mjburgess

147 ms·

2101.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies? D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag? The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the re
2102.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Well calling it "planned" adds a conspiratorial element, maybe there's a better word. The effect comes from many sources. When the engineering science is new, tech tends to be way overbuilt because the creators don't kno
2103.
by mjburgess 4y ago
python -- syntax doesnt just correspond to one idea, the class keyword has a semantics entirely independent of an OO interpretation the whole point of design patterns is, exactly, to reuse "class etc." syntax for essentially non
2104.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Much of practice here can be summarised as: Code should read so that the intent of the programmer is clear. Omit types where they arent relevant to understanding the code, include them where they are. Good code, then, only arises from good
2105.
by mjburgess 4y ago
I dont think `class` as a module keyword, in python, sucks. It just requires learning being open to python as python. Eg., class EG: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST = 1, 2, 3, 4 def move(a, b): return a-b
2106.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Well.. I think they're over-stated because of the current wave of AI basically only having naïve compression as its tool. Is the concept `addition` a compression of the space `(Int, Int, Int)` ? If you want to say it is, OK for some
2107.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Say, there are two types of people: (1) a person who mostly experiences challenges at or just above their ability to solve them (2) a person who mostly experiences challenges way above their ability to solve them (even plausibly so) St
2108.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Wealth is pareto distributed, by definition, almost no one can be rich and almost nothing you do can change that.
2109.
by mjburgess 4y ago
A modern "AI" models have c. 200bn parameters, say. At 32bit/param that's c. 6TB. At 6 bytes/word, 1T words, or more words than are in all books that have ever been written. NNs, and models of this kind, are just se
2110.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Chaos is only deterministic with infinite precision. Since the universe isnt the kinds of place where position-momentum etc. have infinite precision, chaos isnt deterministic. Chaotic orbits of whole moons are non-deterministic on quite sho
2111.
by mjburgess 4y ago
The cost, whatever it will be, is always just a cost of doing business. The purpose of the fine is to make the business unprofitable, which it is successful at doing.
2112.
by mjburgess 4y ago
given twitter isn't profitable, i'd imagine its more money than they've ever made
2113.
by mjburgess 4y ago
It's something more old-fashioned than modern economics, it's a kind of moral-political economics. Which, I agree, lines up quite well with what Bitcoin is, as a project. A The problem with the moral premises of this world view is
2114.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Only one of those curves looks like a currency. The other looks like the price of a bridge for sale.
2115.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Yip, we have all the history we need in economics to know what makes a good currency. The problem with crypto is all the tech-utopians making it, never read any economics (or political theory); and all the financiers hyping it, never read a
2116.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Incidentally, much like the Tabaco industry. No doubt, as western nations increasingly ban this stuff or regulate it out of existence, the scam will move across the ocean.
2117.
by mjburgess 4y ago
I disagree with the policy, but this article is far less well-thought than other commenters think. * That child abuse is largely familial is irrelevant. It is precisely long-term child abuse which becomes CSAM. * That 10% of children are ab
2118.
by mjburgess 4y ago
All of those words have different meanings in csci and in thermo, and in qm, and in many areas. They arent the same word. They are only connected when empirical-logical models are provided. p
2119.
by mjburgess 4y ago
I read this as a means of making the implictness of OO, explicit. Ie., it is syntax for specifying what `this` is Inheritance, fluid changing + properties, etc. are all implicit in exactly the same way. OO programmers have just got used t
2120.
by mjburgess 4y ago
sure, it's about ratios a business needs an executive, and at scale, it needs middle management to implement the general strategic direction set by the executive if there are more middle-managers than this requires, they start trying t
2121.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Same phenomenon, slightly different analysis. The gervais-style analysis mystifies some of the issues it describes. The heart of the group dynamics is "leader vs follower", "rutheless vs clueless" and "transactional
2122.
by mjburgess 4y ago
The issue the author is talking about, in my view, is caused by the natural lifespan of corps tending towards bloating middle-management. (Very hard process to fight). At the start the founder group are rutheless productivity-chasers. Then
2123.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Consider, (in my own syntax), on(table) select(blah) where(blah) groupby(blah) this is basically just, table.select(blah).where(blah).groupby(blah) but this becomes inflexible when we want `table` t
2124.
by mjburgess 4y ago
A computation is just an implementation of a function `f: {0,1}^N-> {0,1}^M`... if not, what is the meaning of the word at all ? All these phrases "manipulates data", "computation", and so on... they dont mean anythi
2125.
by mjburgess 4y ago
None of those things. My point is that logical models of computation dont, in themselves, have empirical content. That the language and ideas of theoretical computer science are, as with any area of pure mathematics, only empirically useful
2126.
by mjburgess 4y ago
It's not an absurd reduction, it follows from the definition of a universal turing machine. This is how completely non-empirical theoretical models of computation are: they are devices of pure mathematics. This is exactly my point. If
2127.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Energy is always conserved. Just define the computer to be the system in which energy is conserved, and there you go. A "computer" is a formal pure-mathematics notion, it is just a certain sort of "discrete mathematical model
2128.
by mjburgess 4y ago
"computation" is only equivalent when it's calculative, ie., when the algorithm in question is merely computing some number. The reason the LCD screen displays some output isn't because the electrical switches have som
2129.
by mjburgess 4y ago
It's sufficient for my purposes just to show that "bit" in a logical model and "bit" under some idealised thermodynamic thought experiment are radically different notions . Reality, i am sure, has many systems whic
2130.
by mjburgess 4y ago
Any correspondence between formal properties of the algorithm, namely, the logical model of the system and its physical properties *requires* (1) the algorithm; and (2) the implementation model. Speaking about "computational proces

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