codeflo

34 ms·

961.
by codeflo 5y ago
First, programs are defined to be finite in length. Second, for a program to be said to compute a function, it must do so for all possible inputs. That’s by definition, but there are good reasons why these definitions are useful: if we acce
962.
by codeflo 5y ago
I’m not sure I buy that completely. If this were a neutral choice, why would a gene take the 50% chance of not having made it to the next generation? (Or in the case of many offspring, invest half its resources into a different copy of the
963.
by codeflo 5y ago
That’s plausible, but there might be trade-offs involved. There’s a theory — not sure how serious it’s taken by experts — that at least some of the mechanisms involved in aging have other benefits. For example, the fact that telomeres limit
964.
by codeflo 5y ago
Not sure if this is within the spirit of the question, but: The individual ADSL bands are only 4 kHz wide, so you could modulate 4 or 5 of them down into the audible range (20Hz - 20kHz) and back up again after the transmission through the
965.
by codeflo 5y ago
That fact that this delivers 3.5 MBit/s really makes you wonder how many low speed connections out in the wild are literally broken cables that still have some amount of coupling somewhere.
966.
by codeflo 5y ago
Hard disagree that most of these are metaphors in actual use. They’re more like mnemonics, arbitrary names for highly abstract concepts that are only incidentally borrowed from ordinary languages. For example, I never think of a physical
967.
by codeflo 5y ago
We’re talking about the same thing I think: the context was pre-game preparation, where the teams of the contenders can (and according to every top GM commentary I’ve seen, extensively do) use engines to look for “off book” but good moves t
968.
by codeflo 5y ago
I said "not just", not "not". It's a matter of degree. Picking a top three engine move instead of the top one, when it's only 0.01 worse, isn't a losing strategy. Even at this level, and especially if it t
969.
by codeflo 5y ago
I considered clarifying that, but it's a bit subtle. First of all, neural networks are typically trained from (millions of) self-play games. So you have the "equally strong opponent" assumption right there in the weights of t
970.
by codeflo 5y ago
I'm personally a bit more interested in computer chess, but find it very interesting how engines are used for preparation in human chess. You might think that engines make opening preparation trivial: just play what the engine recommen
971.
by codeflo 5y ago
Why wouldn’t those objects be loaded in a competitive multiplayer game?
972.
by codeflo 5y ago
I don’t follow. Spawning objects (which the article talks about as part of the network code) is unrelated to (re-)spawning players as a gameplay feature (which is where griefing could be an issue), neither of them make hardware use “unbound
973.
by codeflo 5y ago
I just hand-derived it both ways to make a comparison, the standard way was from memory. So. The standard way to complete the square uses a trick to rearrange the equation so that one can use the formula (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2. This uses
974.
by codeflo 5y ago
Is infrastructure at this scale typically unable to do a cold start? I can believe that this is very difficult to design for, but being unable to do it sounds dangerous to me. (Edit for the downvoters: I was genuinely curious how these kind
975.
by codeflo 5y ago
I agree, and the article doesn’t really explain a difference, either. Two quotes: > Campbell’s law states that the more important a metric is in social decision making, the more likely it is to be manipulated. > Goodhart’s Law, states
976.
by codeflo 5y ago
The “theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige“ is a bit oversimplified I think, at least for continental Europe. In German, for example, we have two words that translate to “castle”: “das Schloss” is a rep
977.
by codeflo 5y ago
> essentially free to the home user There’s a world of difference between “free” and “priced in”. And anyone who builds their own PCs would disagree with this anyway.
978.
by codeflo 5y ago
While this is nice, I don’t like the idea that lecture times should vary depending on the century I find myself in. Clearly, we need to take the average, which is 52 minutes and 35.6952 seconds if I calculated correctly.
979.
by codeflo 5y ago
Thanks, that helps. When I notice errors in the stuff I already know about, it find it hard to trust the other information that’s new to me.
980.
by codeflo 5y ago
The writing is cute and the animations are nice, but none of it makes any sense. I stopped reading at > It is important to remember that bivectors have a certain redundancy built into them in the sense that s a ⃗ ∧ b ⃗ = a ⃗ ∧ s b ⃗ s
981.
by codeflo 5y ago
Debian is my preferred distribution for servers, I'm simply in awe of what the community has achieved. Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness that cree
982.
by codeflo 5y ago
I think the bad writing in D3 is a weird consequence of WoW's success. Either because they hoped to attract part of WoW's audience, or for the simple fact that a lot of Blizzard's staff at the time had also worked on WoW and
983.
by codeflo 5y ago
I remember reading a Perl 6 design document back in the day that made a convincing argument that operator precedence should be a partial instead of a total order. The language was supposed to have user defined operators. The idea was that y
984.
by codeflo 5y ago
I don’t see how those problems are related. Finally replacing those dozen terrible USB port variants with a single good design is great, and solves problem (3). You’d finally only need one type of cable. Routing all kinds of other protocols
985.
by codeflo 5y ago
Everything about which people tell you to “not invent your own” must be invented by someone .
986.
by codeflo 5y ago
This sort of bug only happens when running a multithreaded program (with shared memory) on a multicore processor. You do need both for the problem to happen: Without shared memory, there’s nothing to exploit. And with a single core only, yo
987.
by codeflo 5y ago
OTOH, 11 is the first version of Windows where Microsoft actively tells a large portion of their userbase that they don’t want them to run it. I’m not a believer in “the year of the Linux desktop” either, but those insane policies around fi
988.
by codeflo 5y ago
Ah, I get your question now, I thought you were talking about const functions. Well, const values in Rust are funny things, they're not linked into the executable, they don't have an address or a lifetime. That confused me too f
989.
by codeflo 5y ago
The trick is that an empty string doesn’t actually own any data on the heap. It’s basically a null pointer, and all string methods check for that in some way. This is a typical optimization trick that many languages implement (empty lists a
990.
by codeflo 5y ago
IMO, the toy example in the article is too simple to show a good use of the pattern. The builder pattern is great if the builder methods configure complicated invariants and are not just setters. Otherwise, there's nothing wrong with m

More ›