agalunar

16 ms·

121.
by agalunar 4y ago
Agreed! Your comment has made me realize that I could have written my original comment more clearly; my dissatisfaction in re the MIT Free Speech Alliance (if my impression was accurate) isn't about political agendas, but about decepti
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by agalunar 4y ago
True! I was just pointing out that this is different from defending free speech; it's simply wanting people to listen to you. (And so it may be deceptive to claim your goal is free speech when, in reality, you will only fight for free
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by agalunar 4y ago
I've seen instances of wealthy or powerful individuals publicly calling for private platforms to deregulate speech not because of a dedication to the ideals of free speech (the ostensible reason) but as a tactic to achieve some polit
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by agalunar 4y ago
This is not the divide I see, but it's the divide I hear many people say they see, and so I've always wondered if the majority of people actually fall into these two camps. From where I happen to stand, I see four camps or so: 1 ·
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by agalunar 4y ago
> the Computer History Museum has an IBM 1401 And a working PDP-1, which I'd highly recommend visiting. You can listen to some of the earliest computer music and play Spacewar!, the first video game to share or sell more than a sing
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by agalunar 4y ago
Or obsessive-compusive personality disorder, which is what I have. I tend to either care entirely about something or not at all, and the only standard is "perfect" (there are no visible ways something can be improved) – "good
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by agalunar 4y ago
> What's the point of "being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c." if it's not beneficial to society in some way? PG's statement [1]
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by agalunar 4y ago
> Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't. This is certainly not a
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by agalunar 4y ago
It's interesting that although you can't prove "forall P, P or not P" in intuitionistic logic, you can prove "forall P, not (not (P or not P))". In other words, it can't possibly be the case that P is not
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by agalunar 4y ago
I believe using reinterpret_cast to reinterpret a float as an int is undefined behavior, because I don't believe that follows the type aliasing rules [1]. However, you could reinterpret a pointer to a float as a pointer to char, unsign
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by agalunar 4y ago
Ironically, we're not very efficient at all with our land usage today. Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef (either for pasture or for growing feed) and yet it accounts for only 2% of our calories. And about 50% of a
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by agalunar 4y ago
Here's what I can recall: The big idea is diminishing marginal returns – increasing societal complexity pays off enormously at first, but eventually the returns level off while the overhead remains high or even continues to increase. C
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by agalunar 4y ago
I'd second the recommendation. I personally enjoyed reading it, and from my limited exposure to the topic, my impression was that although some anthropologists disagree and theory has advanced since, The Collapse of Complex Societies w
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by agalunar 4y ago
> I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy I think the important thing to contemplate is that this might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done
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by agalunar 4y ago
I assume that the problem, like global anthropogenic climate change, isn't change in and of itself, it's change faster than biological systems can adapt to or evolve for – resulting in mass extinction events or radical losses of b
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by agalunar 4y ago
Writing and speaking are such different media – for example, you can go back and reread a sentence, but you can't wind back time in a live conversation; you can signal how something should be interpreted,* give parsing hints, and add e
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by agalunar 4y ago
I assumed by "Republicans" they meant Republican politicans and the wealthy entities that support them, rather than party members (the general populace).
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by agalunar 4y ago
> I expected the given example to produce assembly that respects short-circuiting, [...]. > Always assumed this was a requirement of the language, not "up to the compiler". But the assembly does respect short-circuiting in C
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by agalunar 4y ago
> Obviously that's important, but education also simply enriches your life. You should read the Aims of Education speech given by Abbott; you might really enjoy it. https://college.uchicago.edu/student-life/aims
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by agalunar 4y ago
Thank you so much, @ZoomerCretin and @huevosabio! I think this has left me with only more questions, and I might ask a few of them later when I have a moment, but I wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
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by agalunar 4y ago
I read some time ago an interview with a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and an article about the YIMBY movement: • https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/11/san-francisco-sociali... • https:/&
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by agalunar 4y ago
Ah! that's a really good question. No whitespace before the colon in type annotations is my own personal pet peeve – the hill I'd die on – so it seems like my duty to answer. I think of it this way: there are two symbols that by
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by agalunar 4y ago
I'm firmly in favor of markets, myself, but I think there are other notable caveats. You mention pricing externalities being important; it's also important that corporations don't have undue influence in their own regulation,
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by agalunar 4y ago
I do agree that the term "safe" shouldn't be used as a shorthand for "memory-safe". Memory safety is only a subset of correctness, and "safe" in my ears sounds misleadingly like a stronger promise. (And th
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by agalunar 4y ago
This may be a bit pedantic, but I think it's worth discussing. > The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste. The fact that no economic system yet implemented a
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by agalunar 4y ago
But an immutable data structure will cause data dependencies – the only way it couldn't cause a data dependency would be if it was never read.
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by agalunar 4y ago
> If a piece of code B loads the contents of memory where a piece of code A writes that's before B, then you can never execute B before or in parallel with A. This is a description of what a data dependency is; I'm still not su
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by agalunar 4y ago
> When you use a mutable data structure, and your code is concurrent, you'll force the CPU to put locks everywhere in your code so that several cores won't see stale data in their internal caches. Do you mean to say the compile
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by agalunar 4y ago
That's not linear probing, though; that's having a 3-way associative cache. Maybe that's how I should have phrased my comment: a transposition table is a cache, not a hash map,* because entries can be lost (overwritten). Furt
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by agalunar 4y ago
True, although I'd say transposition tables are much, much easier in a crucial aspect – you deal with hash collisions by simply overwriting the current entry or nop'ing. There's no linear probing, no cuckoo hashing, &c; w

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