sfpotter

24 ms·

361.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Sounds cool but doesn’t address my question. Do you think the relative instability of Zig will hurt you? Or do the benefits outweigh the costs? Lots of languages make it easy to talk C ABI (including… C itself). So why Zig? I guess the peop
362.
by sfpotter 3y ago
C is standardized and is one of the most (the most?) widely used programming language on the planet. If you write code targeting a C standard and don't include many unstable dependencies, it has a good chance of running correctly for a
363.
by sfpotter 3y ago
You're missing the point of the question.
364.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Do clean cars last longer than dirty cars?
365.
by sfpotter 3y ago
"[...], and it’s dimensionless, so you can’t easily check if you forgot to divide or multiply by it." For what it's worth, it's often the case that a factor of 2pi is the difference between something being in terms of cy
366.
by sfpotter 3y ago
For what it’s worth, if your goal is to write Lisp in Emacs, a reasonable environment can be set up in a few minutes on a modern system with a package manager: 1) Download Emacs 2) Download e.g. sbcl 3) Install SLIME using Emacs’s package
367.
by sfpotter 3y ago
If you’re really a minimalist, you don’t own a car
368.
by sfpotter 3y ago
NaN != NaN is very useful when debugging numerical software. NaN is a great placeholder value for things which don't have a clear default value to which they can be initialized. To your point, there are plenty of situations where a flo
369.
by sfpotter 3y ago
By the way, I had a chance to check: and I was right with my guess. All six of those languages evaluate 1.0/4 to 0.25, exactly as expected. It might have taken me 30 seconds or so to form my answer ;-) but that time was mostly spent pa
370.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Much sadder: the car is the only the transportation option many people have in the majority of places in the US. The best way to reduce the number of car accidents is to reduce the number of cars by providing other options.
371.
by sfpotter 3y ago
OK, I get the point you’re trying to make now. The languages I work with most often in decreasing order of frequency are: C, Python, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, and Julia. I don’t regularly cause problems for myself by running afoul of implicit c
372.
by sfpotter 3y ago
The probability of a real number equaling 14.7 depends on the specific distribution the real number is being sampled from. If X is a Bernoulli(p) random variable, and Y = 14.7*X, then P(Y = 14.7) = p. Support for exact equality between floa
373.
by sfpotter 3y ago
It isn't frightening if you've been properly trained and understand how your tools work. The onus is on the bank to train its employees to use the proper number type for money. I have no problem with languages having first-class s
374.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I totally agree, although I think it's even worse than that. In my opinion, a precondition for creativity and inventiveness is understanding. If you rely on a surrogate to give you answers, you will never reach the level of proficiency
375.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I guess you're right. We should throw the baby out with the bathwater because a bank hired a crappy engineer. There is no other solution to this problem.
376.
by sfpotter 3y ago
No, I’m not. In the applications IEEE754 was developed to support through standardization, being able to represent 14.7 exactly is simply unimportant.
377.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Please don’t spread FUD about floating point arithmetic. IEEE754 is an extremely carefully worked out standard which provides a good trade off between speed and accuracy. The problem of representing a continuum of real numbers in a fixed am
378.
by sfpotter 3y ago
This is a great set of observations. The only thing missing is an analysis of how much power it takes to accomplish each of these tasks. If ChatGPT-4 is at about 1:1 in terms of “effectiveness”, all that remains is to divide by the amount o
379.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Learning math helps develop your ability to hold large, complicated logical edifices in your head and to analyze them. There are different ways to develop this skill, doing math is one way to go about it. Programming is fundamentally abou
380.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Damn, what is this? A college dorm room?
381.
by sfpotter 3y ago
An app that does nothing except the default pass through and says in a booming voice every 10 seconds “YOU WILL DIE ALONE…”
382.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Nice. It’s like a lame version of The Matrix. Instead of going to a fantastic and amazing virtual world I get to ~virtually~ be in the same room I’m already in but with a crappy CRT monitor. For the sake of nostalgia, I guess?
383.
by sfpotter 3y ago
x*y/|x||y| is a very different function from x*y It also isn't a distance...
384.
by sfpotter 3y ago
It isn't equivalent to it. See my other comment.
385.
by sfpotter 3y ago
The dot product of two unit vectors is the cosine of the angle between them. Since cos^-1 (u*v) is the angle between them, or the geodesic distance between u and v regarded as points on the sphere, which is a distance. But the dot product
386.
by sfpotter 3y ago
A distance is a function d(x, y) where d(x, y) = 0 if x = y, if x = 0, or if y = 0 (among other properties). If x = y and neither x = 0 nor y = 0, and if we let d(x, y) = x*y, then d(x, y) != 0 in general, so the dot product is certainly no
387.
by sfpotter 3y ago
The dot product isn’t a distance
388.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Stochastic parrots have nothing directly to do with consciousness. You might consider reading the paper or at least the definition on Wikipedia more carefully. As far as your statement regarding consciousness goes, it's glib to say tha
389.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Apple gave him an exclusive invitation to be one of the first people to try the device on. Do you think Apple is unaware that he has a popular blog and is a popular developer of software that runs on Apple products?
390.
by sfpotter 3y ago
It’s a literal waste of energy. LLMs draw a tremendous amount of power. They enable problems to be solved in a low effort, careless sort of way, but this neglects the power efficiency of our own brains. We can think through and implement be

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