david-given

15 ms·

91.
by david-given 9y ago
If you're interested in cellular automata, a must read is Greg Egan's short story _Wang's Carpets_, which later became a chapter in his novel _Diaspora_ (which is superb). It's not formally published on the interwebs but
92.
by david-given 9y ago
I did look at it, but the API appears to be completely undocumented, there aren't any precompiled libraries for it (the ordinary binaries don't contain the API), and it's painfully complicated to build. The nicest renderer I&
93.
by david-given 9y ago
I just wish they'd put some more effort into letting the renderer be used standalone --- I'm not particularly interested in the modeller, but I would really like a renderer with a C++ API that would allow me to play with procedu
94.
by david-given 9y ago
Listed buildings are money pits. It's not just that you've bought a house that's older than most countries, and is therefore wearing out in so many ways , it's that you have to do the repairs using original techniques a
95.
by david-given 10y ago
I could have sworn it was 'Scottish', because that meant that the language wasn't entirely St.Andrews' fault, but it was nearly twenty years ago... At the time I quite liked it, and did a lot of programming in the Su
96.
by david-given 10y ago
Hey, this is out of the University of St.Andrews! I went there! During my time they were a big Haskell shop, working with Glasgow University (the G in ghc). There were also into custom research languages that nobody's ever heard of lik
97.
by david-given 10y ago
It didn't understand castling, en passant and promotions. It would also only play white. I did once try to pit it against a modern engine. It seemed to do reasonably well until the modern engine sneakily castled, and I was unable to te
98.
by david-given 10y ago
No story about chess engines is complete without a mention of 1k Chess for the Sinclair ZX81: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/ How big is it? 672 bytes. How much memory did that ZX81 have after
99.
by david-given 10y ago
Roughly put: in a capability based system, if you have a valid handle for a service, then you can use that service. But the only way you can get a valid handle is to ask your parent process for one --- handles are unforgeable. So your paren
100.
by david-given 10y ago
For me it was a Mandelbrot renderer typed in from a computer magazine, in BBC Basic, on a 2MHz ARM with five-byte floating point. It'd do a 256x256 four-colour render overnight. These days? $ sudo apt install xaos $ xaos C
101.
by david-given 10y ago
...one day I'm hoping they'll release all the cut footage from the, um, learning experiences of the early Falcon 1 and 9. I'm sure that they've cleaned up the broken frames and there'll be lots of fascinating firewo
102.
by david-given 10y ago
My heart attack moment was during the launch when I started seeing flame flickering around the tops of the engines... and then I thought to look at the altitude indicator, and realised they were at about 10km, and it was just the plume expa
103.
by david-given 10y ago
Although when the technical webcast went black just at the moment when I'd expect the vehicle to come into sight, I was sure that something had gone wrong and they'd pulled the plug.
104.
by david-given 10y ago
Eevblog has a teardown of the mechanical analogue computer that drove an astrocompass from a B52 bomber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzGaO4Kdz2Y So, so many beautiful cams and moving arms...
105.
by david-given 10y ago
Sadly, 2014.
106.
by david-given 10y ago
Well, my preferred solution is gigantic offshore tidal power generators in the Minch and around the top of Scotland where there are strong currents, preferably combined with hundred-kilometre-wide offshore wind farms (if you're build
107.
by david-given 10y ago
That's a really cool site. Thanks for linking to it. ...but I do need to point out that 12% of electrical demand is about 1800 ktoe, which is only about 1% of total energy demand. We use about six times more petroleum energy that a
108.
by david-given 10y ago
...addendum: there's actually a huge pile of small power generation facilities springing up all over the Western Isles and nearby mainland. But the purpose of most of these is to produce passive income. e.g. in Applecross on the mainla
109.
by david-given 10y ago
To be fair, Eigg is hardly a big consumer of electricity. I was there in December of 2006. I was staying in the guest house --- there's only one. I was the only tourist there. At one point I was kidnapped and taken to their community n
110.
by david-given 10y ago
CC say it's suitable for software (unlike the other CC licenses): https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC... However the OSI didn't approve it and don't recommend it, mainly because
111.
by david-given 10y ago
I had much the same experience. I'd be interested to try it for general purpose programming, but the setup procedure is so tied into doing web work that I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing. What's Reason&#x2
112.
by david-given 10y ago
Can you comment on what the system's like to write for? i.e. development workflow, good/bad points about the language, things you thought were cool, things you thought weren't cool, that sort of thing?
113.
by david-given 10y ago
Yeah, I wear daily disposable contacts for doing LARP stuff where being hit over the head with rubber swords isn't uncommon, and I am increasingly astigmatic; my old optician was unable to find daily disposables that would correct the
114.
by david-given 10y ago
So Magie's game came with two sets of rules ---one monopolistic, which I believe became modern Monopoly, and the other antimonopolistic. Has anyone played the last ruleset? Really interested to know what it's like... Writeup with
115.
by david-given 10y ago
Yes --- we do that because we are symbolic creatures. We serialise thoughts into sequences of symbols so that we can express them tonally, in series, to other people. We express mathematical concepts the same way. Naturally, the machines we
116.
by david-given 10y ago
> Right. That's the point. This clearly shows that Chinese has multisyllabic words. ...but I never said it didn't. I think you're trying to respond to a different argument than the one I'm making. I'm not trying
117.
by david-given 10y ago
You could totally do this. We tend to deal numbers by turning them into symbol sequences and then applying grammatical rules to them --- we're good at grammar, we have hardware acceleration for it. Digital computers work the same way:
118.
by david-given 10y ago
Do you have any examples of multisyllable words in Mandarin which don't break down like this? I have yet to find one. Note that just because a word is a compound word doesn't mean it's not a word. A compound word has a mean
119.
by david-given 10y ago
My brother's an archeologist, and spent a lot of time in Cyprus. (Fabulous place. Go visit. Some of the best food in the world. Also, did you know there used to be tiny elephants and hippos living there?) There's a lot of history
120.
by david-given 10y ago
Does such a thing as a completely pinyin tutorial exist everywhere? I am quite happy (or would be, if I had the time for this to be more than a theoretical exercise) with ignoring the ideograms completely. ...when I was working in Beijing

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