loicd

8 ms·

31.
by loicd 4y ago
The problem is that averages are constructs of the mind. It is a fallacy to think that random citizens are average citizens. You can average numbers, you cannot average people.
32.
by loicd 4y ago
The idea is that you can reuse instructions for signed integer comparisons. This is explicitely mentioned in the standard, section 5.3: https://posithub.org/docs/posit_standard-2.pdf
33.
by loicd 4y ago
Yes, sign-magnitude is the right terminology, my mistake, but too late to edit. As for two's complement, look at slide 18-19 from the link somebody produced below: https://posithub.org/conga/2019/docs/13&
34.
by loicd 4y ago
> I want a function (isinf, isnumber etc) and I am happy. Sure, isnan(x) is what one should use. The fact that it is `x != x` is an implementation detail. The problem is that it is also a hack that breaks the usual mathematical axioms fo
35.
by loicd 4y ago
Isn't that also the usual argument against subnormal numbers? Anyway, you're right. According to that paper, section 4.3: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/ma221_Fall20/Dinech... the relative erro
36.
by loicd 4y ago
I don't know about regime notation, but it is nice to see a new format with the most annoying ideas from IEEE754 removed: - Two's complement instead of one's complement - No infinities, no signed zeroes - Only one exceptional
37.
by loicd 4y ago
I think that there is a difference between threatening to use nukes and actually using them. Threats make people scared and perhaps willing to compromise, which sows division among Ukraine's allies and favors Russia. However, I think t
38.
by loicd 4y ago
I mostly agree. What I mean by "fondamentally not a technical problem but a political one" is that technological solutions to bad or incompetent government policies seem to me to be band-aids that do not actually solve the problem
39.
by loicd 4y ago
Reading the title, I assumed that the article would talk about what people mean by privacy. However, it really is about how people try to achieve privacy (by reducing the mount of collected data, or by reducing the amount of collectible dat
40.
by loicd 4y ago
> This will sound crazy from our perspective this year, but from the perspective of the essay 31 years ago, Lisp dominates software development today; we just spell it without parentheses. It is true that some good ideas originate from L
41.
by loicd 5y ago
I would like to comment on the claim that "all popular languages have context-free grammars, while C++ has undecidable grammar". Although I understand what is meant here, the terminology is just plain wrong. There are no such thin
42.
by loicd 5y ago
There used to be the "Windows tax" that the rest of Microsoft had to pay[1], now I guess that there is the "Rest-of-Microsoft tax" that Windows has to pay. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/9e09d082-b5d
43.
by loicd 5y ago
The question for me would be: is hydrogen really the best chemical for energy storage? (I genuinely do not know actually.) Although you are not explicitely saying that, it seems to me that the underlying assumption behind the hydrogen-as-st
44.
by loicd 5y ago
There was also Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot who built a steam "car" in 1770. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Joseph_Cugnot
45.
by loicd 5y ago
I fail to see an economic future for hydrogen as a fuel source. If it is produced from e.g. methane (the blue version), then we are burning more methane than we would have if we had been using the methane directly. If it is produced from el
46.
by loicd 5y ago
You would think that, but there was a smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1885 where vaccination became mandatory, and people rebelled against that, attacked pharmacies selling the vaccine, etc. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki&#x
47.
by loicd 5y ago
> We do not know whether this virus is purely natural. Actually, the origin of the virus is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. In my experience, people opposed to vaccination are often biased against it by the fact that it is
48.
by loicd 5y ago
> Vaccine isn't 100% protection from being affected by the virus. True, but I don't care about that. It is a bit as if you were arguing that I should not fasten my seat belt because it is not 100% effective at saving me in a ca
49.
by loicd 5y ago
> The important point is I can't choose to not get the virus, but I can choose to not get the vaccine. I disagree. You can choose not to be affected by the virus by taking the vaccine. That's the whole point of the vaccine. So
50.
by loicd 5y ago
I know about GB syndrome. I do not consider that to be "long term". When I got my first dose, many people had already been fully vaccinated for more than 6 weeks and I personally knew quite a few of them. There was nothing to worr
51.
by loicd 5y ago
I don't understand why people are so obsessed over potential long term effects of vaccines while completely ignoring the potential long term effects of covid. There are no examples of vaccines with long term side effects. On the other
52.
by loicd 5y ago
I think this is a problem with modal logic. There are important nuances between what is true, what is likely and what is possible. In my experience, people are not good at perceiving those nuances and personal bias often erases them. It can
53.
by loicd 6y ago
Nice option, but whitelisting is a bit much for me. Amazingly, the iphone still does not have an option to automatically block anonymous calls (those that hide their numbers) and only them.
54.
by loicd 6y ago
Thank you for the links, but I am unconvinced. Your medium link claims that to decide between a function and a variable declaration in the given program, the compiler has to solve an instance of the Post Correspondence Problem (which is und
55.
by loicd 6y ago
Although the explanation of what you mean by "context-free grammars" is clear, it seems to me that you should be using "unambiguous grammars" instead. An ambiguous context-free grammar is not going to facilitate the job
56.
by loicd 7y ago
Thanks for the writing. I had noticed some of the things you wrote but not all (I am not a Go programmer though I keep track of what is happening there). Your post made me look a bit more into 'defer'. I did not expect it to be a
57.
by loicd 7y ago
Out of curiosity, would you share those flaws you have found?
58.
by loicd 7y ago
The result presented in TFA is that all computable functions over the real numbers are continuous. To generalize that to 'all functions are continuous', you not only need to believe that all functions should be computable, whi