jhbadger

8 ms·

91.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Eh, this hysteria reminds me a lot of the early 1980s when people seriously believed that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were bad for mental health - one of Tom Hanks' early roles was in "Mazes & Monsters"
92.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
That's interesting - Github as social media? That's an idea of would never have thought of in a million years. Personally, I'd be glad if a child of mine hung out there - not at all like something like Instagram or Facebook
93.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. Wh
94.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment
95.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Do realize that the author is Czech. While being religious is the default and atheists face (mild) discrimination in places like the US, at least until the 1990s and the fall of Communism, things were reversed in (then) Czechoslovakia, with
96.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as popular as BioP
97.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
A real, completely mechanical watch? No battery or crystal? I'm sure my Seiko isn't be best there is and maybe it could be improved with servicing, but I think electronics have given people unreasonable expectations of accuracy
98.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Yeah, but I'm sure your microwave isn't mechanical. What makes a mechanical watch cool, even a cheap one, is that there are no electronics at all - just gears and springs and things. I think that's worth a trivial bit of inac
99.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Is it a Seiko 5 (self winding)? Yeah, those aren't that accurate, but I wouldn't call them "junk" - they do lose or gain a minute or two a day in my experience - I generally correct mine every couple of days against my p
100.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.
101.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novel
102.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Costco also delivers -- I also live in a city in an apartment and order bulky things I don't want to carry from Costco online.
103.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
They only joined the UCC (Geneva Copyright Treaty) in 1973 though. That was less than twenty years before the USSR ceased to exist. All the works published in the USSR before 1973 weren't copyrighted in the West (it wasn't retroac
104.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
And also, if you put an actual parrot in a room full of programmers, it might learn a few word of programming jargon, but it never will become a useful coding partner the way LLMs are.
105.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
This chess game has a min-max algorithm in it! AI slop! It should have a short person hidden inside like the original Mechanical Turk!
106.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Biden wasn't "far left". The "far left" in US politics is basically Bernie Sanders and AOC's "squad", neither of which have ever come close to running the country.
107.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
I'm not against students working together -- as you note in some classes it is encouraged and often group projects are assigned. But this is different from the idea of a "take home exam" where students are supposed to work al
108.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Yeah, lack of Vitamin D may or may not be a problem (well, obviously in extreme cases it leads to rickets, but that's rare). But skin cancer unquestionably is a problem, and not infrequently a deadly one. Pick your battles.
109.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
110.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.
111.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
The problem with that argument is it is trivial to write a Markov chain program that takes in text and then can generate the most probable series of words given a starting word. I myself wrote such a program in BASIC on a 64K 8-bit computer
112.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperb
113.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Scientific American hasn't been the magazine it was for decades -- there's nobody writing columns like what Martin Gardner or A.K. Dewdney used to write that made the general public interested in some mathematical or computational
114.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
The obscure Russian nicknames! How is anybody supposed to know without being told that Sasha and Alexander are the same guy? (I do realize that while some English nicknames like Johnny for John are pretty self-explanatory, other like Jack f
115.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Well, Crime and Punishment is often taught in US high schools. Or at least was back in the 1980s. During the Cold War there was a lot of interest in Russian literature in general in part because in the bipolar world they were seen as "
116.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a pleasant enough fe
117.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
All democracy is a "two party charade" then. Countries that have a dozen parties still have them form a left-wing and right-wing coalition in order to actually get enough seats to form a majority. I'd call those coalitions th
118.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Even though I'm American, I was living and working in Montreal at the time of 9/11 and it was weird how even there in the weeks after there were American flags displayed "in solidarity" with the US.
119.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
But that isn't the purpose of academia -- the purpose of it is to discover new phenomena not to make products. It is true that there is a lot of work to turn a new advance into a product whether it is software or turning biological kno
120.
by jhbadger 4mo ago
Maybe, but it's a bit weird to complain about connotations for "jab" when the US word is "shot" which surely has even more violent connotations,

More ›