sevensor

52 ms·

61.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I would like to see references out to less hand wavy material. It’s a free resource, so I’m not going to complain too hard. Gnarly windowing effects on the square wave example in the first chapter; I do think if you’re going to show somethi
62.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Mary Renault. Fire From Heaven. I think she was ahead of the curve in recognizing that Alexander had monstrous qualities at a time when he was still seen as a kind of superhero. Tolkein. The Silmarillion. I’ve bounced off this book a do
63.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I’m interested by this recent development where people are using LLMs with Lean to prove things that haven’t been formalized yet. This seems like a really good fit for LLMs. They’re good at translating approximate language to formal languag
64.
by sevensor 10mo ago
No mention of PNGs? I don’t usually go to jpegs first for screenshots of text. Did png have worse compression? Burn more cpu? I’m sure there are good reasons, but it seems like they’ve glossed over the obvious choice here. edit: Thanks for
65.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Surprisingly not yet available in Project Gutenberg, which is my go-to source for 19th century books.
66.
by sevensor 10mo ago
My high school electronics teacher had a screwdriver that was permanently welded to the terminals of a capacitor he’d pulled from a TV set. “This is why you use a resistor to discharge one of these things,” he said.
67.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Last time I measured it, handling KeyError was also significantly faster than checking with “key in collection.” Also, as I was surprised to discover, Python threads are preemptively scheduled, GIL notwithstanding, so it’s possible for the
68.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I was just looking at an OOM situation this week. I disagree that turning overcommit off helps specifically with locality. Finding the straw that breaks the camel’s back doesn’t necessarily help you fix the problem. If you don’t understand
69.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I’ve done this: I had a hot loop and I discovered that I could reduce instruction counts by adding a branch inside the loop. Definitely slower, which I expected, but it’s worth measuring.
70.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Thanks for the report! I was hoping for better news, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
71.
by sevensor 10mo ago
What’s interesting to me about this, reckless as it is, is that the conversation has begun to shift toward balancing LLMs with rigorous methods. These people seem to be selling some kind of AI hype product backed by shoddy engineering, and
72.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I’ve been posting here for a decade, and lurking for a few years before that, and your observation tracks with my experience. There’s a handful of ideas we’re collectively mulling over at any given time. They slowly rotate in and out, and
73.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I discovered named ranges only a couple of months ago, and they’re pretty amazing, as is the spilling behavior that fills an entire column from one cell. When it comes to the specifics of dealing with complex formulas, I usually copy paste
74.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Notoriously secretive, siloed Apple, where even internally, teams are said to be entirely in the dark about each other’s work? I think Apple, culturally, can’t do a public post mortem no matter how much they might want to. I would love to b
75.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I re
76.
by sevensor 10mo ago
> The issue was never the syntax—it was the runtime. Why readable math still matters in a world aided by LLM-assisted code generation I’m going to stop you right there. Matlab has 5 issues: 1. The license 2. Most users don’t understand w
77.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I’m in a similar place with an internal tool. I have a two part changelog. In the first part, each release gets 50 words or less justifying its existence. This is ready to be copy pasted for management consumption. The second part goes into
78.
by sevensor 10mo ago
You don’t even need parentheses here. 42, This expression is a tuple all by itself.
79.
by sevensor 10mo ago
No, I’d type the function argument as a Mapping. Frozendict is so that the function will raise an exception if it violates its type signature. Edit: that is, if as the caller you want foo to be immutable, then you make it a frozendict
80.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Good point, I was responding to a the parent talking about GaAs, but CdZnTe is certainly II-VI.
81.
by sevensor 10mo ago
The Python stdlib does not get enough credit. People complain about things like how its http client is dated and slow, but it’s pretty amazing that it’s just right there if you need it, no external dependencies needed. And it’s sitting rig
82.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Additional factoid: these are known as III-V semiconductors after their columns in the periodic table / number of valence electrons. They all have different bandgaps and lattice constants, and interesting things happen when you modulat
83.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Concurrency is a good motivation, but this is super useful even in straight line code. There’s a huge difference between functions that might mutate a dictionary you pass in to them and functions that definitely won’t. Using Mapping is grea
84.
by sevensor 10mo ago
So do I want the button with the three horizontal lines, three horizontal dots, three vertical dots, nine dots arranged in a grid, the point-down triangle, or the point-right chevron? Generally these convey no information and I have to try
85.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I’ve been there! Stony Creek used to be a little working class seaside village with some quirky artsy folks mixed in. My father would kayak in the sound.
86.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I’m confused about how you’ve characterized factory work. It’s nothing like the factories I’ve been in, so I’m assuming this is an imagined future state? Hope do you propose we get there?
87.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Seriously? They show people on the floor within the first 30 seconds of the video. I guess it’s technically “lights out” if you make people work in the dark, but I meant, and the article implied, production without jobs.
88.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Hogwash. Find me a “lights out” factory. They don’t exist. All your stuff is made by people. Often people with fancy machines, but people nonetheless. And the higher the degree of automation, the more non fungible skills you require of thos
89.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I disagree. Code review has a social purpose as well as a technical one. It reinforces a shared understanding of the code and requires one person to assure another that the code is ready for review. It develops consensus about design decisi
90.
by sevensor 10mo ago
I have worked with a lot of junior engineers, and I’ll take comprehension any day. Developing their comprehension is a huge part of my responsibility to them and to the company. It’s pretty wasteful to take a human being with a functioning

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