pjscott

19 ms·

181.
by pjscott 4y ago
The core problem here is not processing power but information: often a central planner just doesn't know what people want or need, and can't realistically get that knowledge out of their brains without using something like a pri
182.
by pjscott 4y ago
Since this is from the 1980s, would a VAX cluster suffice?
183.
by pjscott 4y ago
My personnel records are always ordered adversarially, on general principle. :-) But if you’re willing to assume that none of the ages are more than some reasonable constant bound, like no employees over the age of 65535 or something, the
184.
by pjscott 4y ago
Plant immune systems aren't as adaptive as ours, and the American chestnut had no reason to evolve any immunity to the blight because it wasn't present on the continent until the early 1900s.
185.
by pjscott 4y ago
$ lsof -u `whoami` | grep '[.]db$' | less The macbook I'm typing this on has 113 sqlite databases open right now. I'd call that a lot of deployment. The name doesn't seem to have held sqlite back much!
186.
by pjscott 4y ago
Agreed on all counts. The “falsehoods programmers believe about X” articles are cautionary lists of edge cases to think about, with an unfortunately aggressive naming scheme.
187.
by pjscott 4y ago
I went to check on this a bit further. Here's a list of editorials, in reverse-chronological order: https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=editorial Many of the editorials seem approximately apolitical, e.g.
188.
by pjscott 4y ago
Yep. But if it were me I would forget about the trademark and just make sure that everyone who is In The Know is aware that I am Freddie, the Likker is mine, and I haven’t told anybody else the Secret of its manufacture. What could possibly
189.
by pjscott 4y ago
Starlink is mostly a bet on Starship. If they can actually get big reductions in cost to LEO, the cost of maintaining a large satellite constellation goes way down —- the capital cost of building each satellite is in the five-figure range
190.
by pjscott 4y ago
I consider those to be in the category of not lowering people's IQ. Making someone dumber is fairly easy: just drop them on their heads as a child, malnourish them, and expose them to lead and lots of parasites. And make sure they do
191.
by pjscott 4y ago
How? There's a long history of failure at raising people's IQs by environmental changes, and it doesn't seem to be for lack of trying.
192.
by pjscott 4y ago
The usual form of these contracts is that (a) the Human in question will pay X percent of their income to the Company for the next Y years, and (b) the Human is not otherwise constrained by contract. If they want to just surf on a beach for
193.
by pjscott 4y ago
Everyone I know who hates taxes on unrealized capital gains will happily tell you which other taxes they would prefer to raise the same amount of revenue from them. There are better and worse kinds of taxation!
194.
by pjscott 4y ago
Very soon the traders will write a program that will warn them of things that look like the well-known "go long yourself then make lazy yourself" strategy, and afterward it'll have negative expected value.
195.
by pjscott 4y ago
There are some of those contracts active in the USA right now, and the people who sell part of their future income do not have a fiduciary duty. I predict that this will not change in our lifetimes.
196.
by pjscott 4y ago
You're right that this has unilateral benefits, but it's even better if something like this becomes encoded in social norms. For example, there are online communities where it's simply expected that you'll assume good fa
197.
by pjscott 4y ago
That sounds like all the more reason to keep the arguments against them sharp. There's a recurring pattern that happens when you have a clash of two ideas, one of them so dominant that its supporters have forgotten how to argue. When M
198.
by pjscott 4y ago
My mistake! They look so similar.
199.
by pjscott 4y ago
No hardware multipliers here: left shifts are handled by much cheaper hardware [1], and are almost part of the basic arithmetic logic unit taught in school -- it can do addition, subtraction, bitwise operations, shifts by one, and maybe s
200.
by pjscott 4y ago
Yes! This is both possible and fairly easy.
201.
by pjscott 4y ago
The inverse Ackermann function is one of the slowest-growing functions that you’re ever likely to encounter in the wild. To say that it’s “constant for all practical purposes” is 100% true but doesn’t do justice to how amazingly slow this f
202.
by pjscott 4y ago
If you’re willing to use moderately more memory, you can get much better cache locality using a blocked bloom filter. The basic idea is to use an array of bloom filters that each fit into a cache line, and use some bits of hash to determi
203.
by pjscott 4y ago
That depends very much on how the trie is represented in memory. Something like a burst trie or HAT trie is usually very compact!
204.
by pjscott 4y ago
Note that re-sorting an array after making a constant number of changes can be done in O(n) and will usually be very fast in practice. Insertion sort will do it, as will Timsort and similar algorithms.
205.
by pjscott 4y ago
Lots of companies use skiplists without realizing it because Redis uses them as the implementation of sorted sets. For example, last time I checked, every time someone looks at a playlist on PornHub the software is doing a partial traversal
206.
by pjscott 4y ago
You can do this with any tree, finger or otherwise, and the big-O stuff applies as long as the tree is within a constant factor of balanced. For some bizarre reason, though, the concept of caching a monoid in each node doesn’t seem to have
207.
by pjscott 4y ago
Oh! I had assumed that it was closed. Thanks!
208.
by pjscott 4y ago
That sounds strictly inferior to Bayesian reasoning (both to me and to my Wordle program), so I’m curious what advantages abduction has, if any. (If there are philosophers reading this: do you have any good, non-paywalled links defending ab
209.
by pjscott 4y ago
Thank you. I can’t count how many people in those days attributed (for example) Japanese manufacturing success to visibly foreign things like karaoke and radio exercises when the real story was something vastly more interesting about factor
210.
by pjscott 4y ago
The US shouldn't be thought of as a homogenous place. There are parts of the US -- most of it, geographically, as far as I can tell -- which are basically indistinguishable from their Japanese counterparts in crime rates and levels of

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