agalunar

12 ms·

61.
by agalunar 3y ago
Something I've never quite understood is the (tacit) judgment that the end of the human race would be a bad thing, and that creating more people is inherently a good thing. And in fact, that it would maybe be acceptable to allow a larg
62.
by agalunar 3y ago
This doesn't make sense to me; it sounds like you're suggesting I can't make my own moral judgment regarding your actions – that if you think what you're doing is okay, I have to think it's okay too. Even if moralit
63.
by agalunar 3y ago
It depends on what you do! The reason I use this as my go-to example is that I came across the incorrect use of reinterpret_cast for this exact purpose in a previous job (which was firmware-adjacent). edit: are you also expressing disagreem
64.
by agalunar 3y ago
Ah, yes, thank you for catching my omission!
65.
by agalunar 3y ago
I've become somewhat convinced that no one has written a correct nontrivial C or C++ program since 1989.* My go-to example in C++ is examining a floating-point number as an integer: • Cast a (pointer to a float) to a (pointer to a uin
66.
by agalunar 3y ago
From what I recall, in vector machines, operations are still done in parallel due to chaining; the difference is that you're doing e.g. add(v[1]) and mul(v[0]) in parallel, then add(v[2]) and mul(v[1]), and so on, rather than add(v[0])
67.
by agalunar 3y ago
> the distinction about countable and constructively countable? The set of all programs is countable; the set of all terminating programs is a subset of it, but can’t constructively be proven to itself be countable—after all, that would
68.
by agalunar 3y ago
Like @bdsa points out with their example, the singular and plural are actually spelled differently, viz. "parent's house" and "parents' house", despite being pronounced the same way. https://en.wikip
69.
by agalunar 3y ago
It's worth mentioning the truly ludicrous number of positions that chess networks are trained on, usually in the billions. Which is a bit interesting, because it suggests they're not as good at generalizing from examples as human
70.
by agalunar 3y ago
Agreed, but I get the impression many people mistakenly believe that they are.
71.
by agalunar 3y ago
LLMs can be useful tools for conducting scientific research, in much the way that ordinary computer programs, or desk calculators, or slide rules are useful for conducting scientific research. I meant that (insofar as I am aware) they are n
72.
by agalunar 3y ago
I don't see how that at all counters point 1 or maybe even point 2. Although LLMs are incredible feats of engineering, they're useless scientifically. The hallmark of a good scientific theory is that it not only explains what&#x27
73.
by agalunar 3y ago
Perhaps I'm hopelessly out of touch with pragmatism, but I think Dijkstra's comments would still be applicable even if we could trust GPT to write code correctly. Getting some task done is only half the reason I write programs, ev
74.
by agalunar 3y ago
Color me surprised! That's very neat. Thanks for answering the question!
75.
by agalunar 3y ago
Why did the 8086 have the LOCK prefix? I think of it as being mostly useful in parallel contexts, e.g. lock cmpxchg for an atomic compare and swap. But the 8086 was a single core, single thread processor, and I'd be surprised if it wer
76.
by agalunar 3y ago
I was trying to be careful by writing "treats people terribly" rather than "treats its people terribly", having imperialist nations in mind, or "treats all people terribly", having class-divided societies i
77.
by agalunar 3y ago
Ah, no, I phrased that in a rather callous way. I'm sorry – my apologies. If you do decide to give it a try, I hope your editor makes it easy to configure (since they really run the gamut) and that you have another typeface to enjoy!
78.
by agalunar 3y ago
I wasn't replying to the original comment. I was replying under the branch of the comment tree where jimsimmons wrote > Let’s say I’m targeting x86 or PTX or some standard subo instruction set. I can do vanilla codegen but it is sl
79.
by agalunar 3y ago
Why don't you just disable them? Or does your editor not give you the option?
80.
by agalunar 3y ago
Yes! Someone has to make the glyphs and someone has to write the rules that say "unconditionally replace this sequence of glyphs with this glyph" or "in this context, replace this glyph with that one" and so on. The only
81.
by agalunar 3y ago
Education – learning to do something yourself – is a worthy end unto itself. Learning things is fun. Knowing how something works front-to-back feels good. If you're making something that's meant to be load-bearing, something profe
82.
by agalunar 3y ago
It's completely plausible that a nation with a wealth of natural resources but an economic system that treats people terribly could win a series of wars and establish its economic system as the dominant one in the world, and then use i
83.
by agalunar 3y ago
> Did Khaneman get into this in his book? Not from what I recall; this was just my own observation. (Also, in retrospect I should have made it clearer that this exception was meant to be an example more than a particular claim... "u
84.
by agalunar 3y ago
For many younger speakers, "you guys" is legitimately a second person plural pronoun (like "y'all") and implies nothing about the gender^1 of the referents, even if they consider singular "guy" to be a syn
85.
by agalunar 3y ago
I call BS! I'd like to see the original paper, or better yet, a replication of the study. Sure, on a cold day a hot coffee may be nice to hold and an iced coffee may be unpleasant. But on a hot day? The hot coffee burns your hands; the
86.
by agalunar 3y ago
> Remember that, in this case, all I want to know is if they have that capability or not. Also, I don't care whether they can tell me how multiplication works or not, only if they can multiply two arbitrary numbers. Right, but unles
87.
by agalunar 3y ago
That's not at all how I would assess whether someone understood how to do multiplication – I would ask them to explain their process for performing multiplication or at least to show their work. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you
88.
by agalunar 3y ago
> Good code should be easy to test effectively Can you explain why this is? or maybe more specifically what you mean by this.
89.
by agalunar 4y ago
Same! nice to meet another "&c" user ^_^ I'm afraid I can't remember why I began writing "&c" rather than "etc", although I know I now prefer it (rather than it merely being a matter of habi
90.
by agalunar 4y ago
^_^ Although I am tickled by the idea of pointer providence – that pointers are handed to us from on high, from the C gods.

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