reidacdc

14 ms·

31.
by reidacdc 3y ago
Thanks for the link to the paper, it clears up some issues I thought I might have had. It's nice to see an appreciation that some of the systems for which we require safety are "intractable" in the sense they describe, that i
32.
Knowing how to measure – behavior and AI(apperceptive.substack.com)
1 points by reidacdc 3y ago|0 comments
33.
by reidacdc 4y ago
I used to use this system in undergrad at the University of British Columbia, one of about ten or so installations. It was pretty cool at the time. I (dimly) recall it had something like output redirection, when you run your compiled execut
34.
by reidacdc 4y ago
There is a school of thought in the community where I work that the alchemists get a pretty bad rap. Probably the clearest statement of this is in one of the chapters of Cyril Stanley Smith's "A Search for Structure", particu
35.
by reidacdc 4y ago
Nifty, thanks! I'm only slightly embarrassed to discover that it's explained in the wikipedia page...
36.
by reidacdc 4y ago
I am glad that this article emphasizes the messiness of the bipolar junction transistor, but also disappointed that it doesn't engage with the "obvious" question I had back in the day, when I was taking high school electronic
37.
by reidacdc 4y ago
I've seen the scenario you describe as the "fission bridge to fusion" scenario, and as I understand it, a major problem is that it can't be done with existing pressurized light-water reactors. These systems just don&#x27
38.
by reidacdc 4y ago
It's in the "critical path" for certain niche applications. I do HPC operations, and every now and then, I run across some (usually commercial) scientific software application whose installer and/or configuration manager
39.
by reidacdc 4y ago
We had something like this in the exurbs of Calgary in the 1970s, it was called "DART", for "Dial-A-Ride Transit". It was semi-on-demand, and not door-to-door. The scheme was, you called the DART line (from your land-lin
40.
by reidacdc 5y ago
There is a book on my reading list about this, "The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronsims", by Connie Barlow. I saw a review of it somewhere, and given the timing, it may be an
41.
by reidacdc 5y ago
PL/I was the software-engineering language in my undergraduate computer science classes also, although it was beginning to be displaced by Pascal in the introductory courses, and C/C++ in the advanced courses. (Mid-1980s, in case
42.
by reidacdc 5y ago
Seconding the recommendation for the Burglar's Guide book, it's very good, as is the blog. The essay reminds me very much of how my perspective on urban space changed when I started bicycling around my city, and ow it changed my r
43.
by reidacdc 6y ago
I'm not hugely knowledgeable about LLVM, but it was my understanding that a major benefit of it was separating out high-level from low-level concerns. There are lots of practical issues, obviously, but the dream was that the LLVM inte
44.
by reidacdc 6y ago
Thanks for this question and answer -- I recently learned about both xpra and x2go, and was wondering if this was related, like a generalization of it or something. Now I think maybe this is a good answer for some remote visualization appli
45.
by reidacdc 6y ago
There is some anecdotal support for the article's position in a recent [1] article about the origin of the C programming language -- apparently the C predecessor language CPL used "OR" as a keyword where most modern languages
46.
by reidacdc 6y ago
Good to see that there is some literature, thanks!
47.
by reidacdc 6y ago
The article is mostly suitably modest about mechanisms, focusing on the epidemiology of the observed effects, and it's more or less obvious to me that the transitions are disruptive to everyone, and especially so to sensitive individua
48.
by reidacdc 6y ago
Aside from many excellent developers being neither boys nor men, there are also plenty of challenges to be dealt with in the field of time-keeping without DST. See, e.g. https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45c
49.
by reidacdc 6y ago
I am far from an expert, but as I understand it, Shor's factorization algorithm is a gateway to lots of fast crypto, so it's "enabling technology" for a lot of crypto and number-theoretic applications, not an end-point.
50.
by reidacdc 6y ago
I have read that the uptake of Arabic numerals was actually fairly slow and fraught in Europe, but of course can't put my hands on any references. There's a reddit thread [0] that might be some of what I saw, and my wife does pale
51.
by reidacdc 6y ago
There's a countervailing effect where the more often you do something, the better you get at it. You're right that the absolute number of errors will certainly rise, but the fraction of attempts which have errors will likely fall.
52.
by reidacdc 6y ago
It used to be the conventional wisdom that domain-specific ASICs were unlikely to take off because of the economics -- the cost of fab time for the small feature sizes (meaning an expensive fab) and small batch sizes mean that the unit cost
53.
by reidacdc 6y ago
I ran across an early version of this, on paper, in the university library at my undergraduate institution, and took the same lesson of humility and respect in the face of complexity that the article does. The positive side is that we actua
54.
by reidacdc 6y ago
This is fun, esoteric programming languages can help you think about things differently, and often change your perspective. But I think one of the central conceits is wrong? They claim folders take up zero space on disk. I assume they'
55.
by reidacdc 6y ago
I see these stories from time to time, and I can't help but wonder if there's an opportunity for some kind of third-party support for Google. Like, if you were a former Googler or someone who'd been through their customer-sup
56.
by reidacdc 6y ago
There are fungibility surprises in the west, also. In the UK, one sometimes runs across banknotes issued by banks in Scotland, which generally circulate like those issued by the Bank of England, but have some technical differences. Many yea
57.
by reidacdc 6y ago
Charles Perrow, "Normal Accidents". Nominally about safety in large-scale complex engineered systems, and it's very good on that topic, and/but in doing so, touches on how scale and social factors interact with engineeri
58.
by reidacdc 6y ago
Came here for the MOSIX, not disappointed. I worked at a facility that ran it on a small science cluster, and it worked extremely well. A fun wrinkle: When the Intel C compilers first came out, they had warnings about process migration -- t
59.
by reidacdc 7y ago
Seems like the confusion arises because getchar() (or its equivalent in langauges other than c) can produce an out-of-band result, EOF, which is not a character. Procedural programmers don't generally have a problem with this -- getcha
60.
by reidacdc 7y ago
Some discussion down-thread about this also, somebody runs the numbers for the road itself. If the emissions numbers are right, it can't be matter that is being consumed or discarded, so it has to be matter that is being returned to th

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