mcguire

24 ms·

301.
by mcguire 3y ago
Some notes: " Variation in IQ during adulthood is about 70% genetic. " The proviso "during adulthood" is important: "The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years ol
302.
by mcguire 3y ago
Oh, lord. The sheer number of fork-bombs launched by the students in the systems programming course the week the professor introduced fork()....
303.
by mcguire 3y ago
Largely unrelated, but I was told once by a senior sysadmin that I was never, ever to send an email with the Open Firmware song attached to it. https://youtu.be/b8Wyvb9GotM
304.
by mcguire 3y ago
I used to work with a long-time AIX kernel developer. His method of shutting off his machine was "sync; sync; kill -9 1". Of course, his method of preparing to move offices (a common occurrence at IBM) was to 1. Take his (RS-6000)
305.
by mcguire 3y ago
Once upon a time a (fameous) CS professor reported that his email was annoyingly slow. He was using the good ol' mailx MUA. He never deleted emails. He never moved emails out of his inbox. He had been doing this for many years. His .mb
306.
by mcguire 3y ago
The best way to make money in finance is to manage other peoples' money.
307.
by mcguire 3y ago
Yes. If you value a stock based on fundamentals, including estimates of the company's future performance, at $10 and the current asking price is $100 you don't want to buy it. Vice versa, you would.
308.
by mcguire 3y ago
Raises hand This is, by the way, the intended strategy behind most index-based retirement funds.
309.
by mcguire 3y ago
This is a key point. The best way to make money in the stock market is to do it with other people's money.
310.
by mcguire 3y ago
On the other hand, for those same reasons, there is less information available about those markets.
311.
by mcguire 3y ago
Leading to the entertaining fact of a major facility on a US military arsenal named after an SS-Sturmbannführer. ( https://www.sam.usace.army.mil/Media/Images/igphoto/20009303... )
312.
by mcguire 3y ago
It could have, yes. Would it? This is why historians are leery of counter-factuals; unless you have very strong evidence that it would have happened, you have nothing but a "could have" hypothesis.
313.
by mcguire 3y ago
Like Usenet News?
314.
by mcguire 3y ago
Heidi Stettner's dog, at the Berkeley CSRG. (Ok, I had to look up her last name. I'm getting old.)
315.
by mcguire 3y ago
Shades of my old Vic20.
316.
by mcguire 3y ago
I hate to point this out but as a regular user, recommendation engines and search have not gotten better in the last, say, 10 years. (Although that may not be true in terms of selling advertising and propaganda, both of which I tend not to
317.
by mcguire 3y ago
If anyone is really concerned about the future of AI, why aren't they calling for a strong moratorium on AI research?
318.
by mcguire 3y ago
He's also on record as saying things like, " It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn't innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations. " ( https://www.in
319.
by mcguire 3y ago
Yes.
320.
by mcguire 3y ago
What is the process for starting a new subreddit?
321.
by mcguire 3y ago
Thanks! I couldn't remember the details and was trying to reconstruct it from the bio-Latin. :-)
322.
by mcguire 3y ago
The Homoninid family tree has gotten fairly confusing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Changes_in_taxonomy_and_te... You will often see mention of Hominin (Homo and Pan (chimpanzees), I think) as well, where you woul
323.
by mcguire 3y ago
That doesn't work. Children will learn whatever language they are exposed to. That is why Chomsky and others talk in terms of a universal grammar.
324.
by mcguire 3y ago
This part of the article: " Well, you have to understand how their loans are structured. They are called “non-recourse.” What that means is if they stop paying the loan, and the bank gets the building back, the bank cannot sue them for
325.
by mcguire 3y ago
Isn't the base problem that commercial real estate is worth much less now than when the loans were taken out? This is the same thing that happened to residential housing markets in the S&L and subprime mortage crises, right?
326.
by mcguire 3y ago
While I think some of the points in the article are interesting, the usual evidence for the Chomskian approach is the relative lack of input data for learning language by children in the wild. How much input data is used to train modern lan
327.
by mcguire 3y ago
I'm finding their examples hilarious, especially considering one of them is Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the Oompa Loompas were originally African pygmies.
328.
by mcguire 3y ago
What do you call someone who didn't graduate from law school? Not a lawyer.
329.
by mcguire 3y ago
" It is really quite hard for ancient or medieval armies to do meaningful long-term damage to an agricultural economy; farmers flee, crops are hard to destroy and in any case armies can’t do anything to the land itself. [...] Even a su
330.
by mcguire 3y ago
Is it really a cop-out if most people are not involved in a conflict? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-con...

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