic for €25. That would really kick Musk in the dongle.

The only problem is that in 2001, the US Trade Rep got the EU to pass the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 bans that kind of reverse-engineering. The European Parliament passed that law because doing so guaranteed tariff-free access for EU goods exported to US markets.

Enter Trump, promising a 25% tariff on European exports.

The EU could retaliate here by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports to the EU, which would make everything Europeans buy from America 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish the USA.

On the other hand, not that Trump has announced that the terms of US free trade deals are optional (for the US, at least), there's no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apple's 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagram's apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them.

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, his war-cry was "your margin is my opportunity." US tech companies have built up insane margins based on the IP provisions required in the free trade treaties it signed with the rest of the world.

It's time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It's time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit that the Bill Gateses of the world have been trying to extinguish since the days of the "open letter to hobbyists." The tech sector built a 10 foot high wall around its business, then the US government convinced the rest of the world to ban four-metre ladders. Lift the ban, unleash the ladders, free the world!

In the same way that futuristic sf is really about the present, Picks and Shovels, an sf novel set in the 1980s, is really about this moment.

I'm on tour with the book now – if you're reading this today (Mar 4) and you're in DC, come see me tonight with Matt Stoller at 6:30PM at the Cleveland Park Library:

https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

And if you're in Richmond, VA, come down to Fountain Bookshop and catch me with Lee Vinsel tomorrow (Mar 5) at 7:30PM:

https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

[1000rh]

In the twentieth century, few would have ever defined a truck driver as a ‘cognitive worker’, an intellectual. In the early twenty-first, however, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving vehicles, among other artefacts, has changed the perception of manual skills such as driving, revealing how the most valuable component of work in general has never been just manual, but has always been cognitive and cooperative as well. Thanks to AI research – we must acknowledge it – truck drivers have reached the pantheon of intelligentsia. It is a paradox – a bitter political revelation – that the most zealous development of automation has shown how much ‘intelligence’ is expressed by activities and jobs that are usually deemed manual and unskilled, an aspect that has often been neglected by labour organisation as much as critical theory.

– Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023)

[felix-zarenium]

bro wdym the Pope was a math major from Villanova in undergrad im crying TT TT TT what is the catholic church's official stance on P vs NP please i have a theory of comp exam, can he just, like, announce that P=NP pleaseeeeee

[electricxangell]

born to code, forced to learn theory 💔💔💔

[lilith-hazel-mathematics]

Self-referencing functions

Hey mathblr, let me tell you about one of our favorite foundational systems for mathematics! It's designed to allow for unlimited self-reference, which is neat since self-reference is usually thought of as a big no-no in foundational systems. It turns out that it actually doesn't matter at all, because the power of self-reference is completely exhausted by the partial computable functions. The theory ends up being equivalent to Peano Arithmetic.

What are the axioms?

The theory is two-typed: the first type is for the natural numbers, and the second type is for functions between numbers. For convenience, numbers will be represented by lowercase variables, and uppercase variables represent functions. To prevent logical contradictions, we permit that some functions will fail to evaluate, so we include a non-number object ☒ called "null" for such cases. The axioms about numbers are basically what you'd expect, and we only need one axiom about functions.

The < relation is a strict total order between numbers.

Each nonempty class has a minimum: axiomatize the "min" operator with φ(n) ⇒ ∃m,(φ(m) ∧ min{k:φ(k)}=m≤n) for each predicate φ, and relatedly min{k:φ(k)}=☒ ⇔ ∀n, ¬φ(n).

Numbers exist: ∃n,n=n

There's no largest number: ∀n,∃k,n

There's no infinite number: ∀n,n=0 ∨ ∃k,n=S(k)

Every functional expression represents a function object that exists: ∃F, ∀(a,b,c), F(a,b,c)=Ψ for any function term Ψ. The term Ψ may mention F.

To clarify the fifth axiom, we define 0:=min{n : n=n}, and relatedly S(k):=min{n : k<n} is the successor function. The sixth axiom allows us to construct self-referencing functions using any "function term". Basically, a term is any expression which evaluates numerically. Formally, a "function term" is any well-formed formula generated from the following formation rules.

