jcl

8 ms·

31.
by jcl 4y ago
It’s true that the problem of generating the exact same image seems to be a single-threaded problem. But I suppose the general problem of rendering an approximation of a strange attractor could be parallelized by generating images from seve
32.
by jcl 4y ago
I was impressed by the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, accidentally had a gunpowder tamping iron blasted through his head. A doctor was somehow able to treat the wound, such that he was able to make a near-complete r
33.
by jcl 4y ago
The “relicensing” file, found higher in the directory tree, expresses Fabrice Bellard’s intent to relicense his tcc contributions under an MIT-style license. So that file is available for use under multiple licenses, even if it only explici
34.
by jcl 4y ago
Training with the n-back task (a memory game) has been shown in some studies to improve performance in other cognitive tasks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back#Treatment
35.
by jcl 5y ago
Wow... that's scary. But I think that when the article talks about water being "rotated", it's talking about individual water atoms, whose rotation would be too small to see. I imagine that the waviness would actually b
36.
by jcl 5y ago
I imagine you could, and that it might not even be that exciting... Since a Klein bottle is just a cylinder with its ends glued together a particular way, I think one way to sweep out a Klein bottle through time would be to have a rubber ba
37.
by jcl 5y ago
I love that the “hand-blown” bottle pictured in the article is one of Cliff Stoll’s.
38.
by jcl 6y ago
Per the article’s side bar, the astronaut was working through “How to Design Programs”, a book by several of the Racket contributors, including the article’s author, Shriram Krishnamurthi. As far as teaching languages go, scheme does have
39.
by jcl 6y ago
Also note that the author has made the whole book available to read free online and via ebook: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
40.
by jcl 6y ago
Surprisingly, your visual perception of something can actually be affected by how big you think its image is, even if it is not live. The "vertical-horizontal illusion" is an optical illusion where a vertical line appears to be
41.
by jcl 6y ago
Thedailywtf stories are generally some mix of fiction and fact. They take a presumably first-hand account from an insider and change a bunch of details to anonymize it and enhance it for dramatic effect. I'd guess, for this particular
42.
by jcl 6y ago
I've always been particularly impressed by the way Mort Drucker drew hands -- so expressive and seemingly effortless, sometimes carrying the scene as much as the faces. A good summary: http://illustrationart.blogspot.com&#x2
43.
by jcl 6y ago
Love the song and video -- great to see the behind-the-scenes and in-jokes. One thing I'm still curious about is the lyric: "You should never / write words using numbers / unless you're seven / or your name is
44.
by jcl 7y ago
Reminds me of the barely visible yellow tracking dots that some color inkjets produce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
45.
by jcl 7y ago
Judging from SIGGRAPH videos/presentations, it's pretty common for graphics researchers who are non-native speakers to use text-to-speech or a native-speaking acquaintance for narration. I think it's done explicitly to help
46.
by jcl 7y ago
Correct... the article does not explicitly mention the 20-second recommendation, which was presumably arrived at by experimentation. But it does explain why such a time-based recommendation might work: > The skin is quite rough and wr
47.
by jcl 7y ago
It's funny how often that happens. A favorite example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_pounds_(British_coin)#Desi...
48.
by jcl 7y ago
Similar to that AT&T campaign, I was struck by the prescience of Qwest's "Ride the Light" commercials: "All rooms have every movie ever made, in any language, anytime, day or night." This was in 1999, when Net
49.
by jcl 7y ago
FWIW, it looks like that's a test case -- it is not part of Chrome itself. They most likely just wanted an example of a third-party website, and could have used any non-Google site there.
50.
by jcl 7y ago
Many man pages have examples, but they consistently bury them at the end, after exhaustively covering every flag, file, or environment variable that could possibly affect execution. It might not be crazy to move the examples section to the
51.
by jcl 7y ago
I was surprised to learn that the Four Yorkshiremen sketch actually predates Monty Python -- I guess this is why they only did renditions in their live shows. Of the original Four, only Cleese and Chapman went on to be Pythons. https:&#x2
52.
by jcl 7y ago
Why limit yourself to programmable semicolons? I hear C++ is going to have programmable whitespace : http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf
53.
by jcl 7y ago
(For anyone unaware, in this context "ice" most likely refers to "internal combustion engine" vehicles.)
54.
by jcl 7y ago
> It seems that wedding photographers keep the copyright so that they can reproduce them for self-promotion and advertising That's probably not the main reason, since many other artists are able to use their work-for-hire in self pr
55.
by jcl 7y ago
Reminds me of a curiosity seen during a tour of the historic Filoli mansion: An appliance that cooks food by running mains power through it. Apparently someone in the early 20th century thought this was a good idea. I don't remember
56.
by jcl 7y ago
I've read, though, that one downside of Serde is that it tends to generate large binaries -- the cost of performance, I guess. https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/2019/08/21/rust-bloat.html#...
57.
by jcl 7y ago
Something I found surprising: Some AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions consume so much power that Intel chose to have their chips dynamically slow their clock frequency when the instructions are executed. So naively switching to SIMD instruction
58.
by jcl 7y ago
Looks like the second vsprintf definition should be "BANNED(vsprintf)", not "BANNED(sprintf)". Not that it matters much, as it only affects the error message.
59.
by jcl 7y ago
> You don't have gas or grocery insurance, do you? Some people do have analogous "insurance" for gas or groceries: Anyone with a Sam's Club, Costco, or Amazon Prime membership pays a subscription fee so that they ca
60.
by jcl 7y ago
The article's description of his process was a little hard to follow. A time lapse was much clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFgLQVX86U

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