mmcdermott

9 ms·

61.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
The linked document doesn't feel unreasonable to me. The concrete example given in the document is the Post Office Horizon Scandal where shortfalls in accounts were identified based on computer records. All the working presumption corr
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I think it's easy to forget that as we get better at programming, we tend to get better at either avoiding problems or finding our own answers in which case SO is also less useful because we've learned to fish.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
If the experiment is re-run, but it'd never be noticed if it the results were simply cited and taken as proved.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
> For one, why would we colonize the galaxy? [...] It just isn't a rational choice. If things are universally good on Earth, then sure. Bear in mind that many of the European colonies that would become the United States were built b
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I put this article squarely in the "no way to know what's real" category. It would be naive in 2024 to assume that foreign powers do not attempt to influence outcomes and particularly that they would not attempt to do so thro
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
Beyond a certain point, the money is a scoreboard not a resource. It's like watching someone spend hundreds of hours on a video game for a speed run. You played to win and this is the metric.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
> I'm also annoyed when this happens. But then I say: This is what you requested. I can only work with the information that you provide to me. I think it depends on the attitude of the person giving feedback. I generally find that d
68.
by mmcdermott 3y ago
There's some generational drift at place, for sure. I have heard "Full Stack" to mean JavaScript FE + service layer BE in a lot of the line-of-business world. I assume it is mostly a reflection of where widespread economic ac
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I've certainly seen the phenomena you describe, but it doesn't seem like that belief is completely universal. "Humanists often contend that machines tend to dehumanize people by forcing them to have rigid personalities, but r
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
What is engineering? That isn't a rhetorical question, but the root of the whole question. I would argue that engineering isn't certifications, exams, or education. Those are methods of quality control, not the act itself. Merriam
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
In many parts of the world it is not heavily regulated. I studied Computer Science and taken no engineering board exams, yet I've held Software Engineer titles for years.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
Very few managers would do this themselves. It is far more likely to be done by HR or an HR-adjacent group and a report sent to a manager.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
Zinsser's Writing to Learn disappointed me. I agree with the premise of the title, and have had many of those "Eureka!" moments when writing out a problem, but the book doesn't really make the case that writing helps t
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I've been reading through the rules to the Fight! RPG by Divine Madness Press and have been similarly looking forward to building characters, moves, and combos for that fight system.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I'm a little disappointed that fighting games didn't get a number.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
Typst is likely in a place of needing to convince journals to adopt first. Most of the audience for TeX/LaTeX/etc. are academics. I've noticed a curious pattern in the corporate world of the end product dictating tool usage b
77.
by mmcdermott 3y ago
I appreciate the boots-on-the-ground perspective, so thanks for posting! I do want to be clear that I do appreciate the research and enjoy reading the papers produced by Xanadu. My goal was never to belittle the project itself, just talk ab
78.
by mmcdermott 3y ago
I read a couple of Xanadu papers recently and my conclusion is that it failed to get big because it was mostly vaporware and when it finally delivered something it was much less than the press. The papers are interesting to read, but brilli
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
> Have we not concluded that eternal life begets meaninglessness? Are we really imagining ourselves to be eternally pleasure seeking or revelries entities? I don't think the majority of humanity (either historically or presently) ha
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I'm not so sure. Those technologies are lampooned, but in the context of a broader point, namely that software requires ever more effort to deliver results that are not objectively better. I think that observation is valid and interest
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I wonder whether LLMs will turn out to have a sort of uncanny valley of their own when it comes to producing creative works from incomprehensibly vast training sets. Will LLM novels, for example, be an unlimited spigot of things we enjoy or
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
It probably gets mirrored a lit too, given the target audience.
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
> it's like a vocabulary word I can wield with power and precision, rather than relying on the machine to finish my thoughts for me. I like that point of view and generally code for fun that way. My biggest use for autocompletion is
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
The underlying model can be thought of as the axioms. Going back to the Make example, it is trivial to think about axioms that describe the system's base abstraction ("Let T be a set representing targets...."). Generally spea
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
> No such theory exists for programming. The complex application you designed has no theory behind it at all. The theory isn't a theory of programming or software engineering, but of the problem domain. From the paper: > In term&
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I wouldn't consider myself to have good dexterity at all but have been able to play fighting games and work my way up the ranked ladder. I'd say if Tekken 8 looks cool, give it a try. The main problem with Tekken is that it doesn&
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
That same Wikipedia article casts some doubt about whether the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" was really a question of serious discussion. From the same entry: > However, evidence that the question w
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
I think a lot of the difficulty in Prolog comes down to the fact that you can read Prolog programs three ways: as a restricted form of first order logic (Horn clauses), as a procedure, and as an execution model. The last is double confusing
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
> And yet, the majority seems to oppose unionizing despite calling themselves tech workers. I find this an interesting statement because it equivocates self-identification with a socio-economic class (Workers) with a banal statement of f
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by mmcdermott 3y ago
Both of those questions are fundamentally questions of morality. This means that there is, or at least can be, an objective answer to the question provided sufficient parameters are specified, not least of which is the system of morality be

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