sevensor

56 ms·

781.
by sevensor 2y ago
This is how I originally learned vi. Watching a crusty old guy who occasionally explained his keystrokes and didn't think it was worth mentioning that alternatives existed. (After all, if the alternative requires eight megabytes and
782.
by sevensor 3y ago
What happens in an evolutionary algorithm depends on what you write it for. This is a fun toy, but what it does specifically is explore a very limited simulation of evolution by natural selection. Metaheuristics aimed at optimization have
783.
by sevensor 3y ago
Fond memories of DOS 4.0. We had an IBM PS/2 286 with a princely 30 MB hard drive. As a bored youth, I worked my way through the paper manual that came with it, running each command (in alphabetical order) up until I hit RESTORE (or
784.
by sevensor 3y ago
Having worked in both very flat and very hierarchical organizations, I can tell you exactly what makes a good manager. Any manager, good or bad, is an information bottleneck. Managers have more organizational exposure and are thus a much
785.
by sevensor 3y ago
Yeah, it's the "refactoring" category where I disagree most. Too many identifiers in a function, too many lines in a function, too many branches, too many methods in a class, too few methods in a class. You can learn a lot
786.
by sevensor 3y ago
It's a pain, but you can definitely learn a lot from fixing a bad codebase. For that, I recommend trying to write type annotations and get the whole thing to type-check. I've found that bad codebases end up having very complex t
787.
by sevensor 3y ago
This is good advice. I learned Python long before ruff came on the scene, but I did the same with Pylint. I don't adhere rigidly to its recommendations any more, but I learned a lot about the language from trying. I fact, I think so
788.
by sevensor 3y ago
Our spaces already have rules. In fact, "don't camp out all day without buying anything" is a rule for the coffee shop as shared office space. The article isn't so much about rules versus no rules, as it is about rules
789.
by sevensor 3y ago
What's worse, with autotools, is that while maybe only one programmer in 100 knows how to do ./configure; make; make install, only one in 10,000 knows m4. It's one of those odd corners of the ecosystem like troff. It would
790.
by sevensor 3y ago
My weirdest Frost experience has been "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." My child received the gift of a lavishly illustrated picture book with the verse printed in it. The poem is so desolate, but as far as I could tell, n
791.
by sevensor 3y ago
A long time ago, I wrote IrisGL code for the mathematician George Francis, who made mathematical visualization his life's work. He published this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Topological_Picturebook , whi
792.
by sevensor 3y ago
Written instructions / explaining board games. In both cases, your best bet is a good tutorial. "Do X and Y will result" gives you instant feedback. If Y didn't result, you have probably failed to do X correctly. Ver
793.
by sevensor 3y ago
> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market. Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network a
794.
by sevensor 3y ago
Oh, agreed, it's hard to neglect a good combination! I definitely rotate pens and inks over time, with the general rule that broader nibs and brighter inks are for headings, and finer nibs with more muted inks are for the bulk of the
795.
by sevensor 3y ago
When I was in semiconductor manufacturing, I kept a set of notes in LaTeX, with a different chapter for each process layer. I'd print these out and annotate in the margins. Whenever the margins filled up, I would transcribe my margin
796.
by sevensor 3y ago
I have a similar setup, including the A5 notebook and fountain pens. I alternated colors for a while, but lately I've taken to using a stub nib with flamboyant ink to make a header for each note (meeting / subject plus date), and
797.
by sevensor 3y ago
Indeed, I found it very difficult to avoid having ChatGPT make up outrageous lies about a product it was representing on behalf of my employer. Fortunately the feature ended up not being used very much. Turns out nobody actually wanted a
798.
by sevensor 3y ago
> i don’t want to answer their emails This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we occasionally moan about s
799.
by sevensor 3y ago
I recommend learning about semiconductor fabrication because it's fascinating. I spent five years as a process engineer in a semiconductor plant, and I saw some really cool technology while I was there. How many other fields use TEM
800.
by sevensor 3y ago
If you want to. It would be a lot of work. I check input data on the boundary and rely on mypy to tell me when I've made a type error in the interior, and I find that works well enough. Also, see my disclaimers, this stuff isn'
801.
by sevensor 3y ago
Python's type hints are great as machine-checkable statements about constraints on the behavior of your code. It's not strictly true that they're unavailable at runtime. > Don't count on them at runtime here either I
802.
by sevensor 3y ago
I have thousands and thousands of miles on my bicycle tires. The cheap tires on my commuting bike kept wearing out, and I eventually switched to a high-quality replacement with a high latex content. I haven't had to replace the tires
803.
by sevensor 3y ago
> One awesome, massive free resource for generating data is simply the Internet. Isn't that building AI products _exactly_ the way everyone else is doing it? There are things in the world the internet doesn't know much about,
804.
by sevensor 3y ago
> The only mission is try to find a way to survive and prosper under hegemonic capitalism. How true this is depends on where the money is coming from. Founders at a bootstrapped company may actually believe in their stated mission. I&#
805.
by sevensor 3y ago
Anecdata, which I welcome you to ignore: A plantar fasciitis sufferer I know got substantial relief by walking around barefoot in the house at every opportunity. This helped because the tissues in the foot were actually too loose and flexi
806.
by sevensor 3y ago
Years later, I'm still registering new scents that I haven't smelled since before my first COVID infection. For a hearing analogy, it's not like the volume is turned down, it's like some frequencies are missing entirely
807.
by sevensor 3y ago
Anecdata: performed an LLM-based proof of concept at the request of management. Users were underwhelmed. Not a compelling technology in actual practice. Once we had it clamped down enough to mostly not lie to our users, it didn't do
808.
by sevensor 3y ago
Regarding (1), I used Vim for 19 years, and I had strong muscle memory. However, I found it took only about a week to get comfortable with Kakoune. Its multiple-selection-oriented editing just mapped really well onto how I was already usi
809.
by sevensor 3y ago
I worked in semiconductor manufacturing, and I've been exposed to a lot of other industries. It's extremely volatile. Not quite like oil and gas production, but still enough to make your head spin.
810.
by sevensor 3y ago
Find and work through some old OpenGL tutorials from the fixed-function era. It's long obsolete, but there's a nice immediate connection between your matrix algebra and what you see on the screen. Putting chunky triangles on the

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