celoyd

33 ms·

121.
by celoyd 16y ago
Yes, offshore fishing boats in the developed world almost universally use GPS, as do most ships of any size. But there’s still a lot of conservatism in the regulation of what you have to have aboard and know how to use. Reading nautical c
122.
by celoyd 16y ago
Three reasons: 1. Electronics are vulnerable to salt water. 2. Ships are at sea for longer than planes are in the air, so their power supplies are less reliable, and they are generally dirtier and more chaotic. 2. Ships tend to have proport
123.
by celoyd 16y ago
It reminds me a little of ukiyo-e, where even beautiful and finely detailed images would have basic errors of perspective. (For example, in http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g08423/ , the way the boat meets the water is baffling. As f
124.
by celoyd 16y ago
Here’s a sketch of how you could write a toy lisp in forth: Let’s use “(* 4 (+ 5 6))” as an example input string. 1. Drop ( and ): “* 4 + 5 6”. 2. Tokenize on whitespace and reverse the tokens: 6 5 + 4 * 3. This is forth. Execute it. There’
125.
by celoyd 16y ago
Efficiency is implicit in most natual-language queries. Managing efficiency tradeoffs is a good example of something fuzzy yet important that you have to be able to figure out from natural-language queries and human interaction. But yeah, i
126.
by celoyd 16y ago
Surely it’s the issue in software development. Everything else is a case or subproblem of “how do I use a computer to solve this imperfectly defined problem?” I mean, it’s borderline tautological, isn’t it? Software development is the pra
127.
by celoyd 16y ago
Well, it will be smaller on disk. I know next to nothing about the phone system, but in some countries there are legitimate numbers starting with 0. So among the many problems with this practice, it puts an arbitrary technical limit on yo
128.
by celoyd 16y ago
Strong counter-intuitiveness is a widely accepted use of the word “paradox”, even by logicians. (See, e.g., W. V. Quine’s The Ways of Paradox .)
129.
by celoyd 16y ago
There’s no reason to see it as zero-sum between writers and curators. One of the reasons The New Yorker has such good writing is that is has such good curators, or “editors” as they’re called in publishing jargon. Kottke (assuming he’s as
130.
by celoyd 16y ago
at least one Fields medallist I think both Gowers and Tao talked about it. I don’t remember in how much depth.
131.
by celoyd 16y ago
If they expect mobile platforms keep growing and to keep not using x86, they can expect both of those by the same token.
132.
by celoyd 16y ago
Given that the blog is about fetishizing the look and feel of old writing and inscription, I’d say it is at issue there.
133.
by celoyd 16y ago
Your anti-deletionism argument is insufficiently doctrinaire Having just appreciated your criticism of a sarcastic and unhelpful comment, I hope you’re not turning to easy point-scoring yourself.
134.
by celoyd 16y ago
I agree, but I think the author does too. As far as I see, there is no claim that we should reproduce the long s as such in quotations where it’s not at issue. It’s only presented as a matter of historical interest. (Before this, I had thou
135.
by celoyd 16y ago
Hunh. Well, I don’t need the app anymore. In fact, I reject it.
136.
by celoyd 16y ago
You seem to be trying to disagree with a comment that basically agrees with yours. The points you raise are covered by common-sense interpretations of what I said. On point 2 specifically: as hard as it might be to imagine in the US at the
137.
by celoyd 16y ago
Three related cases come to mind: 1. Secrecy in matters like, well, diplomacy. 2. Protection from reprisal. 3. Confidentiality of people other than the public servants. A lot of government work deals with heavily stigmatized things other th
138.
by celoyd 16y ago
Yes. But even CUDA is pretty verbose and weird in places. CUDA C compiles to PTX, an assembly-ish intermediate language. You could target it with much nicer HLLs to hide a bunch of clunky stuff like cudaMemcpy. Unfortunately it seems to be
139.
by celoyd 16y ago
“Crew resource management” (there’s a good Wikipedia article on it) is another interesting application of Boyd’s ideas. In a nutshell, it’s the training that cockpit crews use to make decisions in quickly-changing environments like emergenc
140.
by celoyd 16y ago
I agree, but this is orthogonal to the point I was trying to address. mechanical_fish, in a cousin thread, is talking about the same thing I was.
141.
by celoyd 16y ago
The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. I bet it led to a significant increase in the average IQ. It may not have been a Singularity with a capital S, but it certainly did refl
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by celoyd 16y ago
An obvious technical one: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . That might have saved me a lot of time to read in early adolescence. (Or maybe it was better to have to figure things out in my own half-assed way. Time trav
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by celoyd 16y ago
Like most hosting TOSes, theirs is written so they can boot you if they find you inconvenient, without a specific violation on your part. They say they can terminate service when (among other possibly applicable points): we determine, in o
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by celoyd 16y ago
The overall warming trend means there’s more energy in the system, which means some patterns will change, and some patterns (like the Gulf Stream) are local warmings. So, in some cases, consistently colder weather is evidence for anthropo
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by celoyd 16y ago
I’m not an IP scholar, but my impression is that patents and copyright have basically the same intent; the only big difference is that patents are for methods and copyrights are for expressions. Where you draw the line between methods and e
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by celoyd 16y ago
People who do math (in a large sense that includes programming) often have a streak of Platonic realism: the idea that ideas are less invented than discovered . Lots of important code boils down to identities: a^0.5 == sqrt(a)
147.
by celoyd 16y ago
This is really cool. But is there anything it’s useful for as it stands? Or is it better thought of as an experiment in distribution?
148.
by celoyd 16y ago
What really gets me about it is that Myhrvold himself is such a brilliant and pleasant guy, and he gets such cool people to work for him. I feel like he should know better than to take this sort of robber-baronial approach to intellectual p
149.
by celoyd 16y ago
Or you might have some highly drive-abstracted representation where every addressable thing in every version of a filesystem-like dataset has its own address. No one’s asking to do that now (as far as I know), but if we get 128 bits I bet
150.
by celoyd 16y ago
I bet he had a pretty good idea. Looking back on the way products were introduced, I think it’s the theory that best fits the facts. (Of course there was also some luck – Jobs is smart but not magic.)

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