dmreedy

20 ms·

151.
by dmreedy 8y ago
It's absolutely untenable for the practical purposes you're after. Unfortunately, that doesn't disqualify it from being true. The more we examine language, the more it seems to be the case that there's really no guarante
152.
by dmreedy 8y ago
We're absolutely working with physical stuff still. However, if there's a continuum between mathematics and engineering, I think software is much closer to the former than the latter. I think 'working with real physical syste
153.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Fair; I'm thinking of people like (from disparate periods) Ivan Sutherland, Doug Englebart, Claude Shannon, and so on; folks who came out of EE educations but became computer engineers or computer scientists in practice (and sort of by
154.
by dmreedy 8y ago
They're clearly a descriptivist only of their own behavior. It's a very Cartesian approach.
155.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Agreed, there's definitely a continuum as you go lower down the stack; in the same way that the first programmers were often electrical engineers (with due deference to Ada Lovelace).
156.
by dmreedy 8y ago
This is a great comment, and very succinctly put. Somewhat incidentally, but I believe this is a large part of why, to me, software development is not an engineering discipline. At the end of the day, engineers (I think; not actually being
157.
by dmreedy 8y ago
What's interesting about brands like MVMT and Daniel Wellington in particular is that it's not like they ever produced actual 'quality' stuff. Unlike a lot of the brands in the article, where the 'premium mediocre&#
158.
by dmreedy 8y ago
"paying attention" and "researching the difference" imply distinctly different patterns of activity. I was objecting to the former, and am asserting that the article is an exploration of one facet of the latter.
159.
by dmreedy 8y ago
As software developers are paid to write code. And yet I couldn't begin to tell you the difference between Node and Angular.
160.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Yeah, she's literally, in that opening you quoted from, admitting to not having paid attention. Does the later choice of focus on the connection between bitcoin and, to quote, 'libertarian-shading-to-far-right` thinking render the
161.
by dmreedy 8y ago
An idea that's been tickling me lately is that 'randomness', as perceived by people inside a system, is actually an avenue by which free will from some hypothetical meta-system might assert itself. The actions causally deri
162.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Because you're an unknown, uncredentialed agent using language usually associated with pseudo-science, and asserting it as if it were plain as day. Unfortunately, most people don't have enough time to give every idea that comes ac
163.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Your points are all well-made, but I don't know if a message has to be surprising to be worthy of studying, whether satirically or otherwise. That said, I do think it's genuinely subversive, and effectively so. It's in co
164.
by dmreedy 8y ago
I think there's more depth to the film than you might be giving it credit for. There's a lot of goofy heavy-handedness on the surface, but there are some layers underneath, in the writing and the arcs of the characters The guys at
165.
by dmreedy 8y ago
I'd say for the same reason programs need APIs and cars need steering wheels and emotions need words. It's often very helpful to be able to understand the stack all the way down, but there's power in abstraction, and the natu
166.
by dmreedy 8y ago
There are two opportunities that arise from reading literature from outside of your own culture and time. One is to have that revelation of "oh, wow, these folks are just like me!" The other is to have the revelation, "wow, t
167.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Separating the two bits like this lets you have your cake and eat it too; it allows for a causal explanation between a person's (comprising both their physical and non-physical) state, and their actions, but that total state (and t
168.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Sure, if you want to keep the 'influence' between the two systems to a minimum. If you allow the mutation of the subset reality by a soul in the meta-heaven, then you can have it all operate in a single universe; the soul is capab
169.
by dmreedy 8y ago
I'd say dualism absolutely solves this problem, or at least can provide the tools to do so. (I say all of this as a devil's advocate, and nothing more) Imagine that heaven exists, and is a kind of meta-universe that our reality is
170.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Yes, that's precisely my point. I've read the rest of what you have to say on this, and it is precisely the kind of mysticism that bothers me. There are no means of disproving it, it reduces to dogma in the end, but it's phi
171.
by dmreedy 8y ago
This quote, and the kind of thinking that engenders it (and is engendered by it), bother me. Yeah, a cheap laptop can do arithmetic faster than 'the smartest mathematicians'. And the smartest mathematicians can do arithmetic faste
172.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Yeah, sorry, that's what the parenthetical about "this particular case" was supposed to allude to; that in this particular context, there were a number of reasons why this book took the form that it did
173.
by dmreedy 8y ago
"It's a very old Orange Catholic Bible made for space travelers. Not a filmbook, but actually printed on filament paper. It has its own magnifier and electrostatic charge system." He picked it up and demonstrated. "The b
174.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Matt Easton's schola gladiatoria youtube channel is mentioned elsewhere in the comments, and he's of the opinion that, in addition to the facets of unreliability and slow reloading (such that it was difficult to take a second shot
175.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Agreed; Grice's Maxims/The Cooperative Principle suggest that communication would not even be possible without these kinds of generous assumptions. And I don't think it's getting too quacky to extend that premise to soci
176.
by dmreedy 8y ago
I think there's a psychological facet at play as well. It may well be statistically bad for the bottom line, but it's much easier for the day-to-day. Planning things is hard , decomposing work is harder still, and making sure t
177.
by dmreedy 8y ago
To be fair (as a hobbyist cyclist myself), there are multiple sub-hobbies. The act of riding is one. The act of assembling, repairing, maintaining, and upgrading a bike is another. Some people really enjoy geeking out over the latter.
178.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Yes, I like to separate, such as they can be separated, the tasks of 'parsing' and 'thinking' when it comes to AI. In the 80s (and really, all the way back to the 50s when we started trying computational AI), the tasks t
179.
by dmreedy 8y ago
Great, I hope he's right. However, the AI that has panned out so far (whatever subset of the Hard Problem of Consciousness we've been able to...I don't really want to say solve. Address? Attempt?) in the current summer has do
180.
by dmreedy 8y ago
I believe these are the kinds of ideas that might actually create a genuine engineering culture in software development. Until we start applying this kind of rigor to our work, I don't believe the title of "Software Engineer&quo

More ›