chriswarbo

1702 ms·

3451.
by chriswarbo 13y ago
Type systems tell you when your code is wrong. You don't have to do any SQL manipulation in your type system, you just make sure that SQL and non-SQL data have different types, and carry on as normal. If your code is joining function
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
How about we stop calling everything "strings" (and "ints" too, while we're at it)? UserInput readFromPost(HttpParam param) { // Read param from POST here } Collection<SqlRow> query(SqlQu
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
SQL injection is so prevalent because developers overwhelmingly think about their data in terms of its representation, rather than its meaning. User input and SQL statements are two completely separate things, but it just so happens that th
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Not at all. The point is not how amazing such a universe simulator must be, the point is that a universe simulator isn't amazing. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that everything that ever was, is or will be; every supernov
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
"person" doesn't have a formal mathematical definition. "computer" does, and anything simulating our universe must be at least as powerful as a computer, since our universe contains computers. https://en.
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
I wasn't proposing that a computer running our universe is based on electronic circuits; rather, I was proposing that computation itself is all that's needed to simulate our universe. Since an 'outside' universe doesn&#x
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Also, note that specifying a brain simulation is much more difficult (takes more bits) than specifying a universe simulation. A brain simulation needs to have moods, emotions, headaches, sensory processing, etc. A universe simulation ju
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
The questions aren't exactly the same. For example, we can imagine characterising our whole universe as a set of physical laws plus some initial conditions, and maybe a pseudo-random number generator. If we're given such a charact
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
I use space2ctrl ( https://github.com/r0adrunner/Space2Ctrl ) which makes the space bar act as Ctrl when used as a modifier. It can occasionally turn the first letter of a word (eg. "hello") into a shortcut (
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
I would refine your argument a little. The Free Software movement does not maintain that "software should be free because it's wrong to restrict developers' ability to use, copy, modify, and distribute it". It maintains
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
I found it quite approachable and thorough, although it throws the the diagonal lemma out there without any real explanation even though it's crucial to the reasoning that follows it. Also I disagree with the completely unfounded assum
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
I'm sceptical of Penrose's arguments. We don't see human brains as symbol-manipulating formal systems, but that doesn't mean that aren't (or, more correctly, that doesn't mean that there is no symbol-manipulati
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Indeed, many incompleteness results (the most famous being the Halting Problem) are known as "infinite employment theorems". For example, we can always make a compiler perform more optimisations as follows: 1) Every diverging (non
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
"Seriously, what an amatuerish-looking mess. White text on black, no clear navigation path, I can't imagine any random end user actually using one of these sites." You could say the same thing about MS-DOS, but if it gets the
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Turing-completeness is a Mathematical phenomenon which doesn't have anything to do with our Universe. Whenever we talk about Turing-completeness in relation to our Universe, it is always an assumption. That's why the Church-Turing
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Interestingly this is still related to information: the fundamental thing which cannot travel faster than light is information, for example if I trace a circle in the sky with a laser pointer then the "dot" (when it eventually hit
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Most digital physics proposals seem to be unfalsifiable, but there are exceptions. For example, statistical Physics tells us that a system can be full of complex, random fluctuations, but it can still be 'stable' if those fluctuat
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
IMHO "bottom" is the point where any lower levels can only be pure philosophical speculation. For example, if we exist as a pure computation inside some computer, it makes no difference which of the myriad Turing-equivalent models
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Something could be described Mathematically without it being explainable to a human: it could be vastly more complex than any person could ever comprehend. For example, every chess position can be enumerated, but no human can ever enumerate
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
The instruction set doesn't matter. To calculate (the first few bits of) Chaitin's Constant we can enumerate and run every program in some instruction set, say x86 assembly, and measure the proportion of programs which eventually
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
Humanoid robots resonate with the public (in a good way or a bad (Terminator) way) and it does make sense for human-replacing robots to be humanoid, since we've built our environment to accommodate bodies like ours, but at the moment m
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
"voters say 45 - 40 percent the government's anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 10, 2010, ... when voters said 63 - 25 percent that such activities didn't go far enough to
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
To me, the main take-away from the article is that there's more to life than KDE/GNOME, especially given the number of comments showing that the alternatives do have real users. If we apply that logic to browsers, we find that the
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by chriswarbo 13y ago
I would claim that Neocities should specifically not add social networking aspects. If someone wants social features on their site then they can copy/paste snippets of HTML/CSS/Javascript into the static site. I think the d