t8sr

24 ms·

241.
by t8sr 4y ago
Having experienced American bureaucracy, I find the claim that US institutions have been "willing to investigate systemic dysfunction" completely hilarious. I think what Palantir means is that American organizations have been fast
242.
by t8sr 4y ago
Thanks for taking the time to provide some local perspective. As a fellow European, what I find fascinating about this is that we all mostly want to accomplish similar things: 1) The government shouldn't go on fishing expeditions for c
243.
by t8sr 4y ago
Well, you can nuke macports just by deleting /opt/local. It's annoying to have to recompile for sure, but at least it's a simple solution.
244.
by t8sr 4y ago
As an old hand who was around when homebrew started, I feel obliged to let people know there are alternatives. If you find brew's take-over-your-system-and-youll-thank-me approach off putting, and/or you value stability over the
245.
by t8sr 4y ago
This is such a German judgement. So the police are using big data to predict who will commit crimes, which is sort of dystopian. But what the court finds unconstitutional about it is that they're using computers. "Automated data
246.
by t8sr 4y ago
Everyone in this thread is arguing about operating systems and their mobile OS preference... why? The interesting point here, which is corroborated by different sources than just TFA, is that Apple's silicon is 1-2 generations ahead of
247.
by t8sr 4y ago
Ah, yeah. The performance of modern FPUs really kills, and it's changing a lot of the assumptions I used to have about performance. Anecdote: In state of the art physics code, it's common to use integers for coordinates [1]. Recen
248.
by t8sr 4y ago
Ah, but it used ints (or bignum) to represent my pointer values, instead of silently losing precision. This is an anecdote, maybe there are other gotchas I am blissfully ignorant of. (Also, this was 8 years ago.)
249.
by t8sr 4y ago
If you simply look at any of the real world implementations, you'll see it's not so easy. Rust has a few readable and educational crates that implement decimals, if you want to take a look.
250.
by t8sr 4y ago
It really depends! Floats are /really/ fast for many operations that are really slow on ints. On modern CPUs, it's faster to cast a number to double, do a square root and cast back to int, than even the cleverest bithacking i
251.
by t8sr 4y ago
The really surprising* thing is that Google Sheets uses floats for everything. Back in the day, I was using Sheets to do some statistics about (IIRC) kernel ASLR on macOS, and I was surprised to see kernel pointers ending in impossible digi
252.
by t8sr 4y ago
Decimals are notoriously hairy to implement and it's not obvious how they should behave when they run out of precision. Integers are almost always the better choice when the decimal is fixed, such as with currency. (I guess it depends
253.
by t8sr 4y ago
I am almost completely certain that neither Google Sheets, nor Excel use that "big number crunching GPU" for anything float-related. Just getting the data to the GPU for a compute shader to run on it would take longer than just do
254.
by t8sr 4y ago
The trivial proof that Apple can't be forcing them is that other services continue to offer a synced folder. Dropbox has been extremely vague about what exactly they're trying to do and why they have to do it this way. It seems li
255.
by t8sr 4y ago
What I find surprising is that Dropbox is apparently willing to just fit in the narrow space Apple has carved out for them. Especially now, when companies are cutting their spend, this is an extraordinary misstep. If I am already paying for
256.
by t8sr 4y ago
Apple can’t (yet) stop you syncing a folder somewhere on the disk. Other services offer this feature - sync.com for example, which I switched to after Dropbox announced this change. Dropbox wants to offer some features that are only availab
257.
by t8sr 4y ago
You send a second SMS with the same PID and it’ll overwrite the first one. It’s in the GSM standard and described on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.40
258.
by t8sr 4y ago
The article is very far from insightful, or even well written. I apologize if this is mean, but who even are The Atlantic's readers? The prose is too dry to overlap with tabloids or, like, Time Magazine. It's strictly worse at ess
259.
by t8sr 4y ago
Good writers can use big words well. Someone who has been writing for 20 years is able to reach for a precise word in the right situation, to get the right effect. 99% of the people are not good writers, and when they try to do that, it com
260.
by t8sr 4y ago
> They don't go hand in hand. Quite the contrary, I'm arguing they are in conflict. "Those two things are at odds with each other." > Drawing from a larger vocabulary allows greater precision, results in shorter se
261.
by t8sr 4y ago
It loaded eventually - Chrome blocked a couple of cross site iframe loads, even without any extensions, but after a few reloads it started working. I am on 1gbps fiber with an M1 Max, I don’t know what the issue is.
262.
by t8sr 4y ago
If you want to understand how it might be motivated by security, just read the LKML threads around Rust - the Rust developers’ claims are at times pretty wild, and in my experience (after 20 years in infosec), they tend to have a relatively
263.
by t8sr 4y ago
Warning: engaging cranky old codemonkey mode. Here's a functional website with the same PDF: https://archive.org/details/frostflowersonwi00albe/page/n1/m... You'd think a website about public d
264.
by t8sr 4y ago
Others point out that calling it a Python framework might be disingenuous, but only if your goal is to compare programming languages. If you're a web developer, trying to pick a framework for websockets, you probably don't care th
265.
by t8sr 4y ago
Yeah, I didn't express myself very clearly, sorry. Let me try again: I think our various definitions of life are not the actual definition that most astronomers have in their head. I think the actual definition people believe is "
266.
by t8sr 4y ago
I don't think I expressed myself very clearly, but I actually agree with you on most counts. The definition you listed is also the one I mentioned + evolution. > What about fire? I actually rambled about fire, and then deleted the p
267.
by t8sr 4y ago
We don't even really have an agreed-upon definition of life, so the question is basically non-sensical. Alive are the things we say are alive, which is mostly stuff like us: some type of metabolism, growth, response to stimuli. By that
268.
by t8sr 4y ago
20 years later I still cringe a bit at the term "software engineer", but that's a different debate. Given how much work nowadays is about technology, calling 30% of the working population "IT guys" is perhaps not su
269.
by t8sr 4y ago
I think the confusion is "IT" the sector and IT the job. Yes, computers are information technology, but saying SWEs work in IT is kind of like saying a pharmacist "works in medicine". Being "in IT" typically me
270.
by t8sr 4y ago
And the majority of doctors, nurses and lab technicians work in hospitals, yet they don't all have the same job. IT the job is nowadays mostly understood to be about installing printers and setting up computers. Software Engineer/

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