"n" is a term; any number variable.

"F(Θ,Φ,Ψ)" is a term, whenever Θ,Φ,Ψ are terms.

"Φ<Ψ" is a term, whenever Φ,Ψ are terms.

"min{n : Ψ}" is a term, whenever Ψ is a term.

In the third rule, we seem to be using the boolean relation < as if it were a numerical operator. To clarify this, we use the programmer convention that true=1 and false=0, hence (n<k)=1 whenever n<k is true, and otherwise it's zero. Similarly in the fourth rule, when we use the numerical function term Ψ as the argument to the "min" operator, we interpret Ψ as being false whenever it's 0, and true whenever it's positive. Formally, we can use the following definitions.

(n<k) = min{b : k=0 ∨ ((n<k ⇔ b=1) ∧ n≠☒≠k)} min{n : Ψ(n)} = min{n : 0<Ψ(n) ∧ ∀(k<n),Ψ(k)=0}

Okay, what can it do?

The formation rules on functions actually gives us a TON of versatility. For example, the "<" relation can be used to encode literally all boolean logic. Here's how you might do that.

¬x = (x<1) (x≤y) = ¬(y<x) x⇒y = (¬¬x ≤ ¬¬y) x∨y = (¬x ⇒ y) x∧y = ¬(¬x ∨ ¬y) (x=y) = ((x≤y)∧(y≤x)) [p?x:y] = min{z : (p∧(z=x))∨(¬p∧(z=y))}

That last one is the ternary conditional operator, which can be used to implement casewise definitions. If you wanna get really creative, you can implement bounded quantification as an operator, which can then be used to define the supremum/maximum operator!

∃[t<x, F(t)] = (min{t : t=x ∨ ¬F(t)}<x) ∀[t<x, F(t)] = ¬∃[t<x, ¬F(t)] sup{F(t) : t<x} = min{y : ∀[t<x, F(t)≤y]}

Of course, none of this is even taking advantage of the self-reference that our rules permit. For example, we could implement addition and multiplication using their recursive definitions, provided we define the predecessor operation first. Alternatively, we can use the supremum operator as a little shortcut.

x+y = [y ? sup{succ(x+t) : t<y} : x] x*y = sup{(x*t)+x : t<x} x^y = [y ? sup{(x^t)*x : t<y} : 1]

Using the axioms we established, basically as a simple induction, it can be proved that these operations are total and obey their ordinary recursive definitions. So, our theory is at least as strong as Peano Arithmetic. It's not hard to believe that our functions can represent any partial computable function, and it's only a little harder to prove it formally. Conversely, all our axioms are true when restricted to the domain of partial computable functions, so it's consistent that all our functions are computable. In particular, there's a straightforward way to interpret each function term as a computer program. Since PA can quantify over computable functions, our theory is exactly as strong as PA. In fact, it's basically just a definitorial extension of PA. Pretty neat, right?

Set theory jumpscare

Hey didn't you think it was weird how we never asserted the axiom of induction? We asserted wellfoundedness with the minimization operator, which is basically equivalent, but we also had to deny infinite numbers for induction to work. What if we didn't do that? What if we did the opposite? Axiom of finity unfriended, our domain of discourse is now the ordinal numbers. New axioms just dropped.

There's an infinite number: ∃w, 0≠w ∧ ∀k, S(k)≠w

Supremums: (∀(x≤a),∃y,φ(x,y)) ⇒ ∃b,∀(x≤a),∃(y≤b),φ(x,y)

Unlimited Cardinals: ∀a, ∃b, #(a)<#(b), where #(n) denotes the cardinality operation.

Each of the above axioms basically just assert the existence of larger and larger ordinal numbers, continuing the pattern set out by the third and fourth axioms from before. Similar to how the previous theory could represent all computable functions, this theory can represent all the ordinal recursive functions. These are the functions which are representable using an Ordinal Turing Machine (OTM). Conversely, it's consistent that all functions are ordinal recursive, since each function term can be interpreted as a program that's executable by an OTM. Moreover, just like how the previous theory was exactly as strong as PA, this theory is exactly as strong as ZFC.

