mrec

83 ms·

841.
by mrec 9y ago
If you can fire pellets out of the well using a mass driver, I'd think that firing whole spacecraft out is going to be a much more viable option than trying to reduce the depth of the well to any noticeable degree. Yes, spacecraft ar
842.
by mrec 9y ago
The relentlessly negative reporting here would be funny if it wasn't so pernicious. "risk ... backfire ... risks sinking ... worrying". And yet they're explicitly talking about a correction . Making something that isn&#
843.
by mrec 9y ago
I found that book interesting, but AFAICT it is has a pretty terrible reputation among historians. Mostly for relying heavily on the work of SLA Marshall, who appears to have skewed or outright invented much of his evidence. https:/&#
844.
by mrec 9y ago
My complaint wasn't that it made it hard, it was that it made it tedious. Having to play through large stretches of the game again just to change one decision wasn't fun, and the threat of that discouraged experimentation.
845.
by mrec 9y ago
> The problem with kingdoms is that spacial relations matter _a lot_, and so that's not something you want to base your gameplay on with a text game. You're rekindling my enthusiasm for this sort of thing (I gave up on Sorce
846.
by mrec 9y ago
Once I grokked where you were going with this article, my first thought was the awesome King of Dragon Pass [1]. Technically it looks very simple; I'm not sure whether it was implemented as a webpage, but it definitely could be. Wher
847.
by mrec 9y ago
> I think the French were a little too hard on Marie Antoinette If you're referring to the "why can't they eat cake?" thing, she didn't actually say that. I believe there was a completely unrelated girl around
848.
by mrec 9y ago
I'm curious - what's getting "increasingly complex" about rasterizers?
849.
by mrec 9y ago
And completely wrecked the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, arguably the great set-piece of fantasy fiction. I'll see your bitter, and raise you a curmudgeoning.
850.
by mrec 9y ago
Conversely, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Pla
851.
by mrec 9y ago
I didn't realize cbloom was a Rad person too. His "Library Writing Realizations" rant is both a) awesome and b) really hard to link to. If you haven't seen it, go to http://cbloom.com/rants.html and sear
852.
by mrec 9y ago
> It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years... As has hardware. Trivial example, but linked lists made a lot more sense in the 1970s than they do today.
853.
by mrec 9y ago
Not unique to Zoroastrians; the "sky burial" tradition in Tibet and (parts of) Mongolia is much the same. Beyond the symbolic aspects, it's practical in regions where there's very little wood for cremation, and the groun
854.
by mrec 9y ago
> I remember 640x480 being the highest resolution my first personal computer could display <FourYorkshiremen> Eeee, you were lucky. My first personal computer maxed out at 320x256, or 160x256 if you wanted more than 4 colours. &l
855.
by mrec 9y ago
It doesn't use rollouts at all: > AlphaGo Zero does not use “rollouts” - fast, random games used by other Go programs to predict which player will win from the current board position. Instead, it relies on its high quality neural n
856.
by mrec 9y ago
> They brought in the original actress and de-aged her face digitally No, Sean Young (the original Rachael) was brought in to consult, but the CGI face was superimposed on a stand-in, Loren Peta [1]. I saw the movie on Monday and wasn&#x
857.
by mrec 9y ago
I hadn't seen Pathfinder before; very cool! Especially if it's easily transferable to gpuweb, if and when that ships. Reminds me of Mark Kilgard's old NV_path_rendering extension, which (as so often happened for interesting N
858.
by mrec 9y ago
I think you're reading me as saying something much stronger than what I actually meant. When we talk about C being "deceptive" we don't need to consider optimizations that respect the as-if rule. (Well, maybe when lookin
859.
by mrec 9y ago
Optimizing compilers have been around for yonks, sure, but I think taking aggressive advantage of UB is relatively recent. See e.g. Regehr in 2012 [1] : > The current crop of C and C++ compilers will exploit undefined behaviors to gener
860.
by mrec 9y ago
> many programmers of any language still don't I wonder if anyone's trying an explicitly adversarial approach to early CS education. Split your class into two teams, each team produces an implementation, each team scores poin
861.
by mrec 9y ago
It's basically the same as the streetlight effect, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
862.
by mrec 9y ago
How?
863.
by mrec 9y ago
Fusion power doesn't really help with rocketry, though.
864.
by mrec 9y ago
Sublime does the "autosave unsaved docs" thing too, and does it flawlessly. (I have other gripes with Sublime, I just don't think this is a USP for TextWrangler.)
865.
by mrec 9y ago
> “I’m visiting small towns in Iowa” is a normal sentence, said by many a billionaire who wants nothing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/08/03/i...
866.
by mrec 9y ago
If Zuck does end up making a Presidential run, I think that'd have a very good chance of triggering a sizeable decline in its US userbase.
867.
by mrec 9y ago
There's no mention of a "desktop version" in the About page - where should I be looking for that?
868.
by mrec 9y ago
In a similar vein, see "We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines": http://prog21.dadgum.com/139.html
869.
by mrec 9y ago
Yes, that's correct. I don't know whether these terms originated in the NaNoWriMo community, but that was where I first encountered them.
870.
by mrec 9y ago
> I was exposed to Motorola 68K assembly in college and it completely changed my world--lots of C++ things I considered voodoo suddenly made total sense Heh. I had this the other way around - picked up 68k asm for fun long before C/

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