LegionMammal978

8 ms·

31.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
Yes, it is all proprietary, but there are still ways to inspect most of the WL-implemented functions since the system does not go to extreme pains to keep them hidden from introspection. It is not unlike Maple in that sense.
32.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
One reason I've found in practice to use iteration even in cases when recursion makes lots of sense (e.g., divide-and-conquer algorithms): the ability to periodically save the state of the computation to disk, and resume it later. Ever
33.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
Perhaps, but at least I find it very simple for the optimality properties it gives: there is no inherent need to say, "I know that better parameters likely exist, but the algorithm to find them would be hopelessly expensive," as i
34.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
In general, I find that minimax approximation is an underappreciated tool, especially the quite simple Remez algorithm to generate an optimal polynomial approximation [0]. With some modifications, you can adapt it to optimize for either abs
35.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
"The clean-room reimplementation test" isn't a legal standard, it's a particular strategy used by would-be defendants to clearly meet the standard of "is the new work free of copyrightable expression from the origin
36.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
Your scenario seems baselessly optimistic. If it were just as simple to run society off of those, we would've been doing it to some extent already: it's not like Big Coal or Big Oil was blocking everyone else from having ideas abo
37.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
And where does all that electricity come from? Until the 40s or so, hydroelectric plants and wind turbines could provide hardly any power output compared to coal plants, later supplemented by gas plants; even the electric streetcars relied
38.
by LegionMammal978 7mo ago
The thing is, unless you're playing with other instruments, no one is forcing you to tune to equal temperament . E.g., it's very common to tune a violin's A string to an A440 reference, then tune the other strings to 3:2 per
39.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
They do talk past each other a bit, and I find it difficult to follow, but overall, I'm more sympathetic to Garrett's position than Oliva's. As far as I understand: GNU Linux-libre, a distribution, excludes the ability to upd
40.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
U.S. and EU CO₂ emissions have been actively dropping for the last ~20 years [0]. (Of course, it's different question how quickly they ought to be dropping.) [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emis
41.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
> Change the original source to something that doesn't need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience. As if paper sources are any less susceptible to be
42.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
You also need some extra bits at the top so that it doesn't overflow (e.g., on an adversarial input filled with copies of the max finite value, followed by just as many copies of its negation, so that it sums to 0). The exact number wi
43.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
IME, on GitHub (or the other major public repo services), it's far more likely than not that I can pull up an old version of a project from 10 years ago if I want to experiment with it. (In case other old things used it as a dependency
44.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
Thank you for that information, all I could find on the website was that "The source code of the Mizar verifier and accompanying tools is available to the members of SUM" [0], which of course does not reflect the newer status quo.
45.
by LegionMammal978 8mo ago
Would something be a proof in that sense even if it did use Mizar? As far as I can tell, Mizar has no complete reference for its language semantics, except for the single closed-source implementation. In general, information about the syste
46.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
At least in Isabelle/ML, it seems like in practice there are also untrusted "oracles" that a proof can invoke to generate "thm" objects [0], and it's not entirely trivial to automatically ensure that only trust
47.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
I'm a bit skeptical about taking the rates of reported soundness bugs between different systems and drawing conclusions about the underlying approaches. There's typically a class of bugs that users can stumble into by doing someth
48.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
Assuming you're referring to [0], that's a statistical estimate of valid chess positions (based on clever methods of uniform position sampling + fast validity testing), not valid chess games (based on estimating branching fact
49.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
How I'd put it is that there are two sets of stopping points under FIDE rules: - After threefold repetition or 50 moves, either player may claim a draw. - After fivefold repetition or 75 moves, the game is automatically drawn. Most mod
50.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
My understanding is that the only still-lifes known not to have a glider synthesis are those containing the components listed at [0], which are 'self-forcing' and have no possible predecessors other than themselves. Intuitively,
51.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
> (including reading from leapsecond tzdb data) That's part of it: If I were writing a standalone program that could extract info from tzdb or whatever, I'd happily jump through those hoops, and not bother anyone else's
52.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
Sure, but my gripe isn't even that we ought to change the "POSIX time by default" status quo (the ship has long sailed that everyone counts durations by 'calendar seconds'), it's that the underlying libraries d
53.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
> All they need to do is set Access-Control-Allow-Origin to allow websites to access it. All the SOP prevents is you hotlinking someone else's leap-seconds file and using their bandwidth without their opt-in. They can , but the maj
54.
by LegionMammal978 9mo ago
I do find it annoying how the Temporal API, just like nearly all other datetime APIs, has 0 support for querying leap-second information in any shape or form. Suggested workarounds like temporal-tai all require plugging in a leap-second fil
55.
by LegionMammal978 10mo ago
I don't see how any amount of memory technology can overcome the physical realities of locality. The closer you want the data to be to your processor, the less space you'll have to fit it. So there will always be a hierarchy where
56.
by LegionMammal978 10mo ago
Of course you should put down a real assertion when you have a condition that can be cheaply checked (or even an assert(false) when the language syntax dictates an unreachable path). I'm not trying to argue against that, and I don&#x27
57.
by LegionMammal978 10mo ago
> or have it done as part of the standard functions like `map`. Which are all well and good when they are applicable, which is not always 100% of the time. > Because I usually do checks against the length of the array And what do you
58.
by LegionMammal978 10mo ago
Do you not make such a tacit assumption every time you index into an array (which in almost all languages throws an exception on bounds failure)? You always have to make assumptions that things stay consistent from one statement to the next
59.
by LegionMammal978 10mo ago
> How many times did you leave a comment on some branch of code stating "this CANNOT happen" and thrown an exception? Did you ever find yourself surprised when eventually it did happen? I know I did, since then I at least add s
60.
by LegionMammal978 10mo ago
But to link against an old glibc version, you need to compile on an old distro, on a VM. And you'll have a rough time if some part of the build depends on a tool too new for your VM. It would be infinitely simpler if one could simply &

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