adonovan

8 ms·

61.
by adonovan 1y ago
Not quite sure why all the responses here are so cynical. I mean, it's a genuinely difficult set of problems, so of course the first steps will be small. Today's computers are the result of 80 astonishing years of sustained innova
62.
by adonovan 1y ago
> An interesting article, especially given the links to the YouTube interview of Cornelius Lánczos. I've used the Lánczos algorithm for years for interpolation but until now I'd not put a face and voice to his work. Indeed. Wha
63.
by adonovan 1y ago
I have read that underpromotion can reduce the risk of immediate capture: the opponent has a bigger incentive to take a queen than, say, a rook. Seems pretty marginal to me though.
64.
by adonovan 1y ago
Why there isn’t a bigger business selling diamond stones for the kitchen is a mystery to me. Everyone has a honing steel but that won’t grind a new edge like a proper stone.
65.
by adonovan 1y ago
Agreed. It's funny how only a couple of years ago we all told schoolchildren "stop citing Wikipedia, anyone can edit it, read an actual book!" yet now in this benighted era of AI we urge them to consult Wikipedia for "th
66.
by adonovan 1y ago
One other benefit of indices is that they are ordered, whereas pointers in many languages (e.g. Go, but not C) are unordered. So you can binary search over an array of indices, for example, or use the relative sign of two indices to indicat
67.
by adonovan 1y ago
Even if you allow "mix" to mean "pressure cook under 250 billion atmospheres at 15 million Kelvin", herbs contains too much carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus to make a G-class star that tastes like our sun. So, ye
68.
by adonovan 1y ago
LLMs are writing <1% of my code. I find it demoralizing to hear Google VPs endlessly boosting the end of programming as a job when the products fall so very far short of the extraordinary claims. It’s frankly insulting, and it must be te
69.
by adonovan 1y ago
Not always. More than once I've seen the AI confidently misquote result #1, Wikipedia.
70.
by adonovan 1y ago
I saw this at the time, but reading it again now what struck me is how coolly his correspondent responded, without escalation, hurt, or resistance; and no-one else chimed in to confront the attitude. In other words, this kind of aggression
71.
by adonovan 1y ago
1000? Prussia dissolved only in 1947 and the nation state of Germany was reunified only in 1990. In any case, communication technology (trains, TVs) is a greater determinant of dialect than government.
72.
by adonovan 1y ago
Yeah, it is sad to think how different things could have been, especially when you consider how loud/dangerous/toxic early cars were. On the other hand, before that, we (humans) allowed horses to shit (and decompose) in the street
73.
by adonovan 1y ago
"We have the ability to destroy things that people think were undestroyable. And so we think we did a really good job." Truest thing ever said by a Trump spokesmodel!
74.
by adonovan 1y ago
> would it not be more to correct to say we are breathing the same atoms as those in caesers last breath? You may be right, but according to quantum mechanics, you can't really meaningfully talk about the "same" atoms, or
75.
by adonovan 1y ago
The fourth (and best preserved of all) Magna Cartas is on display in the Chapter House of the cathedral in Salisbury.
76.
by adonovan 1y ago
Quite right. If you use a compiled language (e.g. Go) the difference between the two implementations is indeed negligible. https://go.dev/play/p/i72xCyhqRkC
77.
by adonovan 1y ago
I think you underestimate your cultural bias. Being physically capable may seem like an objective basis for attraction, but at various times and places in history larger people have been considered more attractive than skinnier ones, perhap
78.
by adonovan 1y ago
I highly doubt it, but it might deliver some memorable zingers about nude aliens.
79.
by adonovan 1y ago
Perhaps a superadvanced civilization training an AI model on all remaining negative entropy in their solar system so they can more effectively create realistic propaganda for the upcoming election on their now rather chilly mars colony.
80.
by adonovan 1y ago
True, but even in Wyoming, where you EV is really a coal-powered vehicle, the coal is not burned in the city.
81.
by adonovan 2y ago
I once made a long drive through Vermont and was stunned at the absence of car-culture detritus compared to almost any other freeway I've seen in the US. Without all the gas stations and strip malls you can barely see the highway from
82.
by adonovan 2y ago
“Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...
83.
by adonovan 2y ago
Funny, I recently independently reinvented [1] the "balanced parentheses tree" and was very satisfied with its flexibility and speed: it seemed so simple and general I was surprised not to already know it by name. Now I do! [1] h
84.
by adonovan 2y ago
No need to imagine!
85.
by adonovan 2y ago
The manual clearly says you need to press the "do not explode" button if you don't want the car to explode. It is conveniently located under the rear seats.
86.
by adonovan 2y ago
Well this is a new kind of Bitcoin mining!
87.
by adonovan 2y ago
A great improvement over all previous horses, who stomp a finite number of times iff there is an imaginary component!
88.
by adonovan 2y ago
"replace" is an operation on modules. Networking is part of the standard library, which is a single (very special) module. Even if you could "replace" std, it would not really be less than creating a fork.
89.
by adonovan 2y ago
> How do I make an HTML view of a SQL database? Well old chap, you'll need a shoeshine box full of vacuum tubes and some brass flanges...
90.
by adonovan 2y ago
A slice operation s[i:] seems like it should be little more than an ADD instruction for a registerized slice where i is known to be in bounds, but a surprising little detail is that when i==cap(s) we really don't want to create an empt

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