richard_todd

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61.
by richard_todd 5y ago
In many forths you can have what they call locals, so your example can be: : add {: a b :} a b + ;
62.
by richard_todd 5y ago
Even back when most people I knew used tcsh interactively, any significant scripting we did was for korn shell. It's been so long I don't remember what would have been so bad about tcsh scripting, but since we all made that choic
63.
by richard_todd 5y ago
I think it's interesting that PEP 484 says ([1]): "the authors have no desire to ever make type hints mandatory, even by convention," while the opening of this article says "type hints have grown from a nice-to-have to
64.
by richard_todd 5y ago
Spinoza was writing at a time when it was easy to become exiled or dead for publishing material that doesn’t align with the mainstream religious position. So some degree of the religious comfort aspect of his work can arguably be more of a
65.
by richard_todd 5y ago
Yeah but I can also say it’s a surprise to see instructions on how to exit the REPL when printing a list of functions. Honestly I think there should be no special case, and the REPL should print the “how to exit” text upon startup. As is, t
66.
by richard_todd 5y ago
Itanium had x86 emulation in hardware, so I think the model was to transition via emulation. But, as far as I know, it wasn’t very performant, and then AMD nailed the coffin shut a few years later with their 64-but architecture.
67.
by richard_todd 5y ago
I was at TAMU from 1995 to 1999, and ran either RedHat or Slackware. In the CS department where I worked part time it was all Solaris. Never heard of this TAMU distribution, but I would have been interested in helping to revive it if I had.
68.
by richard_todd 5y ago
I think they were adding something like python’s buffer protocol to ruby3, which should pave the way for something like numpy if there is enough demand. I’m referencing https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14722
69.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I don’t use the triz stuff often but sometimes if a design issue is vexing I will look through the 40 principles (and software-engineering variants of them) for inspiration. Mostly I apply cards to everyday issues for fun and for the immedi
70.
by richard_todd 6y ago
Any divination strategy with a rich semantic palette will work like this (tarot is my personal favorite), and besides that it’s fun. There was also a guy that derived a set of problem-solving principles based on a study of patents (TRIZ), w
71.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I guess it depends. Maybe for an adult. I learned the rudiments of Atari BASIC when I was seven and the book explained assignment with cartoon pictures of numbers going into boxes. I don’t remember ever being confused about what it meant.
72.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I’ve read that Dijkstra liked to say “becomes” for the same reason.
73.
by richard_todd 6y ago
Sometimes I use Office 2000 under Windows2000 under Virtualbox, and it's amazing how snappy the apps feel when the whole VM has only 64MB of RAM. Everyone should try it once in a while, just as a reminder of what is possible! The only
74.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I have seen it happen also, but it’s rare and I can’t recall if it was on Linux or windows. I tried to open a new tab and it said “no more tabs until you restart Firefox”.
75.
by richard_todd 6y ago
It was cool stuff, for sure, and I'm glad I got to experience it when it was new. A little extra latency in our online discourse would probably do the modern world some good, not that anyone would go for it.
76.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I was replying to a post claiming the only novel part of mastodon compared to old message boards is federation. I’m merely pointing out that many old message boards did have federation. To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back the
77.
by richard_todd 6y ago
Fidonet used to provide the federation across message boards in the BBS era, so there is literally nothing new. Really the new thing was smartphones opening up microblogging to average people who want to track celebrities and pretend what t
78.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I don't agree with the BASIC analogy. In the early home computer era, one of the main reasons to buy a computer was as a vehicle to run BASIC programs. Its market penetration was near 100%. It did fade (though there are many VBA h
79.
by richard_todd 6y ago
The internet needs more stuff like this. I got 7/10 but I couldn't resist calling Guido a killer after the way he murdered Perl slowly for like a decade.
80.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I hear what you're saying, and I agree that MS could have done much more to allow consistent theming by the user. But, I also know that even a beginner WPF tutorial shows how to arbitrarily adjust controls with a resource dictionary.
81.
by richard_todd 6y ago
On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user theming against non-standard controls. Simi
82.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I'm seeing comments asking "why a separate file?" I watched a video last night from the creator of the language (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhTXDklRLME ) where he addresses it. At 12:20 minute mark he
83.
by richard_todd 6y ago
There are lots of image-container formats. DjVu is my favorite, and supports OCR text annotations also. But, outside of some niches, it has fallen out of use these days. Adobe closed the quality gap by adding jbig2 and jpeg2000 support t
84.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I would have liked to know what the Kolmogorov approach has to say about the examples used to deflate frequentism ("which of my friends will start a business?"). I don't see from the article how the "smallest-program&qu
85.
by richard_todd 6y ago
I totally agree with you in the context of small settings. There, it's correct to avoid phrases that are harmful to people, once you are aware of the issue they have. That's just part of not being an asshole. But in public forum
86.
by richard_todd 6y ago
By your logic, how can you can casually say "walk in my shoes," when you can be sure it bugs people confined to wheelchairs? Do you owe us all an apology and a promise to never use that common and easily-understood idiom again? I
87.
by richard_todd 6y ago
If your code is swinging a multi-million-dollar robot arm near a multi-million-dollar mirror assembly, for example, it’s probably not seen as excessive to add recovery code even if some of those assertions will only be active during testing
88.
by richard_todd 6y ago
Since the MDCT is discrete, I assume it operates on power-of-2-sized batches of samples. So (like you, without looking at the code) I would have assumed that more samples/s mean you need more transform blocks, which means you have to
89.
by richard_todd 6y ago
Yeah the forced interpolation nags me, even though it shouldn't, but also: if I'm going to encode 128 kilobits per second, I can either use those bits to produce 44k samples or I can use them to produce 48k samples. That's 9
90.
by richard_todd 6y ago
Yep, I've read all that before. I didn't mean to focus the discussion on the resampling--what I was trying to get across is, this codec acts differently than codecs that have been extensively tested and ABXed at high bitrates for

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