johngossman

8 ms·

61.
by johngossman 10mo ago
It depends on who and what you read. Since they became controversial, I notice them more. Charles Dickens used them both regularly--most pages seem to have both. Virginia Woolf's writing has the most semi-colons I've seen and almo
62.
by johngossman 10mo ago
Imagine you were expecting one of those and read the other!
63.
by johngossman 10mo ago
I suggest you go meet some PhD mathematicians and have that discussion.
64.
by johngossman 10mo ago
Newton and Gauss and Euler did just fine without such solid foundations. If you get a PhD, very likely even a undergraduate degree in mathematics you cover this stuff, then (unless you choose foundations as your field) you go about doing st
65.
by johngossman 10mo ago
Citation?
66.
by johngossman 10mo ago
Not to mention that a lot of Japanese cafes don't open until late morning or early afternoon.
67.
by johngossman 10mo ago
Oh boy...more memories. About a decade later at work I identified a bottleneck in our line-drawing code. The final step was to cast two floats (a point) to integers, which the compiler turned into ftoa() calls. Unfortunately, ftoa changed
68.
by johngossman 10mo ago
Sometime in the 80s, I implemented the core of the Mandelbrot Set calculation using assembly on an 8087. As the article mentions, the compilers did math very inefficiently on this stack architecture. For example, if you multiplied two numbe
69.
by johngossman 11mo ago
Mathematics is such an old field, older than anything except arguably philosophy, that it's too broad and deep for anyone to really understand everything. Even in graduate school I often took classes in things discovered by Gauss or
70.
by johngossman 11mo ago
And you don't think she knows this? She's clearly fascinated with the Romans, despite all she finds unappealing about them. Which can easily be said about a lot (most?) of history. Based on books and TV, WW2 is possibly the histor
71.
by johngossman 11mo ago
I have a b&w photo of my (considerably) older brother, from the early 1960s, reading a pile of comic books a foot high. The only cover visible is Spiderman #4. When I was a kid I used to stare at that picture and dream. Needless to say,
72.
by johngossman 11mo ago
I think you're right that the inelegant part is how AI seems to just consist of endless loops of multiplication. I say this as a graphics programmer who realized years ago that all those beautiful images were just lots of MxNs, and AI
73.
by johngossman 11mo ago
I've been reading Hanselman's blog for ages. That's just the way he writes. Compare this post from 2013 (clearly pre-LLM) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ipad-surface-ultrabook-are-we...
74.
by johngossman 11mo ago
Agreed. It's a fine article but leaves half the story on the table. It is supposedly comparing what these movies looked like in the theater to the modern streaming and bluray versions, but is actually comparing what a film scan (scanne
75.
by johngossman 1y ago
Iirc, Chris Whittle proposed this idea of refrigerator advertising in the 1980s. Seemed dystopian then. Ugh.
76.
by johngossman 1y ago
As bad as AI experiences often are, I speculate that we are actually in a golden age before they are fully enshittified.
77.
by johngossman 1y ago
Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I'd say people took nuclear war seriously. People had different opinions on how likely it was and whether it was an extinction event, but there was near unanimity that it was "a really bad idea.
78.
by johngossman 1y ago
On the other hand, a lot more books are published now. There are a lot of books, especially in the genre of experimental literature, that are stranger and more difficult than this. I'd classify Infinite Jest or any of the Irving Welsh
79.
by johngossman 1y ago
This is one of these nuanced takes that will please few. It acknowledges all sorts of uncertainty and adopts ethical priorities that cannot be established empirically even if (unlikely) the facts are universally agreed upon. I applaud the a
80.
by johngossman 1y ago
There's already plenty to go around. It's like paintings in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa is overrun because there's a kind of mythology about it, not because nobody paints anymore. As another poster commented, there are people w
81.
by johngossman 1y ago
An interesting feature of getting old is when you see something you haven't in 30+ years and it suddenly snaps into focus. X-Copy was invaluable.
82.
by johngossman 1y ago
The author interviews both Pico Iyer and Alex Kerr. I can't recommend these two authors highly enough. Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk" and Kerr's "Another Kyoto" are worth reading even if you don't tra
83.
by johngossman 1y ago
At which point you're not just memory mapping the file. And if the new version changes the size of the object, it doesn't pack in the same place in memory, so you have to repack before saving. Even serializing with versioning is v
84.
by johngossman 1y ago
Your mileage may be different. I didn't work on Word (though I talked to those guys about their format) but I worked on two other apps that used the same strategy in the same era. One, on load you had to fix up runtime data that landed
85.
by johngossman 1y ago
New Yorker did a great interview with Parker in 2007. Even if you're not a guitarists, a good read about innovation: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/struts-and-fre...
86.
by johngossman 1y ago
I think the title is a little tongue in cheek. The rest of the blog post develops the Foundations of arithmetic in a clear, well-grounded manner. This is probably a really good introduction for someone about to take a Foundations course. I
87.
by johngossman 1y ago
Things never change. When I was a kid, the librarian at the public library in my little rural town with 23 churches tried to steer me away from Lord of the Rings (which I had already read) and towards Narnia (also read) because CS Lewis was
88.
by johngossman 1y ago
Almost a paraphrase of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides
89.
by johngossman 1y ago
I've always assumed they tell you to arrive early in order to account for the chance it will take you longer than you guess to get there, just like doctors do. I've never had it take 2 hours from arrival to gate, but I have been 9
90.
by johngossman 1y ago
One of the plot points in Seven Samurai is that the peasants save their rice for the samurai and themselves eat millet. When the samurai learn this, they are horrified at the privation the peasants are putting themselves through.

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