colorint

12 ms·

61.
by colorint 10y ago
I don't think that's Feynman's point, no. For one thing, it would be impossible to be a theoretical physicist without having a tremendous amount of buy-in to mathematical realism. That he, for example, believed in things like
62.
by colorint 10y ago
You're certainly begging the question by describing the plumbing as a perceiving subject: it can convince itself, as in, it is a subject of its own experience. This isn't some directionless thought experiment; it matters a great d
63.
by colorint 10y ago
People believe the Planck length implies discreteness because people want the universe to be discrete, for any number of reasons (including, making symbolic and numeric methods work out). But the biggest reason to believe the universe is co
64.
by colorint 10y ago
Look, here's the thing. We all ought to be able to agree that you could build a digital computer out of pipes, valves, and diaphragms (the water analogues of wires, diodes, and capacitors). Does anyone believe that a sufficiently compl
65.
by colorint 10y ago
I'm struck by the first part of the Feynman quote: >Consider an object... What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they a
66.
by colorint 10y ago
You also need the iterative structure to support continuations. Of course, if you do all that---you've just reimplemented function calls.
67.
by colorint 10y ago
So numeric modeling bad, finite state automata good? But I guess that's how it is, since people think black boxes are more "human."
68.
by colorint 10y ago
I'm not sure I buy the arguments about cache, or it's something where I'd want empirical performance analysis to back up the model claims. Allocators will tend to place allocations next to each other in memory, so one might r
69.
by colorint 10y ago
>Anyway, as I understood it, homeostasis is by definition a quality of living beings. If I used the incredibly similar word "metastability," would you feel the same way?
70.
by colorint 10y ago
Of course, it's just as likely that the causality is the other way around, and language serves paradigm. That is, new ways of talking about things are devised as new things to talk about are found. The two situations will look nearly i
71.
by colorint 10y ago
You say bank notes were redeemable for "coin or specie," but really that's state money. So state money precedes bank money. This was also a horrible system, because bank notes didn't have guaranteed parity (with each oth
72.
by colorint 10y ago
There's two things working against this theory. First, such systems only work in the presence of a unit of account, because otherwise it's impossible to coherently price items in a pure unlike-for-unlike barter system. The unit of
73.
by colorint 10y ago
I think OOP will always run into the problem that it requires a taxonomical theory about your problem, which never holds up in reality. (This is just another way of saying, inheritance has to be a forest/bundle of disjoint trees. Yes,
74.
by colorint 10y ago
>perfect harmony But that sort of gives away the game, doesn't it? There is no perfect harmony in the real world, that only exists in the stylized world of scientific modeling. If you take scientific modeling on faith, or worse, if
75.
by colorint 10y ago
The universe is uncountably infinite; that people routinely stumble over this is why Zeno posed all those paradoxes about motion. In a sense, if you don't believe that reality is uncountably infinite, then you believe it IS possible to
76.
by colorint 10y ago
If by half the array you mean your solution must include either the first or second, and either the last or second-to-last, then the problem seems a lot simpler. This ought to work: function maxsum(arr) local max = function(a, b) if
77.
by colorint 10y ago
Well, the answer for an array of all negative numbers is to choose no elements, or if you must choose one, to choose the maximum single element. But presumably you solve it with the normal algorithm but with one level of look-behind. Someth
78.
by colorint 10y ago
This is days old, but I figured I'd mention, what I mean isn't the difference between 0.99999998 and 1, but you need exact addressing. That is, a program always has to branch to the right place, i.e., pointers must be exact; this
79.
by colorint 10y ago
I'll explain the joke and thereby kill it: this standard is mostly an excuse for ANSI members to drink large amounts of 90-proof gin. It's fairly clear they don't really care about vermouth (see section 4.3 and table 2), so r
80.
by colorint 10y ago
That's always a bit of a dodgy metric, because of two issues: The simpler issue, that people are more likely to bring up, is that you need infinite memory (or, if you're a member of the Church of Church, you need to be able to rep
81.
by colorint 10y ago
I'm ultimately conflating emotion and intuition because I don't think they're very different, and by extension, I don't think emotion and intuition are very different from "rationality." Whether to trust someon
82.
by colorint 10y ago
Computing must be focused on precision, because you need exact addressing to have data structures and branches. You could maybe let data structures slide, but if you don't have branching (or something equivalent) then you don't ha
83.
by colorint 10y ago
The "dual-track hypothesis," the belief in "rational" and "emotional/intuitive" modes of thought, is really based on pretty flimsy evidence (e.g., [1] discusses interpretation of fMRI in the context of mor