Lua has petered out a bit but it has been used as a scripting and config language for a ton of games and commercial embedded. Not a hobby language, not typically a main implementation language but that doesn’t mean no commercial use. posix/bash shell isn’t a hobby language either, but unless you’re Tom Lord or something (RIP) you’re not doing the entire project in it.
Do realize that luajit for years was bankrolled by corporations.
The step 3 has been shown to not work over and over again, the “find interesting connections” is the hand wavy magic at this time. LLMs alone don’t seem to be particularly adept at it either.
Has this been tried with reinforcement learning (RL)? As the OP notes, it is plausible from a RL perspective that such a bootstrap can work, because it would be (quoting the OP) "exploiting the generator-verifier gap, where it is easier to discriminate than to generate (eg laughing at a pun is easier than making it)." The hit ratio may be tiny, so doing this well would be very expensive.
Run ML of any combination and form in a for loop for higher order is one of the most obvious avenues. If it worked you would have heard about it a long time ago.
It's certainly a contest for some groups, but I can't say what percentage that would be. There's many many groups that aren't even remotely competitive and for some groups it's primarily a social event.
When we participated with W6YL, we had our own tent, food, and mass quantities of beer. Aside from folks stopping by the tent out of curiosity, it was not a social event at all.
One guy who was a master CW operator wanted to see how the satellite worked. We hooked his keyer up to the 70cm transmitter and let him go at it. At first, hearing his own signal after a 250 millisecond delay confused him a little but I turned the receive audio down to help him out.
I was originally going to scold the GP for a shallow dismissal and shitting all over a perfectly good application that runs on the best operating system in development today, Microsoft Windows.
But I also have a soft spot in my heart for Linux and I thought I would instead mollify the GP by pointing out that there really is Linux software for his Software-Defined Radio.
Little did I suspect that the GP wants all of the special features that SkyRoof offers, such as hyperencabulation of quasicosmic quantum wave collapse, a genuine pair of cathode ray boobs, and also don't forget the 1.7 jiggawatt zener diode that is included free with every subscription.