It takes a lot of work to interpret ZFC, but basically, a set can be represented by its wellfounded and extensional membership graph. The membership graphs can, in turn, be encoded by our ordinal recursive functions. Using the Supremums axiom, it can be shown that the resulting universe of sets obeys a version of the Axiom of Replacement, which can be used to prove the Reflection Theorems, ultimately leading to the Specification Axiom. By adapting similar techniques relative to some regular cardinal, it can then be shown that every set admits a powerset. Lastly, since our functions are basically generated from infinitary computer code, they can be encoded by finite strings having ordinal numbers as symbols. Those finite strings are wellorderable, which induces a global choice function, proving the Axiom of Choice. Excluding a few loose ends, this covers all the ZFC axioms, giving the desired interpretation.

In the finitistic version of this theory, we made the observation that the theory was basically just a definitorial expansion of PA. In the infinitary case however, we unfortunately cannot say the same about ZFC. This ultimately comes down to the fact that our theory provides explicit and definable choice functions, meanwhile ZFC cannot. Although ZFC guarantees that choice functions exist, it cannot prove the existence of a definable choice function. This is because ZFC is an inferior theory has no clue where its sets come from, or what they really look like. Our theory, built from unlimited self-reference, and interpreted under the banner of ordinal recursive functions, is instead equivalent to the theory ZFC+"V=L".

[ravings-of-a-mad-scientist]

STE(A)M Meeting

Engineer: What if we added Art to STEM, so it says STEAM? Like a STEAM ENGINE?

Biologist: but i like stems…

Physicist: Sorry, but STEAM’s got my vote. I approve of all 7(ish?) phases of water. I think.

Computer Scientist: I vote for STEAM too, #PC gaming master race

Set Theorist: I will also vote in favor of increasingly large collections of seemingly unrelated things.

Education Professor: That's all very... dumb. F-. But, I have a pretty good idea on how to use the A so I'll vote for it too!

Biologist: :(

Artist: wtf, why am I here? What kinda nerdy sausage party is this?

Education Professor: (on hands and knees) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE MAKE OUR CURRICULUMS LESS BORING I DON'T KNOW HOW TO STOP ALL MY STUDENTS FALLING ASLEEP IF THEY CAN'T BE CREATIVE PLEASE

[j0ly0n]

usually I don't really care for genderbend AUs but there's something about yuri fight club that's so compelling to me... something something the standard of mother, wife and homemaker that we've sort of gotten over as a society but haven't bothered to replace with anything either... tyler "i'm wondering if another man is really the answer we need" durden... something about fem AU jack treating her body the way he treats his apartment in fc...... religious symbolism in fight club? let's talk about the original sin... something something consumerism something something beauty industry if you just buy enough you can make up for it all.... also something about "I wanted to destroy something beautiful" in this au's context that I can't elaborate on rn bc I'm at uni but do you feel me

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Faster way to calculate electron structure makes it easier to discover new materials

Figuring out certain aspects of a material's electron structure can take a lot out of a computer—up to a million CPU hours, in fact. A team of Yale researchers, though, are using a type of artificial intelligence to make these calculations much faster and more accurately. Among other benefits, this makes it much easier to discover new materials. Their results are published in Nature Communications. In the field of materials science, exploring the electronic structure of real materials is of particular interest, since it allows for better understanding of the physics of larger and more complex systems, such as moiré systems and defect states. Researchers typically will use a method known as density functional theory (DFT) to explore electronic structure, and for the most part it works fine. "But the issue is that if you're looking at excited state properties, like how materials behave when they interact with light or when they conduct electricity, then DFT really isn't sufficient to understand the properties of the material," said Prof. Diana Qiu, who led the study.

Read more.

[weird-machine]

That's a nice solution you've got there. It would be a shame if it wasn't the root cause of the problem.

[joe-willow]

Hey. "7 years of computer science for this". Hey what if. What if ok kinger has a wife ok but what if. What if when he's under all his pillows he's actually trying to remember what happened before. Before the amazing digital circus. How to get out of it. Trying to find a way. Just think about it, like darkness makes him get back to normal, and I don't think he would have said "7 years of computer science" just like this if he only remembered his wife.

