fasterik

17 ms·

301.
by fasterik 3y ago
I don't think that's true. Even if someone doesn't explicitly hold those views, one can still be complacent, ignorant, or subtly enabling of them. Seeing things from a different perspective can provide insight into how releva
302.
by fasterik 3y ago
It's slightly sad that you have to give this disclaimer, especially on a forum for hackers. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from a John Carmack commencement speech: "In many areas, it's almost received wisdom that
303.
by fasterik 3y ago
What about C89 or a similar subset of modern C?
304.
by fasterik 3y ago
Given one of their stated goals is "Embracing the GC and improving upon it, disregarding betterC and nogc in the process", it seems like their goal is explicitly to move it away from being a system programming language. And no, I
305.
by fasterik 3y ago
I'm not too familiar with either Rust's or D's approach to lifetimes, but from some quick forum searching, it appears that adding Rust-like lifetimes to D would have required significant changes to the design of the language.
306.
by fasterik 3y ago
It's a bit disingenuous to pretend like they're the same thing. Explicit design for threaded discussion encourages a different style of communication than design primarily intended for real-time chat. Even if the information exist
307.
by fasterik 3y ago
This seems like a legitimate scientific question. What is the mass of the observable universe, and can light escape it? It's no more pointless than asking what the universe was like at the big bang or what it will be like 10^100 years
308.
by fasterik 3y ago
You're probably joking, but in case not, I would point out that black holes evaporate quickly at small scales, and cannot be smaller than the Planck length. One of my pet peeves is this vague idea about the universe being an infinite f
309.
by fasterik 3y ago
That might be true in your case. What makes someone else happy might be to engage in rent-seeking behavior to profit as much personally off of other people as possible. Even if maximizing personal happiness works as an ethical norm for some
310.
by fasterik 3y ago
I don't think people are misreading it. Everyone understands what "black lives matter" means. It's a phrase that's been co-opted by a political movement with a broader set of ideological commitments. It's possi
311.
by fasterik 3y ago
The question is whether diversity statements accomplish the stated purpose. The people best equipped to write a good diversity statement are those who come from privileged, educated backgrounds and are familiar with the specific conceptual
312.
by fasterik 3y ago
Physically, immortality is impossible due to the second law of thermodynamics. Everything dies, including solar systems, galaxies, and black holes. A biological body can potentially live orders of magnitude longer than we do now, but even t
313.
by fasterik 3y ago
I generally don't trust IMDB or RT scores, but I agree with your assessment. They Shoot Pictures Don't They [1] has always been my go to for critically acclaimed movies. Neither Dune film makes it to their top 1000 of all time. Th
314.
by fasterik 3y ago
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the level of peer review of physics journals in the early 20th century. Note that Annalen der Physik was publishing 90-95% of submissions, so there was still some review process. I also wonder how much of that
315.
by fasterik 3y ago
You could do something similar in C and forgo the standard library. No dependencies other than syscalls. I don't really see a compelling reason to do it in assembly other than as an intellectual exercise.
316.
by fasterik 3y ago
The problem isn't work per se, it's our attitudes toward work and the projects that we choose to work on. "Do what makes you happy" is a cliche that we all accept, but if you think about it, it's actually a very sel
317.
by fasterik 3y ago
I am frequently reminded of George Carlin's bit about "soft language" and how it obscures facts of life that we're uncomfortable about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67k9eEw9AY His criticism of soft l
318.
by fasterik 3y ago
If someone thinks that a scientific paper is true because it passed peer review, they need to change their mental model of how science works. Peer review ensures that a given paper meets a minimum standard of quality. Trust of scientific re
319.
by fasterik 3y ago
Physicists have been using preprint servers for decades, which means anyone can put a paper on the internet for everyone in the field to read and evaluate. So this idea that Copernicus would be suppressed under the current system is absurd.
320.
by fasterik 3y ago
I didn't find it to be incoherent at all, but I had read the book over a decade ago and had seen the previous adaptations. In some sense, maybe I was the ideal audience, because I knew the outline of the story going in but either didn&
321.
by fasterik 3y ago
I don't care one way or another about the TIOBE index, but that video is obnoxious and isn't making an argument or presenting data. Not sure why anyone would be convinced by this.
322.
by fasterik 3y ago
Latin has no first-language speakers, so that makes it a dead language by definition. That's different from being an extinct language, which means that it would have no first- or second-language speakers. https://en.wikipedi
323.
by fasterik 3y ago
This seems to be a common response to people criticizing open source projects. Basically, any criticism can be dismissed by suggesting that the critic should just fix the problem instead of complaining about it. I don't see why someone
324.
by fasterik 3y ago
The post I was responding to was advocating for a "smart phone age", i.e. the state banning smartphone use for people under a certain age like we have for alcohol and other hard drugs. All of your examples are examples of regulati
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by fasterik 3y ago
What I mean by aliens using neural nets is that we don't know what percent of evolved intelligent species would have neural nets as an integral part of their cognition like we do. And we don't know what alternative paths there are
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by fasterik 3y ago
It's still an interesting fact that evolution seems to have figured out that neural networks are good at approximating arbitrary continuous functions. We could ask whether intelligent alien species are likely to use neural nets. In oth
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by fasterik 3y ago
These are definitely problems, but here are some positive points to balance the negative: The price of renewable energy has fallen 99.8% since 1975 [1] and power generation from renewables has increased 800% since 1965 and doubled since 201
328.
by fasterik 3y ago
Previous generations had the same problem with television. We also have this problem with video games, gambling, junk food, pornography, etc. Behavioral addictions are usually a coping mechanism for underlying problems. I don't think w
329.
by fasterik 3y ago
Hard disagree. Economic growth is what raises people's standard of living. We're not going to eliminate poverty without continued growth. That doesn't mean it doesn't also cause problems, but those problems are solvable.
330.
by fasterik 3y ago
I'm not inside the scientific community so I can't verify the degree to which it's a shameful question. My guess is that it has a lot more to do with simple heuristics than dogmatism. A researcher has finite time and resource

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