Thank you for comment. Knew little about the man himself.
"I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."
This has to be experienced. (It's like Jimmy Hendrix says.) I'm not sure I would compare it to puberty, or an invasion. Definitely a visitation, however. It seems the historical successful travellers on the path were in the main fortunate to be born into families of adepts. In many cases it was the father who initiated the son. For others, the cultural milieu typically seeded the necessary symbolic guide posts.
> Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)
You have perhaps forgotten your own initial encounters with such topics. It is a healthy response of the unprepared psyche to recoil from such content to protect itself; it can be dangerous, as you must know. The third rail is very much alive.
But you're stuck in sort of meta duality yourself: you assert a distinction between reality and phenomena (such as consciousness). Did we actually -prove- that consciousness can not be a property of reality and is mere emergent phenomenon as YB and company claim? (note: consciousness =/= intelligence. Our little black boxes are at best approaching 'intelligence'.)
YB starts off with ~'we all agree mind is a product of the brain'. No, we do not all agree. Did we ever find the 'bottom' of matter? Has are search to find 'irreducible particle' succeeded? Is it not the case that as we threw more energy into our apparatus we found more elementary matter? Did we in fact finally arrive at a coherent unified model that fully explains material reality without "mathematical woo"?
So the honest position is that we have patchwork understanding of reality at various scales, and the reductionist program of Democritus et al has not been conclusively shown to be the ultimate truth. It seems that mind is bounded by the body but that 'boundary condition' depends on various reductionist assumptions about materiality.
I didn't assert anything except for what was in the comment. I linked to the Wikipedia article which has a lot of different viewpoints.
If anything I was just trying to suggest that the mind (or soul) and body aren't completely separate things as some religious or pre-scientific viewpoints might hold (touched on in part of the Wikipedia article I linked to).
Maybe I didn't do a great job of stating where I was coming from.
You sound like Donald Hoffman when he was on the Lex podcast. I agreed with a lot of things he said.. I mean the idea that literally reducing things to smaller and smaller particles is not the ultimate explanation of things makes total sense. Along with the idea of using these mathematical exotic geometries instead or something.
Where he loses me is going from embryos to humans that are somehow dictating the shape of reality. We have great explanations for development and evolution. But there doesn't seem to be a good explanation at all for how fully formed minds somehow shape reality in the past. Or how this works with less intelligent life.
> I didn't assert anything except for what was in the comment.
That seems to be the case. I take that assert back.
p.s. just checked out the wiki for Donald Hoffman. Thank you for the reference, TIL. Have to listen to that podcast, but have some idea what are the problematic open Qs that you mention. [I'm not apparently not allowed to vote on hn so take my +1 in spirit ..]
One can get a glimpse of the ever present One and its generations in modular mathematics. If we discard the insistence on numbers being simply a monotonically generated sequence (|, ||, |||, ..) which simply corresponds to counting, and instead assume a cyclical reality to Number, with the sequence of reduced residue sets of primorials illustrating the Generations of One, which is eternally present in each generation. Each is a 'measuring system', and measure engenders form. Reality is harmonic and knowing 'the beginning' is knowing 'the end'. (∅ +/- n)*
That view btw also gives us insight into various numerical structures, e.g. twin primes, involving prime numbers.
"Number rules the universe. Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons. Every man has been made by God in order to acquire knowledge and contemplate." -- attributed to Pythagoras
[I haven't watched the video - I come to HN to read .. but that said]
> I don't think the communication protocol between two processes, services, whatever has have the property of being synchronous or asynchronous.
This is news to those of us who have implemented or designed communication protocols between processes.
> It is more about how each side of the communication handles it internally.
You are confusing processing of information obtained via communication with the pattern of communication. A synchronous protocol is a lock-step exchange of data/meta-data between two communicating processes. You can have processes communicating via a synchronous protocol that handle the processing in an asynchronous manner. An asynchronous protocol does not require exchange of messages to be lock-step
A: HELO w/ MY CREDS <blocks>
B: HELO - ACCEPT CREDS
A: GET 'foo' <blocks>
B: HERE is 'foo' <data>
[A: queue foo data for async processing by an internal comp A']
A: GET 'bar' <blocks>
[A': processed 'foo']
B: HERE is 'bar' <data>
[A: queue bar data for async processing by an internal comp A']
...
[A': processed 'bar']
and then there could be this:
A: HELO w/ MY CREDS <blocks>
B: HELO - ACCEPT CREDS
A: GET 'foo' <doesn't block>
A: GET 'bar' <doesn't block>
B: HERE is 'foo' <data> # B may even return 'bar' first in some cases
[A: queue foo data for processing ...]
A: GET 'foobar' <doesn't block>
B: HERE is 'bar' <data>
[A: queue bar data for processing]
...
B: HERE is 'foobar' <data>
...
Quaint diagrams we used to draw for protocols - this is just some random example from a quick search [note how it transitions from a sync handshake to async comm]:
I think it's all a bit "in the eye of the beholder" as far as protocols. Here I mean the message patterns and implicit state models, ignoring software design choices.
I'd say the IP protocol is asynchronous in terms of flinging individual packets around. They can be buffered, delayed, etc. They can arrive at the recipient without notice.
TCP starts to make it "more synchronous" since the two parties have to signal back and forth negotiate coordinated buffers and perform a sequence of steps within timeout deadlines.
