So there was this German scientist that went about decoding how bees communicate where pollen sources are. I believe he won a noble prize for it. He had to individually hand paint bees. I can't remember the details and I'm too lazy to look it up.
The point here is that if you want to know what birds are saying you'd probably have to record the flapping of wings (especially with the more colorful birds) and then the bird song - their eyesight is particularly acute due to needing to eat fresh berries so body posture is most likely important in communication. A high def camera and microphone and an LLM should be able to do the job if the data is good enough on a particular species. From there you should be able to extrapolate to multiple species.
The language would probably be along the lines of a few set phrases
The homeless and others are also doing "mime stalking" which is as stupid as it sounds. They'll monitor what I'm doing online and then follow me around acting intentionally stupid with body language and clothing until I say or do something irrational and then they get a payoff.
It's stupid and they're awful. At this point I'm just repeatedly looking up all the ways they've attempted to have me poisoned in the shelter system in San Francisco. I have headaches all the time and my health is poor. All this from not drinking smoking or doing drugs. They're just poisonous sociopaths. Please don't come to this city. They're broken people.
Anyway every time it happens from now on I'll make a post on hacker news and that way I'll be able to narrow down the cause and timing. The homeless are awful. I should write that everyone in San Francisco is awful given the enormous amount of stalking gaslighting and typical assholery. It's like it's Spanish for disappointment.
I'd be interested to know if code visualization were more useful for certain languages than others, specifically functional languages like elixir that specifically target data immutability.
As with any highly used language you end up running into what I call the COBOL problem. It will work for the vast majority of cases except where there's a system that forces an update and all of a sudden a traffic control system doesn't work or a plane falls out of the sky.
You'd have to have some way of testing all previous code in the compilation (pardon my ignorance if this is somehow obvious) to make sure this macro isn't already used. You also risk forking the language with any kind of breaking changes like this. How difficult it would be to test if a previous code base uses a charbit macro and whether it can be updated to the new compiler sounds non obvious. What libraries would then be considered breaking? Would interacting with other compiled code (possibly stupid question) that used charbit also cause problems? Just off the top of my head.
I agree that it sounds nonintuitive. I'd suggest creating a conversion tool first and demonstrating it was safe to use even in extreme cases and then make the conversion. But that's just my unenlightened opinion.
That's not really the problem here--CHAR_BIT is already 8 everywhere in practice, and all real existing code[1] handles CHAR_BIT being 8.
The question is "does any code need to care about CHAR_BIT > 8 platforms" and the answer of course is no, its just should we perform the occult standards ceremony to acknowledge this, or continue to ritually pretend to standards compliant 16 bit DSPs are a thing.
[1] I'm sure artifacts of 7, 9, 16, 32, etc[2] bit code & platforms exist, but they aren't targeting or implementing anything resembling modern ISO C++ and can continue to exist without anyone's permission.
[2] if we're going for unconventional bitness my money's on 53, which at least has practical uses in 2024
Yours is the sort of project where if I had a boatload of money I'd just find it no strings attached through your project forecast. This would be such an excellent tool for artists with light pen integration.
Serious question out of curiosity. Has anyone solved the lifting gas volatility problem (is the lighter the gas the more volatile)? That's the main deal breaker with all zeppelin proposals.
Consider a cargo airship operated remotely. The propulsion would be based on solar powered fans. Even if it took weeks to cross the ocean it would need essentially no cost to operate (or incredibly little) compared to operating a ship. If one blows up (hydrogen is volatile) you'd dump all the cargo on the ocean but you wouldn't be dumping tons of diesel fuel and the frame of the the ship is smaller than a ship. If you can do it without a crew you've essentially made shipping almost free except for loading and unloading at ports. AND you can put ports in areas that don't have access to inlets to the oceans or good shorelines. The most difficult part is the volatility of the lifting gas. You might have to load and unload cargo on platforms away from the coastline to prevent explosions. As for the hydrogen itself, the balloon can create it's own lifting gas by separating hydrogen from the atmosphere with an onboard chemical electric apparatus (presumably) if it ends up leaking hydrogen on its voyage. Lifting gas volatility has always been the biggest problem.
The point here is that if you want to know what birds are saying you'd probably have to record the flapping of wings (especially with the more colorful birds) and then the bird song - their eyesight is particularly acute due to needing to eat fresh berries so body posture is most likely important in communication. A high def camera and microphone and an LLM should be able to do the job if the data is good enough on a particular species. From there you should be able to extrapolate to multiple species.
The language would probably be along the lines of a few set phrases
- wanna mate? - where's food? Here's food! - stay away - fly together south?
Stuff like that.