DougMerritt

9 ms·

61.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I started with Bell Labs Unix, transitioned through many variations, and then when I came to OpenBSD and Linux, they were both pretty straightforward compared with, say, porting to or from System V Unix. I don't think you're wrong
62.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Very well said.
63.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Almost everyone sometimes wonders "what if I had chosen a different path", but it's very important to note that that means that you still would have wondered that if you had in fact taken the other path! It's just human
64.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Skipping the exact amount of money in the sibling thread, Jim Davis allowed truly massive merchandising -- I didn't follow it, so I have to make it up rather than give exact examples, but something along the lines of Garfield toys, Gar
65.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
> But that's for at-rest inertia. Photons are only very rarely if ever "at rest". Not just rarely; photons are never at rest, period. In circumstances where one might intuitively think they might change speed, instead they
66.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Citation please (preferably from a prestigious journal ;) But seriously, why is that, or why do you think so?
67.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Yes, and that tends to be the case with formatters for programming languages in general.
68.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I haven't reconsidered "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics" from a more modern perspective, but it sure was a bible. Great book.
69.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Makes sense. I wish you luck on all this!
70.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Someone instantly down modded this? That's just weird.
71.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I'm not the OP, but a word to the wise: 99% of the time that people decide to reimagine something to make it more powerful and advance the state of the art, they leave out important features from previous technology, which "myster
72.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
In the right circumstances, you're very right -- but most people will get some aspect of this wrong.
73.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
You're overly humble Chuck. ;)
74.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Although nothing will explain everything, still it's fine with the first point: increasing the rotation vector of momentum in spacetime increases mass. The rest follows, since you know that the more mass, the more energy required to ac
75.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Fair point, but even taking that without argument, it's still not about 110 baud teletypes. :)
76.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
You're saying that brevity for typing on 110 baud teletypes was the primary reason for the density of APL operators, but that's not historically true. For one thing Iverson and pretty much everyone else high profile in the APL com
77.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
All of that appears to directly contradict things established by experiment, as well as mainstream theory, so I dunno.
78.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
You appear to be unhappy with the notion of reversible computation , but that is not the topic here. Time reversibility of most physics at the subatomic level is standard, mainstream, but also posed one of the biggest physics puzzles of
79.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I don't know; its creator, Walter Bright, is a frequent poster here on YN, and it must be quite frustrating to him. My impression of it has been that it might well amount to a safer version of C, but I have yet to try it on a project.
80.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I usually don't have the patience for videos, and I'm going to wait for reviews before considering his book, which on Wolfram's site is at: [0] However, maybe this helps: (1) perfectly reversible systems do not inherently inc
81.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I haven't been fresh on this stuff for years, but there are some other differences. Included multicast, true QoS, included IPsec, a few other things. It's just that I sometimes see people advocating upgrading from ipv4+NAT to ip
82.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
ipv4 with NAT is in fact still extremely common, but skipping that, which parts of ipv6 (beyond extra bits) do you regard as essential versus which parts are over-engineered?
83.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
In ordinary arithmetic and algebra, there isn't any reasonable definition of n/0 because if it is allowed, then one can prove contradictory things. Outside of proof systems/pure math, like in software you write, you can defin
84.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
As an avocational linguist I am sympathetic to all of that, but effective communication requires a large degree of mutual understanding of words, so it's not like anything goes, either; plus most people have not studied linguistics and
85.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Their distinction follows dictionaries that I've looked at, but common usage is clearly diverging from that. It's unclear to me at what point we should stop saying that lots of people are using words incorrectly, and start saying
86.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I'm American and I have pretty much the same impression.
87.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Nice. Also an illustration that its good to establish one's inner motive first, like here might range from a desire for simple solutions, to another dimension of drama, which might indeed be desirable sometimes, for entertainment or fo
88.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Since the title is only meaningful in the AI context for people in the know: 'The "Grokking Paper" is one of the most head-scratching papers to come out in the neural network space...' [training increases accuracy, but m
89.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
Right -- although many things that are ambiguous in text are disambiguated in actual speech, so the problems that arise with audio speech are not wholly the same as with text. A classic example is the word "record", which has firs
90.
by DougMerritt 3y ago
I definitely agree, specifically because of software improvements (not because Moore's Law will make it that cheap). Conversely, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to predict that it will always be as expensive as it is today. Well,

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