rwallace

96 ms·

901.
by rwallace 12y ago
As far as I know, LLVM does exactly the same thing; the LLVM representation of that code would have a different syntax of course, but semantically would be exactly equivalent to the Gimple version you've presented.
902.
by rwallace 12y ago
Or that the employer correctly realized a six-hour working day is a valuable enough perk that they could exchange it for a substantial salary cut.
903.
by rwallace 12y ago
A kitchen knife can work across intercontinental distances. Buy plane ticket to city where target lives, buy knife in local store, get taxi to location of target, stab target to death with knife. It's less glamorous than drones and mis
904.
by rwallace 12y ago
You seem to be implying that being able to know the identity of the person you're looking at will cause women to be harassed. But in small communities, everyone already has this feature (by virtue of their being few enough people that
905.
by rwallace 12y ago
As a more immediate fix with less collateral damage, since Unix programmers refuse to stop putting `rm -rf` commands in shell scripts (they seem to think the suggestion is an insult to their manhood), change the behavior of rm so that by de
906.
by rwallace 12y ago
I agree that diversity of opinions, perspectives, skills and backgrounds is important. That's one reason I oppose the monocultural idea that has crept in over the last few decades, that the one true path for everyone is spending their
907.
by rwallace 12y ago
Yeah, on balance if someone is working on solar powered agricultural robots to do the weeding, I'm happy to say go for it. But the article was talking about spraying the entire landscape with herbicides that kill off practically everyt
908.
by rwallace 12y ago
According to the article, the reason for the massively increased use of herbicides is that it's less labor-intensive than other ways of getting rid of weeds. When we can find ways to produce a given quantity of food with less land, wat
909.
by rwallace 12y ago
Have the governments of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela etc. actually been blocking progress? If so, how? As far as I can see, the primary blockers of progress on carbon dioxide reduction have been: 1. Environmentalists, interfering with nuclear en
910.
by rwallace 12y ago
As someone who identifies as a pragmatic libertarian generally in favor of smaller government, I've upvoted your comment. Markets are great for a lot of things, but they undersupply public goods, and scientific progress is a critical p
911.
by rwallace 12y ago
Catching insects in the wild is very labor-intensive per kilogram of protein obtained, and so is trying to farm them in a pasture. Obviously this insect farm solves that problem.
912.
by rwallace 12y ago
The law should not compel you to say something you believe to be false. If you lose a court case, it should be legal to say, "I still believe I did nothing wrong, but I will pay the penalty as the court has ordered."
913.
by rwallace 12y ago
Then again, by that criterion a 40-year-old who loses his job and can't find another one is suddenly not an adult anymore, which doesn't really seem to match what most people want the term to mean.
914.
by rwallace 12y ago
It boils down to the deeply ingrained human psychological need to believe in higher powers, in a universe governed by the struggle between the forces of good and evil that are fundamentally human. The same thing happened with space explorat
915.
by rwallace 12y ago
As someone who could reasonably be classified on the libertarian right, I think you're conflating different views under a blanket heading of 'advocacy of Cuba'. I certainly do not think communist dictatorship is a good form o
916.
by rwallace 12y ago
Well, that's subjective. When I was in Canada, the local water supply contained a lot of minerals. Some of the locals disliked the taste for that reason, but I positively enjoyed it. Certainly not in the same category as microbial cont
917.
by rwallace 12y ago
Deontology is a good idea from a consequentialist viewpoint. An omniscient being with infinite computing power, capable of accurately calculating from first principles the consequences of every action, could operate as a pure consequentiali
918.
by rwallace 12y ago
> everyone would raise their hands if they were asked if they would want their children to go to college. I don't at all believe that college is an unalloyed good. For some individuals seeking some career paths, it can be, granted,
919.
by rwallace 12y ago
> The NIST collaborated with the NSA to put a backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG standard The version reported in the news at the time was that the NIST didn't know about the back door, and was quite pissed off with the NSA when it was di
920.
by rwallace 12y ago
One-time pads only work if you already have a secure way to transmit the pads, and if you have that, you could probably use it to transmit your actual data.
921.
by rwallace 12y ago
Space could certainly be done better (I think the key advance would be the ability to upload human minds to solid-state substrate - that would make a lot of the problems of living in space dramatically easier), but it doesn't follow
922.
by rwallace 12y ago
Do you have any examples of this handy? I have seen a lot of cases of idioms and algorithm design changing to match the exact CPU model. Approximate CPU generation, sure: try hard to cut down on memory traffic - but that's true for eve
923.
by rwallace 12y ago
The solution I eventually arrived at after many years: Don't start any more side projects. Save my energy for my primary project.
924.
by rwallace 12y ago
As an anti-immigration person, my position is not the one suggested by Paul Graham. I make no claims either way regarding the ease of training people to be programmers. My position is that we should put an end to this ridiculous 19th-centur
925.
by rwallace 12y ago
On the one hand, there is truth in what you say about the statistics. On the other hand, treating individuals as though they were statistics tends to be boorish and obnoxious behavior. If you were running a forum for discussing sports cars,
926.
by rwallace 12y ago
I would like to share your optimism. But then I read about things like the US nuclear launch codes being set to 00000000 for quite a few years, or an incident when survival versus Armageddon depended on the judgment of one man [1], and I ha
927.
by rwallace 12y ago
But declining birth rates don't lead to stable populations, they lead to shrinking populations. So if we don't manage to restore birth rates, this would be an example of 'Great Filter ahead of us'.
928.
by rwallace 12y ago
I don't think it's at all invariable. The moral compass comes from the top. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have deletionist moderation because Jimmy Wales and his counterparts are happy with that, which is unfortunate, but it is the
929.
by rwallace 12y ago
To be honest, I have no interest in seeing the film because everything I've heard about it indicates it's probably a crap film. I furthermore think it was a bad idea to make it in the first place. However, I applaud 2600's pr
930.
by rwallace 12y ago
If I were the CEO of Sony, I'd put the damn movie on YouTube under a CC license and weaponize the Streisand effect. This has turned out to be a dead loss financially for Sony either way, and when you know you've lost the current g

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