mistercow

5 ms·

31.
by mistercow 11mo ago
> and don’t think that the programmer more than the languages contribute to those problems This sounds a lot like how I used to think about unit testing and type checking when I was younger and more naive. It also echoes the sentiments o
32.
by mistercow 11mo ago
Multiple severe attacks on browsers over the years have targeted image decoders. Requiring an implementation in a memory safe language seems very reasonable to me, and makes me feel better about using FF.
33.
by mistercow 11mo ago
Seems like the normal usage to me. The post above lists other criteria that have to be satisfied, beyond just being a Rust implementation. That would be the consideration.
34.
by mistercow 1y ago
1. “High resolution” in this kind of context is generally relative to previous work. 2. “Postage stamp sized” is not a resolution. Zoom in on them and you’ll see that they’re quite crisp.
35.
by mistercow 1y ago
Yes, and those glyphs don’t fit the grid. Try to redraw the n from the original font yourself. You can’t, because you can’t add points between the grid dots.
36.
by mistercow 1y ago
I tried to do that, and now I’m just confused. The included glyph for the lower case n doesn’t actually fit the grid, so you can’t seem to replicate it. But also that grid doesn’t have enough resolution to do the tilde. Maybe I’m missing so
37.
by mistercow 1y ago
WebGPU is the only one of those I’ve really followed, but hasn’t that had a huge amount of input and changes due to other voices in the working group? That seems to contradict the simplistic picture painted above of Google just dictating st
38.
by mistercow 1y ago
If you use base64 with the intention of hiding the encoded information, surely it’s as much a cipher as rot13 is, right?
39.
by mistercow 1y ago
> How to calculate π for n-metrics numerically. The general idea of "divide the circle into segments and calculate the length by the metric" is explained, but the exact algorithm or formulas are not shown. I feel like that woul
40.
by mistercow 1y ago
There’s an almost mystical belief among certain tech and science journalists that computers are bad at randomness, and it’s really bizarre, and in my opinion, pretty harmful.
41.
by mistercow 1y ago
> ... all believe that the universe is not destined to grow more disorganized forever, but more complex and rich with information. Maybe it's just a problem of being loose with terminology, but this seems to be contrasting entropy a
42.
by mistercow 1y ago
Yeah, apparently I didn’t communicate that well enough. But I think this is a subtle and common point of confusion. There are machines which are very, very hard to determine whether they halt or not, and so people end up thinking that there
43.
by mistercow 1y ago
> In 1936, the pioneering logician Alan Turing proved that there’s no universal procedure for answering this question, which became known as the halting problem. Any method that works for some programs will fail for others, and in some c
44.
by mistercow 1y ago
This is pretty clear from the readme though? > While Grant Sanderson continues to maintain his own repository, we recommend this version for its continued development, improved features, enhanced documentation, and more active community-
45.
by mistercow 1y ago
Every source I can find says that most homeowners insurance will cover direct damage from volcanic eruptions, including fires, with some exclusions like mudflows.
46.
by mistercow 1y ago
I would argue that home owners insurance is a commercial application of volcanos. No, it doesn’t harness them, but if you live somewhere that could potentially be affected by an eruption, your insurance company is paying attention to the sc
47.
by mistercow 1y ago
OK, so this author doesn’t like James Randi. So what? We’re discussing in a thread about his post, so his word is gospel?
48.
by mistercow 1y ago
> I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content. Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film
49.
by mistercow 1y ago
Actually, no, we don’t know what they mean. This is the foundation of the great motte and bailey that so much nutrition nonsense is based on. People say “chemicals”, and then they can gesture at a food label with a few obscure sounding ingr
50.
by mistercow 1y ago
Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
51.
by mistercow 1y ago
> Makes you dream there could be an equivalent for our own universe? But would we even notice? As far as we were concerned, it would just be more physics.
52.
by mistercow 1y ago
There’s something very aesthetically amusing about these shaders fitting into tweets, and those tweets also having videos attached which very roughly approximate the same information using many orders of magnitude more data.
53.
by mistercow 1y ago
Yeah, and I think it’s worth asking why there. Why do we not just have a standard for PWAs with privileged OS access? There are two obvious answers. The first is portability. And sure, but Electron provides an answer here, so why can’t we p
54.
by mistercow 1y ago
I keep thinking that this could be solved by just building Electron into the OS as a shared framework so we don't have to have a separate copy for every app, but the more I dig into it, the more I realize I'm just reinventing the
55.
by mistercow 1y ago
Very nice! I wasn’t even sure that the approach could be fixed without major rethinking. Great job figuring that out.
56.
by mistercow 1y ago
Also, even if, as the author wishes, there were a protocol for learning the subpixel layout of a display, and that got widespread adoption, you can bet that some manufacturers would screw it up and cause rendering issues that would be very
57.
by mistercow 1y ago
Even more obviously, the squares in the front aren’t bigger than the squares in the back. It looks like each square has equal area even as their shapes change. It’s fascinating how plausible it looks at a glance while being so glaringly wro
58.
by mistercow 1y ago
Just to tack onto this, the one thing you could do is just deny real rewards. If someone wants you to take part in their pool in order to load a webpage, you could just refuse to submit any block that will actually pay out. This wouldn’t be
59.
by mistercow 1y ago
Is there a good source that tracks the performance of these forecasts? I’d be particularly interested in seeing what things looked like in, say, 2005, looking ahead ten years, and then maybe 2008. That would be right before and right after
60.
by mistercow 1y ago
> Still, while it is basically impossible to predict with any confidence what AI will do in 20 or 30 years, one can say something about the next decade, because most of these near-term economic effects must involve existing technologies

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