tgflynn

51 ms·

541.
by tgflynn 6y ago
You can never be certain that any statement is true unless that statement is purely mathematical or logical in nature or the assertion of your own existence. In general the best you can do is to try to assign reasonable probabilities to dif
542.
by tgflynn 6y ago
But the airspace of a US carrier strike group shouldn't really be a "low information zone".
543.
by tgflynn 6y ago
You could probably measure the extent to which HN users are aggressively-conventional minded by how often they downvote comments without replying to them.
544.
by tgflynn 6y ago
This is a good essay, but I don't think he gets it quite right. I agree with the horizontal axis: conventional vs. independent but I don't think the view he presents of aggressiveness is quite accurate. I do think that a major ax
545.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Would you still consider it a "good take down" if he turns out to be wrong ? Or are you 100% certain that he's right ?
546.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Yep, it looks like GPT-3 might not be too far from achieving artificial schizophrenia.
547.
by tgflynn 6y ago
I am going to make two claims: 1) Consciousness is not a computation. 2) Science will never be able to disprove claim (1). If you doubt claim (2) then explain how you could prove to me that you are a conscious being as opposed to a figment
548.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> Isn't that the whole point of science? No, Carl Sagan's famous "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is certainly not the whole point of science. At best it's merely a useful heuristic for judg
549.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Who uses C++ ? Webscale tech companies (definitely Google plus almost certainly Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc.), traditional software companies (like Microsoft), aerospace and defense, finance, robotics and automation, automotive, are a fe
550.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> okay would be a liquid nitrogen leak, explosive risk oxygen condensing out of the atmosphere I don't think that's very likely. I used to work in cryogenic labs and a simple LN2 leak would not have been considered a danger (e
551.
by tgflynn 6y ago
This article is interesting but it's causing me quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. If IBM spent $3 billion dollars developing 7nm and less technology how is it that it got rid of it's own chip fab business and is now dependent o
552.
by tgflynn 6y ago
The distros I've had the most professional experience with are Debian and Fedora. My main personal distro has been Ubuntu (usually the LTS version) for quite a few years however I recently installed Debian 10 on my second laptop and ha
553.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> are a lot more specialized than GPUs. What do you mean by "more specialized" ? FPGA's can implement any logic circuit whereas GPU's are optimized for highly parallel arithmetic computations. I don't understa
554.
by tgflynn 6y ago
I wonder how competitive GPU's would be with FPGA's on this type of problem. FPGA's have the advantage that the circuit architecture can be designed specifically for the algorithm but as far as I know they have much lower gat
555.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Those topics fall under the general heading of Mathematical Logic. Wikipedia is usually a pretty good place to start for any such question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus there are a lot of external link
556.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Maybe because they bought a lot of stupid and annoying commercials that made no sense to anyone.
557.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Aren't you confusing a theorem with a proof of that theorem ?
558.
by tgflynn 6y ago
If that's the case then they might correspond to the Tuatha De Danann of Irish mythology who were supposed to have been the first people to inhabit Ireland (I think the Irish have traditionally believed that these were indeed the mound
559.
by tgflynn 6y ago
It's pretty much the main point of the story.
560.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Since they've found a lot of ancient DNA there are many more questions that they should be able to answer. One is how closely related were these neolithic people to modern Irish people and/or ancient DNA from later Irish populatio
561.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. That depends on both time period and location. In the late 80's I worked in a physics lab in the US that had an old helium recuperation system installed (as gas, I don&#
562.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Yes the difference between integral spin (bosons) and half-integral spin (fermions) particles is one of the most important facts in physics. The two types of particles behave very differently, fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle an
563.
by tgflynn 6y ago
There are certainly companies that have experimented with Power, including Google, but I've never heard of any large migrations either. One other consideration is that Intel chips come with closed source and completely opaque logic emb
564.
by tgflynn 6y ago
That sounds more like marketing hype than anything else. Intel chips also support virtualization that is far more widely used (basically all the cloud providers - AWS, Google, Azure, etc.). As for lower infrastructure costs, I have troubl
565.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> The only Power based supercomputers I can think of are all from IBM. Does any other vendor use them? Perhaps not but there are non-IBM Power systems available, such as those from Raptor, as well as IBM Power systems primarily intended
566.
by tgflynn 6y ago
Another factor may be that older people have seen so much nonsense that they've become more skeptical of the "official" narrative. I know this has happened with me. I don't go in for conspiracy theories but I can see h
567.
by tgflynn 6y ago
I don't think there's much competition between x86 and s390. You'll use the later only if you're already an IBM mainframe customer and don't plan to migrate off. For Power vs x86 it probably matters a lot what type
568.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> You can have a purely functional programming language with objects. Yes, but those objects would have to be immutable. Much (probably most) OOP and procedural software works with mutable data structures, which are forbidden by pure FP
569.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> Object oriented programming, for all its later excesses, was a big step forward in software engineering. It made it possible to develop much larger programs than before, maybe 10x larger. If that statement is true then OOP was surely t
570.
by tgflynn 6y ago
> No, the virus doesn't just float around in the air I'd be interested in any references you can point to that explain why that doesn't happen. A priori I would expect virus particles to be able to remain airborne indefin

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