MarkusQ

27 ms·

631.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Not at all! It's great when a language (or anything) gets an active community that's working to identify and ameliorate its pain points. My point is that these occasionally break out of their bubbles and become more "mainstr
632.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Except "black body" here is a technical term, and doesn't really correlate with "an object that's black". You could, for example, design something that absorbed well in the UV/visible/near infrared w
633.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Also (as I recall; it's been decades) there were solar powered fan heater things that used complicated equipment to do basically the same thing that just letting the sunlight hit the ground (or maybe some black plastic) would have. I
634.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
In the spirit of the old genera "PHP people solving problems that they only have because they're using PHP" (and similar for C, regexs, rails, etc.) we're starting to see a whole new ecosystem developing around rust.
635.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
> "...plant and manage blackberry bushes..." Have you ever dealt with blackberry brambles? Because "plant" and "manage" aren't the words that come to mind. "Dominate" and "contain"
636.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
His Mars books were unrealistic given what we knew _when he wrote them_.
637.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
If I had to sum our era up in three words "data quality issues" would be a strong contender.
638.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Just guessing (esp. "educated guesses") always makes life easier. No idea why historians are so opposed to it. Just kidding. Some historians will probably love this, and some will probably hate it.
639.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
There is also a sort of blindness to the same sort of processes Hyde is quite reasonably (and evocatively) gobsmacked by: if Darwin could be said to have invented a sort of integral Calculus to grapple with deep time, a differential version
640.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Documentation, not doctors. Got it. That makes so much more sense than what I thought when I first saw the headline.
641.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Modern type systems grew out of the problems caused by such storage hacks (and the general issues of having a bunch of bits that have to be consistently interpreted in some way). Kvetching about the type system in FORTRAN is like complaini
642.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Back in the day, when memory wasn't as cheap as it is now, there was a strong belief that forcing the user to "waste bits" on a proper sum type was a non-starter for a "real" language. It was widely assumed that th
643.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
> such that addition distributes over multiplication: > (a+b)c=ac+bc and c(a+b)=ca+cb This is usually referred to as multiplication distributing over addition.
644.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Came here to say: Squigglevision!
645.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
If you weren't to start with, you might well be by the end (i.e., momentarily). Or pieces of you would be at any rate; ΔV to the Kármán line is only a few km/s.
646.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
You found the person who'd been looking at the presentation the whole time, and not down at their phone.
647.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Yeah. And that's really important; If someone makes a correct claim by accident, say they misread a paper that incorrectly claims X as correctly claiming not-X, we shouldn't consider it evidence that they are trustworthy or hone
648.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Both this and the underlying system of fact checking are ignoring the elephant in the room: we have no direct access to the truth. Instead, all we can do is check for consistency. This can be either internal (if I say "two is even&quo
649.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
This is why I always review the files with bugs in them first.
650.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
The only risk this report clearly shows is the existential risk AI poses to consulting firms that specialize in writing vacuous reports. Anyone who makes their living writing pompous puffballs of poop like this should be really, really wor
651.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
And if you _don't_ randomly assign, the effect is even stronger: students who are being well served by the standard/control school don't opt to change, while students who aren't are primed to jump as soon as the option i
652.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
This paper annoyed my when it first came out, and still does. Harnad sets arbitrarily high standards for what constitutes a symbol system by I) requiring that the rules must also be fully symbolic, II) everything must be "semantically
653.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
And apparently some people are a tad touchy about it.
654.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Yeah, grifting. In fact, that's what the article's about.
655.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
At some point I expect they'll discover that it can't be detected in the presence of skeptics. At least, that's the usual trajectory. I'm all for any sort of planetary science missions, but this seems more faith than l
656.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
That's why you should call them pervs (per-instance values).
657.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
I remember the first time I heard of that pattern of thinking. My initial reaction was "OMG, it must be aliens!" Then I thought "now wait a minute...hold on..."
658.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
I really enjoyed that when it was coming out, and used to follow it with some students. It's a shame it seems to have been abandoned.
659.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
The definitions are loose enough, I'm kind of surprised nobody has tried making an end run on the whole thing and getting Pluto declared a continent.
660.
by MarkusQ 1y ago
That early warm interval would have been a soup of 75% H, 25% He, and 0.0000000% or so Li, with nothing heavier. Not much to start life with.

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