pfdietz

8 ms·

121.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
The thing about testing is that each time you produce a new kind of tester you have a chance to find bugs in the blind spots of the previous testing approaches. Diversity makes sense, more so than in software construction.
122.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Technically correct, because there are infinitely many numbers.
123.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Bugs are always easier to find in retrospect.
124.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Wondering how often the phrase "now here's the thing" appears.
125.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
To be clear, I wasn't trying to sugarcoat climate change, just expressing some (mild) guilt.
126.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
There's evidence we're driving toward that brick wall at 100 mph, but there's no evidence we've hit the wall yet, so we don't need to do anything? The objections to climate change are transparently ideological. Adm
127.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
This is quite sad, so I've felt a bit guilty for enjoying the summer we've had in upstate NY. Local farmers seem happy even though spring was a bit wetter than optimal. The corn is looking very good and the apple crop promises t
128.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
So, about $0.001 of electricity. The nerve!
129.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
I'm not sure conventional chemo actually is nastier than this drug. It sounded really bad. Conventional chemo is less effective here, though.
130.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Well my anecdata goes in the opposite direction. Maybe it depends on the kind of fiber.
131.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
One downer about this drug is the absolutely horrific side effects, like "your skin feels like you've been dipped in acid" kind of horrific. Still, pancreatic cancer is just that bad, so maybe that's worthwhile.
132.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
My mother died of it less than two weeks after the diagnosis was confirmed by biopsy. On the other hand, I knew a guy at work who survived more than five years with it; this was so unusual there was an advocacy group that used him as a ki
133.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Common Lisp has some value types, specifically numbers and characters. Any implementation is allowed to copy these objects at any time. For this reason the EQ function should not be used on numbers or characters, as the results may be unp
134.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Washable cloth towels work just fine, if not in a public restroom.
135.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
High fiber is supposed to be a good diet, and leads to larger/looser bowel movements.
136.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
He observed that historically energy transitions took 50-100 years and then concluded a renewable energy transition would take a similar amount of time. This is of course a non sequitur, an example of the hazards of inductive reasoning. Si
137.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Possibly, but economists can simply not make those predictions. Smil focused on them. It was a core of what he was saying, and he got it very wrong.
138.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
> they can pop out earth-sized chunks of gold The can produce Earth masses of gold, but of course not in the form of "chunks". The gold starts as atoms in a highly ionized gas and only much later cools enough to form solids (d
139.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Oh sure, batteries are completely inappropriate for seasonal storage. But for a home I think a synthetic liquid fuel would be better than hydrogen. Seasonal storage at grid scale is rather different; there I suspect thermal storage will w
140.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
"Is not serious" is not serious?
141.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
I'm skeptical of any application for hydrogen where electricity could be used directly. In your case, I think hydrogen would better be used in a more centralized power plant as a backup for renewable sources (perhaps with the waste he
142.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
You want a fuel that's chemically identical to current jet fuel, not one burdened with extra oxygen. Yes, this would require more energy, but it would be used more effectively in jets. A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydr
143.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Vaclav Smil so wildly mispredicted the trajectory of renewables that his worldview should be taken with heavy skepticism.
144.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
When calling EVAL it can be much faster to use the interpreter than to go through the compiler. This has bitten me in the past. A faster compiler would get around that. One of the competing open Common Lisp implementations, CCL, has a muc
145.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Last I checked, CLISP compiles to byte code. Did they add a JITter for the byte code?
146.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
You can turn that off by setting or binding sb-ext:*evaluator-mode* to :interpret. Also, on my machine, compiling the identity lambda form takes about 200 usec with (optimize (compilation-speed 3) (debug 0)). SBCL could use a faster JIT mo
147.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Uh huh. Why should I believe this any more than your hallucination about "everyone"? You've demonstrated a complete lack of cognitive quality control.
148.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
This is not new news. Even back in the Reagan administration, he was trying to blame air pollution on isoprene emissions. This led to protesters at one of his speeches hanging a sign on a tree that read "Cut me down before I kill aga
149.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Cooking also increases the energy available from plant matter, particularly starchy tubers.
150.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
> fruit harvested Also tubers.

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