Anecdotally, this does work -- whenever I have had a break from nicotine pouches, I have done with cigarettes. The big difference is that with cigarettes you have to excuse yourself to go outside. It's much easier to break the habit this way. Though that might be in part how with nicotine pouches the act is different as well. Note that the nicotine content does go down this way -- I would say that the specific brand of cigarettes I roll are around 8mg in "Zyn" equivalent, which are usually sold in varying strengths from 3 to 12mg. Snus is a similar product sold usually at 8 to 24mg, though specific brands at 48mg exist.

The real challenge is that the difference between one cigarette a day and zero is huge, at least for me. Once you are at one cigarette a day, and e.g. commit to it being after a workday, you start waiting for the end of workday. It's easy to start feeling that the day does not begin until that moment. Real withdrawal starts at around day 3 and takes roughly 21 days for me.

I think smoking cessation products like patches and gum is not really helping either. It's still nicotine. I have wanted to try Varenicline, but it requires a doctor's prescription and (seemingly) "strong enough" dependence. I have hated the idea of paying 100 euros for a doctor's appointment to maybe get a prescription that costs me another 100 euros.

I plan to quit nicotine for good next month, when I submit a dissertation. After roughly 7 years of using snus and nicotine pouches, I have noticed that my gums are retracting, and when I eat food, a lot of it gets stuck at my lower teeth, and there are gaps between my teeth. I would not be surprised if I need braces, and in part wish that would solve the problem -- the gum retraction itself is irrecoverable. I have been waiting for a doctor's appointment to have my teeth checked out for about 6 months now. I can't help but think that in the process of doing my dissertation, I have trashed my health, at least to an extent, and now I'm just waiting to get an assessment how badly. Moving on, I think that whatever I'm about to do next, it should be something that I feel like needs no nicotine for motivation.

Cytisine. I buy some on Amazon. Works wonders, no cravings but strange dreams.

You most likely have this enabled and unless you run some ancient board. This UEFI mod is for motherboards from circa 2018. For workstation machines that would be 1st and 2nd generation Threadripper. So, if your CPU's model name starts with 3 or higher (and you have an AMD workstation), you likely have this already enabled by default.

Switching from macOS to Linux was quite painful because the security was so seamless on Mac. But I also realized I had no idea how my passwords are stored and under what guarantees. Learning and getting the hardware tokens to do it properly on Linux was a PITA. But reading this post made me feel a pinch better.

Documentation explaining the Keychain security model: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secb0694df1a/...

My anecdotal experience is that while LLMs are quite good at closing theorems given an LSP to inspect the proof-tree, they suffer from similar kind of problems with proofs as they do with bigger codebases in any language -- finding reusable parts that can be built into libraries (that's lemmas in Lean 4 sense). However, Buzzard has many times said that he wouldn't care how big the proof is and how ugly it would be, as long as there would be a proof.

Kevin might not care, but I care more about building the foundation for future proofs and human understanding than I do about this particular result.

Is any piece you've seen in good enough shape to be in a Lean library?

I believe Lean supports a signature search mechanism. E.g. Haskell has Hoogle, Lean has Loogle. So in many ways it's actually easier to search for "library" code than in most languages, because the type tells you everything you need to know and you don't need to care about the implementation.

It indeed does, this is a very good point I haven't thought about in the reverse direction.

SPIR-V states its an int, float, vector n (where n <= 4) or a matrix (2..4 cols of vector n).

It does not necessarily mean the hardware can do 4x4x64 floating point operations in a single subgroup operation, but at least the programming model supports framing it that way.

I've been writing a language around recursion schemes! Insofar it's just a library for Lean, but I wish to one day release it as an array programming language. I'm submitting a thesis in ~3 months, after which I'll be open-sourcing it.

As a meta-comment on the topic, something I have noticed is that there still exists confusion what it means to use theorem provers for projects -- the other day I read a tweet from Paradigm, a crypto-VC now seemingly AI-pilled. Some LP of theirs had made a Lean 4 formalization of the Ethereum's virtual machine. The tweet said this would have cost like $150k in API tokens ("would have", as in, I guess they get theirs for free), and took a week of inference time for an LLM to produce. I somehow got distracted to actually take a look at the code, which I found rather light on theorems. Nor did the project make use of Batteries or Mathlib which are arguably the one of the strongest motivation for me personally to use Lean4. That is, I generally rather rely on someone else getting the category theory and algebraic structures right, which then leaves me the proof obligation to show the correspondence with whatever toy I'm working on. Here I'm fine to use LLMs for proof search, very similar to how would I use a SMT solver. But what I have found is that the language models have to be really coerced into using these libraries, because otherwise the models much rather overfit and overclaim a solution with a 3 minute inference task rather than attempt to fulfill the proof obligations over 3 hours. And I feel nauseated when I need to convince the LLM (I use Claude) that filling the proof obligation is for "academic exercise" or because I'm coerced into doing so, because otherwise it will come up with reasons of its own why it does not want to do it. Now, this happens under the mental model in which I'm interested in finding equivalences with prior work. Many LLM generated Lean code reads more as if someone was interested whether X can be turned into a Lean 4 program, which is mostly yes, and that in general is a positive thing. But, if you are not interested in refinement types and theorems, why not just choose Haskell? The point is, I strongly sense that unless you have good questions to ask, then that's very evident in these languages. And, this is something the LLM won't help you -- if you don't impose a proof obligation for it, it certainly will not try to go the extra mile to conjure one for you.

Crypto guys are in the business of grifting magic beans to rubes. They are mostly interested in the aesthetics of these technologies. Using an academic programming language gives these scientific magical vibes and such that make people believe these guys are high tech and know their shit and so on. This is the reason many crypto projects do use Haskell too, it's known as an academic research language that is difficult to use and "if it compiles it works." They come at it from the perspective of "What would sound the best when I try to sell the space money of the future?"

Blockchain protocols are also faced with the most active, persistent, and well-funded state sponsored attackers of any industry, so naturally formal verification should be of great interest.

Another good tutorial: https://hoj-senna.github.io/ashen-aetna/

I used that to create my own Vulkan compute loader https://github.com/rivi-lang/rivi-loader

Anecdote, but I recall my friend saying he worked on freelancing assets to some train game and showed me some pictures of the said game. Unless there are more of these in existence, I think it was this.

Well, there are 864 other train sim games on Steam right now, so there are quite a few others in existence.

Please tell him thank you from us all :)

100% they look incredible.

I have this weird thing about a birthday -- for some reason, I was assigned a different birth date in NHS records in the UK compared to the one I have in my native Finland. I want to believe it has something to do with electronic systems transacting with different countries' systems (I noticed this difference soon after I exchanged my driver license) -- and I would have indeed born on a different day if it'd been the UK. But, I would assume this to be such a well-known issue with people who migrate, that it must just been just a typo. Doesn't stop me from believing though.

My German residence permit cut 10 centimeters off my height. Typos on the address registration form (which is printed by the resident, then typed back into a computer by a civil servant) frequently has typos too.

There are plenty of older Polish people living in countries like Belgium who are born in a city that's can be translated to "Blue".

How comes? For the color of the eyes used to be present on Polish ID cards / official documents (maybe still is, dunno).

And a great many people in non-polish speaking countries read the wrong line for "place of birth".

Did they really take the time of birth into consideration? I suppose that could be an issue with poorly made electronic data exchange, passing along the time and timezone for a field which should be just for the date.