Smaug123

18 ms·

271.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Answering the object-level problem "my grandma wanted to play some sudokus on her computer", I really enjoyed the Cracking the Cryptic-affiliated game "Classic Sudoku", which is available on Steam, although some of the p
272.
by Smaug123 2y ago
I won't just say it doesn't satisfy my philosophy. I'll say additionally that the .NET standard library's `DateTime` type, which I believe is essentially the same and uses basically the same primitives, is so hard to u
273.
by Smaug123 2y ago
That's not the attitude which leads to inventing the negative numbers, for example! The ordinals are useful and it's very reasonable to call them "numbers"; and I'm told that the surreal numbers are useful, although
274.
by Smaug123 2y ago
The SREs have the word "toil" for work-that-has-the-technician-nature. Relevant page of the SRE book is https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/ .
275.
by Smaug123 2y ago
You can totally do this with non-passive-aggressive phrasings ("Is this possible using structured programming instead of GOTO? What went wrong when you tried, how messy does it get?")
276.
by Smaug123 2y ago
By "not-too-pathological" I intended at least to include the requirement "measurable".
277.
by Smaug123 2y ago
You're talking entirely about the meaning of symbols, right. That's not a question Turing addressed at all, and the answer is trivially "there are infinitely many possible semantics". Turing only addressed the question o
278.
by Smaug123 2y ago
A very strong empirical statement about the nature of reality, and a strong statement about the nature of mathematics, neither of which everyone agrees with! (What will your reply be if we discover a halting oracle at the centre of the gala
279.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Of course you can have infinitely many different semantics , but this is a question about available syntaxes . (Trivial proof: for each n, take the semantics S_n which assigns to the symbol "X" the meaning "integer n",
280.
by Smaug123 2y ago
I think the question is more like: > Turing says that a certain space, the space of all compact subsets of [0,1]^2 endowed with the metric "integral of minimal distance required to transform {1 ink at each point of P1} u {infinite a
281.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Oh, 100%, it seems extremely unlikely that multiple brain states in this sense don't code for the same thought! If nothing else, you could only avoid that with an absurdly precise definition of "brain"; any practical defini
282.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Assuming you're not trolling: nope, that would be an empirical question of how many brain states ever actually arise in the world during the time humans exist, and how much space and time it takes to maintain a given brain state. The
283.
by Smaug123 2y ago
That works if you're fixed to a grid, but the argument is much more general: it allows symbols to be of arbitrary size (as long as they're still within the unit square), in any orientation, formed by continuous or (not-too-patholo
284.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Is that counterintuitive? There's a finite number of electrons in a human brain (which fits in a space of size 1m^3), and information takes time to propagate across any distance, and humans die before 150 years; this all gestures at th
285.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Is that relevant? If my philosophy is weak, you can prove it to be weak by providing me with an example of a library which conforms to a better philosophy; then I can see why it's better.
286.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Personally I have `git difft` aliased to `difft --display side-by-side`, so it's one extra character for a semantic diffing tool (for me, Difftastic).
287.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Fortunately the article already says that hiding all semantically identical changes is "probably going too far", so they can just not try and solve the halting problem.
288.
by Smaug123 2y ago
I think the premise is false? It's up to the eBPF implementor what to do in the case of invalid input; the kernel could choose to perform a controlled shutdown in that case. (I have no idea what e.g. Linux actually does here, but one c
289.
by Smaug123 2y ago
There's no such thing as a "valid" value. Values can only be valid in some context . The empty string is valid only in contexts where… it has meaning. (Quite hard to say this without being obviously circular!) Golang has cho
290.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Obviously physical limits will bind at some point; indefinite exponential growth implies at some point that each electron in the observable universe is outputting the entire current world GDP every year, which is pretty unlikely under our c
291.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Fortunately, since we are explicitly talking about English here, that convention is indeed the relevant one to use!
292.
by Smaug123 2y ago
I imagine it can be made to work, as long as you make sure the zero value is never actually valid; then you're back in the usual billion-dollar-mistake world where everything is implicitly optional, rather than in the hellscape where y
293.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Obviously if you've written a buggy parser then all bets are off, just as all bets are off if you've written bugs into any other part of your program. But those bugs would probably still be there if you didn't explicitly pa
294.
by Smaug123 2y ago
I'm going to make the bold claim that it doesn't take more time to do this, if your language supports algebraic data types. It just sort of naturally happens. Of course, if your language requires a great deal of ceremony (C++, J
295.
by Smaug123 2y ago
They can certainly be simple and incomplete, or simple and incorrect; do you have an example of a simple, complete, and correct time library?
296.
by Smaug123 2y ago
"hard G" is the sound denoted "g" in IPA. The other "g" is "dʒ".
297.
by Smaug123 2y ago
Having access to the unit type is useful; I use it maybe once every couple of months in F# even if we restrict solely to the use-case "instantiate a generic with the unit type to indicate that no data is held here". (Of course,
298.
by Smaug123 2y ago
They say this in almost every paragraph! For example, five of the first seven paragraphs: > The first is to express more of the requirements using Rust's type system in order to catch more mistakes at compile time. > Almeida show
299.
by Smaug123 2y ago
The point is that Rust can model invariants that C can't. You can call both ways, but if C is incapable of expressing what Rust can, that has important implications for the design of APIs which must be common to both.
300.
by Smaug123 2y ago
By the way, an argument for ex-falso which I found very compelling: Take "False" to be syntactic sugar for "0 = 1"; then you can prove by induction that if False then all numbers are equal. That gives you a great deal of

More ›