jacb

4 ms·

1.
by jacb 4y ago
Ha! Certainly none of us will get anywhere close to this bound, no matter how much time we log in Anki. But the OP asked "Would an infinitely-long-lived, but forgetful person be able to recall an infinite number of facts using this met
2.
by jacb 4y ago
More than semi-fallacious - the math doesn't add up, because you run into the Bekenstein bound, which limits how much information you can pack into a volume.
3.
by jacb 6y ago
Ah, I misunderstood you! I apologize. :)
4.
by jacb 6y ago
That's not how arguments from contradiction work. You've assumed H (halting problem is decidable), prove B (beauty decidable), then say "but actually !H, therefore !B". All you've proven is that H => B. An actual
5.
by jacb 6y ago
I might be missing something - why would this be a breakthrough? It sounds complicated to generate the interfaces, sure, but is there a theoretical problem blocking this, or just practical?
6.
by jacb 6y ago
https://www.microcovid.org/ is a similar tool, with more knobs to adjust risk factors (distance, outside vs inside, the other person's risk profile, etc.). Friends living in shared apartments have used it to budget, es
7.
by jacb 6y ago
This is really upsetting. I didn't go to TJHS, but the sense I got from the three people I know who did was that it had that critical mass of nerdy science-and-tech-obsessed teenagers. At least in Canada, it's more common to have
8.
by jacb 6y ago
> The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger) But banning ICE cars is clearly even worse for those unable t
9.
by jacb 6y ago
Perhaps it's consistent with computation being done in many "parallel universes," but with heavily restricted communication - in this model it's almost trivial to parallelize work (flip a quantum coin, do A if heads else
10.
by jacb 6y ago
> how well a compiler does is mostly dependent on how many of those transformations happen to apply to your program at hand Right, there's an infinite number of distinct useful code optimizations, there's a cost to checking if
11.
by jacb 6y ago
Have there been attempts to measure modern compilers' ability to optimize large programs against "perfect" machine code? The few times I've poked through demo scene binaries, I've felt a sense of awe at the complexi
12.
by jacb 6y ago
It seems like a common misconception that humans have some secret power to solve undecidable problems that computers lack. But "this problem is undecidable in general" doesn't mean "computers cannot solve small instances
13.
by jacb 6y ago
That's a good point! I guess you'd still have to make sure that variants with alignment requirements don't get unaligned. One way to do that would be to add leading padding if they follow an unaligned variant. Adds some compl
14.
by jacb 6y ago
If you want random access into an array of enums, you need them all to be the same size (there are also alignment concerns, which is why it's tough to use only 1 bit of overhead to discriminate an enum with two variants). I guess you c