Like that's a bit sad to think about it because I know that a lot of people likes kinger including me, but I think that he will MAYBE abstract. I know he is there since much more time than the others but I don't know, it could happen.

Remind yourself before insulting me or whatever that I'm not a super mega fan of tadc like some of you so I might have missed some infos about kinger that goosework dropped here and there, and I havent checked the wiki, I'm just writing this because I WANT THIS THEORY TO LEAVE MY BRAIN ARGGHHHHH

Kinger is pretty unstable, not really in the way that he could abstract at any moment like, but he has lost his mind, and does not seem to remember anything when he's with the others, even if he is able to go in the dark sometimes in their presence. In the hell it's diferent IT'S COMPLETELY DARK, so he was able to be in his normal state with Pomni. He tries to reassure her and all, because he is at that moment aware of what is tadc, which he wasn't really the moment before ???????? OK and so my idea is that (I think) he probably is one of the ppl who created tadc (I mean that's a bit obvious) and that seeing that being in the dark makes him go normal, he stays in the dark as much as he can so he can try to remember what happened BEFORE, his wife has existed for sure but he would be using her a a cover to avoid the others to be anxious because of him, I think that doing that kinda make him go crazy, explaining his state when he goes out of the dark. The more he tries, the darker he has to go in to remember. See, he had to be in HELL to remmeber. So it drives him crazy. He almost remember something but in the end just forget it. Kinger is going to abstract . I'm warning you guys.

Idk I that make any sense, english isn't my first language but I swear if this become a reality I WILL CRY 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

He's trying to find a way out of tadc, goes in the dark to be able to remember, does not succeed, it drives him even more crazy than he was before, he gets out of the dark and goes back to his crazy-CRAZY state. It hides to the others the fact that he's trying to find a way out, that he's actually REALLY going crazy and probably not so far from abstracting.

PLUS !!!!!!!! If we folliw what I've said, being able to talk with pomni in his normal state probably made him realize how crazy he has become. It will just accelerate his abstraction.

I'M SO SORRY IK THAT'S AN HORRIBLE AND SHITTY THEORY BUT IDK i I I DON'T WANT KINGER KINGER TO DIE WHAT DO YOU THINK 😭😭😭😭 BUT LIKE ????????,,??? AND THAT'S WHY HE WOUKD HAVE SAID THE THING WITH COMPUTER SCIENCE. HE REALIZED. HOW CRAZY HE HAS BECOME SINCE THE LAST TIME HE WAS ABLE TO BE LIKE THIS IN FRONT OF SOMEONE OR IN GENERAL. I'M DUMB. I'M CRAZY. IM GPING CRAZY 😭.

The whole thing with his wife is absolutly adorable

[lindahall]

Claude Shannon – Scientist of the Day

Claude Shannon, an American information theorist, died Feb. 24, 2002, at the age of 84.

learn more

[1000rh]

…the inner code of AI is constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but by the intelligence of labour and social relations.

– Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023)

[m---a---x]

Inspired by all the newly created communities i have also created one about the topic closest to my heart: Foundational Mathematics

It is inteded for all types of posts about and from people of all kinds of backgrounds interested in the topic.

Please share with anyone you think might be interested. If you want to be added comment on this post, so I can add you.

[noecturnalstudies]

I hate being the cliché of "can do computer science/maths but can't go to appointments because there are too many people and unknown factors" but it is true for me.

Maybe I should look a bit more into autism.

[a-typical]

In some respects, one can think of a quantum computer today as being analogous to an analog computer from years ago. The cooling is key to reduce energy and thus vibration in the system. If a quantum computer is run for too long the processor heats up and the noise in the results increases. So sensitive is the computer to heat or vibration that at the $150 million Nanoscience Hub at Sydney University, scientists have to use stairs rather than the lifts because the quantum computer would feel the vibration of the lifts in the building and produce meaningless results. Thus in Devs, the quantum computer main lab space is depicted as a suspended hovering isolated block, inside a bunker style building. This art directed visual feature, like so many in Devs, had one foot in reality and another in fiction.