Strong agree - it's horrible. I can't get past the enormous amount of boilerplate code that's required to do anything - even the proverbial Hello World.
In Australia "baked in store" actually meant baked in Ireland, frozen, shipped to the other side of the would, and warmed-up/finished-off in an oven at the supermarket!
Why not something a little simpler, like a universal sales/VAT/transaction tax offset by a UBI. This simpler model provides fewer opportunities to build or exploit loopholes.
The universal tax would be at a relatively low rate, because it would apply to all transactions. And the UBI compensates everyone for the tax on essentials.
I'm not sure there is a clear separation between applying heuristics and searching a space. Often in compilers you search a subset of a space using heuristics, and you can adjust those to control how much of the space you cover.
For example, here is a pass that reorders WebAssembly globals in the Binaryen optimizer:
We have a simple criteria for the quality of a solution - how big the binary size is with an order - but the space of possible orders is huge (every permutation that keeps every global after its dependencies). What we do is a targeted search of that space using some heuristics using parameters that work well enough and aren't too slow in practice.
> I'm not sure there is a clear separation between applying heuristics
There is and it's quite simple: if your heuristic reduces the size of your search space faster than it takes to perform the search (ie try solutions) then you have a real algo on your hands. Otherwise you're just searching. This is basically the border between P and NP and it's just that in compilers most of the problems are NP hard so none of the heuristics are really that good.
To me an algorithm is closed, while a heuristic (aka rule of thumb) is just a fast way to probably get a better solution / subset of the solution space at the cost of possibly missing the optimal result or even ending up in a pessimal corner case.
With an NP complete problem you'd rather have some solution rather than use up your lifetime searching for the best.
i dunno what "closed" means here? converges? lots of things with heuristics converge...
most things people think of as algorithms are just heuristics codified. take for example unit propagation in DPLL (fairly modern SAT approach); quoting wiki[1]
> In practice, this often leads to deterministic cascades of units, thus avoiding a large part of the naive search space.
that *in practice* there means there's no guarantee because ofc not - otherwise they would've proven something about NP. but they didn't, they just came up with a way to search that's sometimes/often not bad. a lot of people call this an algorithm ("... is a refinement of the earlier Davis–Putnam algorithm") because it fits the dictionary definiton (a repeatable process) but i do not because it's a repeatable process that isn't proven to produce anything (ie faster than brute force). and the intuition i'm proposing for why it doesn't is because it doesn't actually shrink the search space fast enough.
note, my definitions/intuitions don't translate/have the same force elsewhere (especially in continuous/differentiable spaces) but they're a pretty standard/obvious perspective in combinatorial optimization (np-hard/np-complete problems).
I don't know what you're asking for - this isn't some kind of controversial topic - any iterative algo that isn't polynomial time (or is approximate) is search.
In the context of compilers there are many. Look at this block diagram for Chaitin's register allocator:
Yes - Anyone who's FAQ answer to "How to avoid being scanned" is "We don't have an opt-out, you must block all these addresses" isn't behaving like a legit business.
"Nice network you've got there."
"We noticed something might be open. We're not telling you what it is."
"It would be a pity if something happened to your business."
> calling it "heat death" makes me think how the whole thing is steadily unraveling
"Heat death" seems especially appropriate when talking about google results being pages of nothing but scraped results of SEO rated pages of scraped results, ... Or youtube showing ads for ads for ads...
And how long before our AI results are built primarily on previous generations of AI results. Turtles all the way down to ... mindless nothing :(
