Paul_Clayton

5 ms·

1.
by Paul_Clayton 8d ago
I suspect a programmer working for a well managed business might be willing to work unpaid overtime to tidy up code from professional pride. Personal feelings do not generate monetary profit (at least not directly) but have value to workers
2.
by Paul_Clayton 9d ago
I agree that heroic effort can hide a resource allocation issue, but often the goals of those controlling resource allocation are not well aligned with the hero's goals. By no longer buying supplies for a student, a teacher is not goin
3.
by Paul_Clayton 11d ago
I think reputation and warranties are insufficient. While building a reputation may be expensive, destroying a reputation can be profitable (in the short term). Warranties can also be made less effective by making the buyer spend excessive
4.
by Paul_Clayton 16d ago
I wonder if ads (not 20+ minutes straight of ads!) would be less annoying if they were diverse and even moderately entertaining. E.g., have a customer standing in front of the concession stand saying "Man, the popcorn costs an arm and
5.
by Paul_Clayton 1mo ago
I would guess that rate of benefit relative to divergence from idiomatic purity might also be significant. If a little clutter gains a 50% improvement with language A but only a 10% improvement with language B, language B having a 15% advan
6.
by Paul_Clayton 1mo ago
If a language can produce the same machine code (including dynamic patching) as a second language, that second language can at best only equal the runtime characteristics of the first. The development and maintenance costs can be very diffe
7.
by Paul_Clayton 1mo ago
I think more recent languages also provide abstractions that reduce the frequency of off-by-one errors. Type systems also seem to have improved. Unfortunately, even having tools that eliminate simple errors (like spell checkers and grammar
8.
by Paul_Clayton 1mo ago
Would having prominent "cancel order" and/or "edit order" buttons and delayed payment processing have sufficiently reduced the support costs for such cases? (I am guessing not since such is an obvious method of prov
9.
by Paul_Clayton 2mo ago
I think a microscopic black hole would evaporate very quickly from Hawking radiation, so the result might be more bang than suck.
10.
by Paul_Clayton 2mo ago
In D&D, min-maxing (hyphen and one x) is already a used term for character optimization, minimizing undesirables and maximizing desirables (I guess). Minimizing peaks is probably not a good strategy generally. Even low peaks may have so
11.
by Paul_Clayton 3mo ago
For poetry, I think English has the advantage of Germanic and Latin roots. Such seems to offer some flexibility in tone. The relative lack of conjugation and declension seems to hurt by constraining word order and reducing opportunities for
12.
by Paul_Clayton 3mo ago
One can look at abbreviations as being like pronouns with the antecedent sometimes being stored in a cultural context or being placed at first reference in a potentially longish text. Like pronouns, the 'antecedent' may be unclear
13.
by Paul_Clayton 3mo ago
How about rarely_viewed? Such expresses the property of interest, avoids the double negative issue, and is shorter? Of course rarely might imply a frequency much lower than the cutoff and infrequently has a bit of the double negative issue.
14.
by Paul_Clayton 4mo ago
The History Guy did a video on "The History of Aluminum": https://youtu.be/Nx16c6SB4kQ?si=jqaObtbTp3uNNjj3 From what I recall of the video, two people independently worked out the chemistry for cheaper aluminum. (
15.
by Paul_Clayton 5mo ago
I would not phrase the means of approaching best length as "edit out everything that's not 100% necessary" but as something more like "make every scene count/pull more than its weight". The former, to my mind,
16.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
When ARM moved to 64-bit the ISA was much more substantially reworked than for AMD's x86-64 transition (which mainly added modes and repurposed INCrement and DECrement to provide the REX prefix which provides a 64-bit size specificatio
17.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
While increasing dealer revenue is a plausible goal, it also seems plausible that reducing production cost could cause awkward maintenance. It is even plausible that only the bill of materials would be considered, though the feedback loop f
18.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
The PhD Movie introed with Richard Feinman's statement "I don't know anything, but I do know everything is interesting, if you go into it deeply enough." Feinman was a curious character. I suspect that with even a modest
19.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
That clause reminded me of Popeye's "I can't stands no more" and I took it as an expression of considerable annoyance along with a sense of humor.
20.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
I think one should use ex/em units when setting a maximum width for readability. People with poorer vision will tend to prefer a physically larger font size. Pixels can also vary in size for different displays. (I am not a web develope
21.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
By only testing one static branch, it is possible that the performance of the Intel Emerald Rapids predictor is not representative of a more realistic workload. If path information is used to index the predictor in addition to global (taken
22.
by Paul_Clayton 6mo ago
The Triptych Proposals [1] cover a lot of common use cases for submitting information to a server and updating part of a page. Something like that should have been possible to implement early in web history (I perceive some similarity to fr
23.
by Paul_Clayton 7mo ago
This reminded me of the CPC Grey video "7 Ways to Maximize Misery" https://youtu.be/LO1mTELoj6o?si=7tWgqLPyug0-NC6Z (which is not specifically about loneliness). That video did not really include self-medicating (
24.
by Paul_Clayton 7mo ago
I disliked _Always Coming Home_, substantially because it felt misandrous though the less optimistic setting probably also played a role (a post-industrial Earth with a rape victim as the "protagonist" and not a heroic victim who
25.
by Paul_Clayton 7mo ago
The Motorola 88k and 68k both supported (eventually) extended precision, and, of course, Itanium supported it for x87 compatibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000 (under "Registers": "32 8
26.
by Paul_Clayton 10mo ago
When returning to Washington University in St. Louis, I was walking a few miles with some luggage. Someone offered to carry one piece with me to the dorm. It was only after reaching the dorm that I realized she was barefoot!
27.
by Paul_Clayton 1y ago
Even personal recommendations have the problem of requiring significant use time (c. a year?) to estimate value. A company can (it seems) degrade quality for a model faster than quality can be evaluated by normal use.
28.
by Paul_Clayton 1y ago
Most parts of the liturgy are teaching. Scripture readings might compare with text book reading; the Lord's Prayer and other formulaic recitations are often taken from Scripture. The eucharist is more "ritual" than "over
29.
by Paul_Clayton 1y ago
"higher prices for the consumer" can include lower value at the same price. Size reduction seems a common method for certain commodities. This may result in reduced consumption (e.g., a consumer buying one package of ice cream eve
30.
by Paul_Clayton 1y ago
Innate talent can also be tied to one's sense of identity, which makes failure more overwhelming. (If one does not _really_ try, failure does not feel as crushing.) Just an expectation that something will be easy (without a strong tie

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