wbillingsley

7 ms·

1.
by wbillingsley 2mo ago
Profit motives in infrastructure are a bad idea. See Thames Water in the UK, for instance. It always introduces a perverse incentive where if the company in control of the infrastructure can extract an extra million in profit by making ever
2.
by wbillingsley 1y ago
Yes
3.
by wbillingsley 1y ago
What I used to recommend to my sofware engineering classes is that instead of putting large files (media etc) into Git, put them into the artifact repository (Artifactory or something like it). That lets you for instance publish it as a sna
4.
by wbillingsley 1y ago
I set this as part of a Scala programming assignment for my second year undergraduate class at UNE (Australia) last term. However, during the working a square is not Queen | Eliminated but Set[Queen | NotQueen] Largely so from a programming
5.
by wbillingsley 2y ago
I wonder whether future generations will be ingrained with a Truman Show fear that maybe only the few thousand people they meet are real and everything else is generated background noise.
6.
by wbillingsley 2y ago
I've never really understood the problems he had getting the Hitchhiker movie made - all the articles around before it came out talked about having to revise the script to make sense to an American audience (and the eventual movie ende
7.
by wbillingsley 2y ago
Sometimes. Foals are born (almost) able to walk. There are occasions where evolution baked the model into the genes.
8.
by wbillingsley 2y ago
We use ARM. Because then we can lean on some things (e.g. the ARMlite simulator) UK schools built for A-levels.
9.
by wbillingsley 2y ago
That's a similar approach to the one I use for teaching git. First the sim, then the CLI. https://theintelligentbook.com/supercollaborative/#/challeng... (Albeit I made mine simulate how things like VS Code l
10.
by wbillingsley 3y ago
The more obvious one is that Orion's standing on his head.
11.
by wbillingsley 3y ago
We do sometimes have an informal "Christmas in July". Which is a little odd, since 6 months on from Christmas would be June.
12.
by wbillingsley 3y ago
Sorry to see them go. I used them with students and they were always very helpful.
13.
by wbillingsley 3y ago
It depends. e.g. In Australia, the snake most people worry about (the eastern brown - world's second most venomous and common in cities) is native, so yes it's important to an ecosystem in the broader sense. But its numbers around
14.
by wbillingsley 3y ago
The elephant in the room in this study is how the UK economy has performed over the study period. From a quick read, they are essentially asking people to predict whether they'll be better/worse off next year, and then correlating
15.
by wbillingsley 3y ago
LLMs are very good at uncovering the mathematical relationships between words, many layers deep. Calling that understanding is a claim about what understanding is. But because we know how the LLMs we're talking about at the moment are
16.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
Give this one a go, you know you want to... https://theintelligentbook.com/thinkingaboutprogramming/#/de... (programmable lander)
17.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
> What's the big advantage of encoding whole requests into JSON blobs If you're doing URL routing, you're at the mercy of your web framework If you've got a data structure coming in, you're probably turning it in
18.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
If I recall, the overhead of running a university (the fraction taken by the central institution to run campus and facilities, versus the amount coming into the schools to pay academics) is around two thirds of the student revenue in Austra
19.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
Hugely sorry to hear this. I met him when he was visiting Cambridge while I was a PhD student and he's a wonderful person as well as a computing luminary.
20.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
I've always been curious that old dogs often get cancer, despite "old" for a dog only being the early teens as well as dogs being smaller.
21.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
It would be very difficult to dispel the notion of prestige, because most output measures are highly influenced by input measures. Prestige inevitably flows into the measures. E.g. an academic at a prestigious university has a healthy suppl
22.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
It seems (to me) less complex to have that as "just a library". In most of my little projects, I don't use ZIO, I just have a tiny library I wrote years ago that lets me write stuff that works ok whether it's a Future[Se
23.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
Although there are some complex libraries available for Scala, there's also a lot of very simple stuff. It's a very expressive language, and sure that lets some libraries do some very powerful and complex things or find new abstra
24.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
I sincerely hope Scala.js isn't "dead". Though I know use by academics isn't the use case you imagined, Scala.js has very much been the right choice for me publishing interactive Open Educational Resources that can inclu
25.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
Long-term, I expect identity-tracking legislation ("big brother bills") are unavoidable. It's cheaper to generate fake content than real content. Arguably it's already cheaper to generate fake content than to read re
26.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
> For some higher risk use cases, the age check may involve a liveness test where the user must ... record a short video saying phrases requested by the provider. I guess that'll be just in time for OpenAI or Stability Diffusion to
27.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
These do look a little like "an alternative use for a screwdriver is to use the handle to bang in nails". Yes, but it looks a little hacky and I suspect there might be another tool designed for that niche. I'm not convinced t
28.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
If you're not using macros, moving from Scala 2 to 3 is pretty easy. I have a bunch of 2d games I use in programmable learning environments. This is the commit that did a lot of the shifting from 3 to 3.0.0-RC1 https://githu
29.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
Here's one I made earlier Veautiful - https://www.wbillingsley.com/veautiful/ Tends to be used for slightly unusual things like - "I want to do lecture notes with a maze game and lunar landar built into the n
30.
by wbillingsley 4y ago
I have a little self-written version I use as an assignment for Scala students at UNE (Aus). At the moment, using classic actors but it'll probably shift to typed actors next time around. https://github.com/UNEcosc250&#

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