SMTP seems more asynchronous in terms of whole messages being delivered and stored without protocol-level coordination between messages.
Non-pipelined HTTP 1.1 is both "more synchronous" and "less synchronous". It adds more timing behavior to the use of TCP to have simplex phases of client-sending and server-sending. At the same time, you can think of the request and response messages a bit like email messages to be stored and forwarded. But there are narrower response time limits for an HTTP message pair to succeed or fail at the transport level compared to a message and reply via email.
Of course, these different scenarios are happening all at once in a normal SMTP or HTTP exchange. So the abstractions layered over introduce new protocol units which may have synchronous or asynchronous characteristics, while the underlying primitives continue to also occur with their own apparent characteristics.
A similar issue exists with voice over IP. The protocol is duplex streams which seems quite asynchronous to me. But a typical conversation involves synchronization at human language boundaries and is quite sensitive to latency. Conference calls can fall apart when participants lose synchronization and start talking over each other. This is a social communication protocol layered over the underlying audio streaming protocol.
What I think GP meant is that [a]synchrony is a property of how one locally handles the need to "wait" for something, and if the protocols being spoken are do not impose order then this is really evident. E.g.,
A: do thing #0 (no wait)
A: do thing #1 (no wait)
A: do thing #2 (no wait)
B: thing #1 result
A: do thing #3 (no wait)
B: thing #0 result
B: thing #3 result
A: do thing #4 (no wait)
B: thing #2 result
B: thing #4 result
In this example A reads responses from B but never sits idle while "waiting" for those responses.
At some point A might need to "block" waiting for all the results for extant requests. What does "block" mean? It could mean: not sending any more requests, not allowing the user to initiate more requests, not being responsive in the UI, and probably more.
A could also speak the same protocol synchronously:
A: do thing #0
A: <wait>
B: thing #0 result
A: do thing #1
A: <wait>
...
Assuming this protocol does not impose ordering, then, the [a]synchrony property is purely local to A.
Even if order is required, A might do other things "while waiting" for responses from B, and that... might be asynchrony. In the traditional Unix single-threaded process model A might block but the system continues to be responsive because the kernel is not synchronous even if A is, and so the kernel can schedule other processes while A "waits" -- but no one would say that A is async in that case, nor would anyone say that the whole system is async either unless A's functionality were spread over multiple processes in such a way that the UI (or whatever) has an "async feel".
In reality we might have blocking behaviors even in fully async cases like the first one above owing to flow control, but even there the meaning of "blocking" will depend on what A does when B can't receive more messages due to flow control: A could transmit backpressure to whatever is causing A to generate messages to B, or A could stop generating messages to B, or A could stop being responsive in its UI, or...
I believe this is what TFA was getting at: that the meanings of these words (blocking, waiting, asynchronous, etc.) are somewhat fuzzy. Still, when someone says "let's do this asynchronously" I know what they mean, at least for the purposes of the discussion in which it comes up -- in actual design and implementation, once again, the meaning may vary, but the intent is still the same! The intent of doing things asynchronously is to amortize latency and better utilize local resources.
That was not a description. I merely appended the primary motivation for pipelining. We trade latency for throughput in pipelining.*
It's also not opinion. When pipelining, the communicating peers are not sychronizing their interactions; it occurs in an a-synchronous manner. Where does opinion get into the picture?
* since we typically end up packing a multiplicity of requests in a given MTU and further we can saturate the link (on both ends) since we are not blocking for a response before sending the next request. In synchronous protocols, the full bandwidth can't be utilized as there are cycles where the link (on respective sides) is idle.
As for description of pipelining, this question came up years ago in Redis's newsgroup and I posted the following (It starts sync and the final segment is 'pipelining' :)
I was not referring to the statement that pipelining serves maximizing throughput. I agree with that. I was referring to the statement that pipelining would be a kind of asynchronous communication.
Look, you are welcome to your 'opinion' but the q remains (given that there are only 2 choices here) as how pipeling is a form of "synchronous" communication.
[p.s.]:
pipelining is a kind of async comm because unlike the general case of asynchrony, the response order mirrors the request order (which is not a requirement of the general case.)
I never said that pipelining is synchronous communication. If our go back to my original post. I merely said that (a)synchronicy is not a feature of a protocol, but how sender/receiver handle the communication internally.
The authority to check with is Kenneth Frampton and his Modern Architecture. He categorized Safdie as postmodern. I just checked and apparently my copy (some early 90s edition) is awol from the shelf and no pdfs to be found on the net. However found this article:
Ando used to make concrete sing. Just superb. He also had a dog he named Corbu (its true!) - iirc he claimed (in a lecture when visiting our school) that he followed Corbusier but to me he generously lifted from Lou Kahn.
I suggest using 'form' instead of 'shape'; the latter is mainly concerned with external form. In context of LLMs, form would be the internal mapping, and shape the decoded text that is emitted.
"I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."
This has to be experienced. (It's like Jimmy Hendrix says.) I'm not sure I would compare it to puberty, or an invasion. Definitely a visitation, however. It seems the historical successful travellers on the path were in the main fortunate to be born into families of adepts. In many cases it was the father who initiated the son. For others, the cultural milieu typically seeded the necessary symbolic guide posts.
> Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)
You have perhaps forgotten your own initial encounters with such topics. It is a healthy response of the unprepared psyche to recoil from such content to protect itself; it can be dangerous, as you must know. The third rail is very much alive.