wcarey

8 ms·

31.
by wcarey 6y ago
A wonderful use case for nano is introducing students who have never used a command line before to unix. You can teach a classroom of students to edit files in nano productively in a single 45 minute class period, which means that an introd
32.
by wcarey 6y ago
In the high school computer programming class I teach we use headless Debian on a Raspberry Pi. The idea that you can rename files, move them, and organize them is mind blowing to about a third of the students. When I ask how they organize
33.
by wcarey 6y ago
It's a daft idea that we would have been forced to sue for peace had we lost Hawaii. Japan certainly did not have the logistical capability to take and hold Hawaii (Morison and Toll agree on this point) at any point in the war, so I&#x
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by wcarey 6y ago
How would price discovery operate on externalities? Who decides what's an externality? It seems like you're suggesting centralized planning under a different name.
35.
by wcarey 6y ago
Right - I was aiming for something analogous to your rule, which has the condition of even inputs. I do prefer your simpler example. Either way, I'm not sure your rhetorical strategy would be persuasive to someone who was unsure of the
36.
by wcarey 6y ago
I think the phenomenon you're describing is definitely real, and definitely worth thinking about. There is signal in your poll about parity, but there's a lot of noise there too. Figuring our what the signal is is very hard. You&#
37.
by wcarey 6y ago
A counter argument to you approach: If I multiply two positive integers by one another is the result always greater than either integer? Turns out there is one exception to that rule. Does it serve a purpose? How do you know?
38.
by wcarey 6y ago
Indeed. And Euclid’s definition of evenness (Def VII.6) applies only to numbers, which for Euclid excludes both 0 and 1. So there’s at least one vaguely axiomatic formulation of number theory where the correct answer is probably “neither be
39.
by wcarey 6y ago
1. Well, I just told you about them. It's old fashioned, but talking to people works wonders. You're not the first person I've encouraged to go directly to legal documents. 2. Probably the median person uses several -- google
40.
by wcarey 6y ago
How, even in principle, would google prevent a person from seeing legal documents? Most (all?) jurisdictions publish them on the web themselves? https://www.courtlistener.com/ is great.
41.
by wcarey 6y ago
Incorrectly. It mistakes non-passive constructions for passive. For example, "The sailors are spent." is marked as passive despite not containing an action verb. It looks like it's just regexing on forms of "to be"
42.
by wcarey 6y ago
The difficulty, of course, is that clarity is primarily a function of ideas and meaning, and ideas and meaning are totally opaque to tools like this. For example, no complaints about this sentence: > The poets breach the digestives by mo
43.
by wcarey 6y ago
Quite so. I suppose I lament the idea that you can become a good writer whilst shortcutting reading a large corpus of good literature. There are many ancillary benefits to reading good literature, and losing them makes education as formatio
44.
by wcarey 6y ago
My particular objections to people being made machine like are rooted in a Christian conception of the inherent worth of humans as being made in the image of God (who is not a machine). Being machine-like impedes our progress towards our t
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by wcarey 6y ago
I suppose I haven't given up on the idea that all of us can aim at being more fully human. You might be able to put together a sentence of that caliber! Particularly if you read a large corpus of great writing. The worry is that young
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by wcarey 6y ago
The trend towards using syntactic machines to teach people to write perplexes me because writing is foremost about meaning. For example, the Gettysburg address begins: > Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that natio
47.
by wcarey 6y ago
Even the much smaller submarines in the second world war where space was at extreme premium carried a fairly complete machine shop.
48.
by wcarey 6y ago
GDAL - https://www.osgeo.org/projects/gdal/ - is a nice codebase that features lots of hooks for extensibility, is relatively performant, and handles the sorts of complex data and algorithms you might encounter in
49.
by wcarey 6y ago
Battle for Wesnoth might be a counterexample to your argument about games: http://wesnoth.org It's an open source video game that's of high quality with good user experience, developed by lots of folks over a long peri
50.
by wcarey 6y ago
In particular, because the President is the source of classification authority, the oversight functions that would normally be fulfilled by financial disclosures on forms like the SF-86 have traditionally been fulfilled by the electorate. T
51.
by wcarey 6y ago
Those rules too exhibit cross-language conceptual shear. For example, English doesn't really have an equivalent of Latin's subjunctive mood, and our clause boundary system is way weaker. We use punctuation marks in a way that the
52.
by wcarey 6y ago
Interestingly, much of what you describe is present in old mathematical texts. For example, Fibonacci's Liber Abaci is essentially a long succession of story problems. Diophantus's Arithmetic is a succession of concrete problems
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by wcarey 6y ago
It's less clear in informal languages that concepts exist apart from the language to describe them. This is one of the great difficulties in translation; different languages conceptualize the world in different (and sometimes incompati
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by wcarey 6y ago
What would that look like? How could Apple ensure that subscriptions made through a third party payment processor are cancelable without dark patterns?
55.
by wcarey 6y ago
It seems like you've moved from a position of "way more harm is done by protecting people than allowing freedoms" to "more harm is done by allowing Apple to do as they wish; we need protection from that", despite Ap
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by wcarey 6y ago
Perhaps an opportunity to cultivate some empathy and listen carefully to people whose relationship with computational devices is very different from yours. Telling people that their concerns are imaginary isn't a good way to persuade t
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by wcarey 6y ago
You've made a compelling argument that Apple should be allowed to, in their freedom, do whatever they feel appropriate with regard to their own App store. The we each can make the right choice about whether or not we as individuals sho
58.
by wcarey 6y ago
I'm not convinced the problems are larger (or, at least, not that they're larger for most people; some people are seriously inconvenience by Apple's policies. I once hit a hard roadblock trying to develop something for the iP
59.
by wcarey 6y ago
That's good - we've moved from no harm to a balancing competing harms, which I think reflects the reality of the situation. There's a spectrum of what you're allowed to do software-wise with various computing devices you
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by wcarey 6y ago
That's a real possibility, and part of the greater tradeoff that happens with most technolgies: as they grow more powerful society applies more controls to them to prevent their ill use. Drunken horse riding is less regulated than drun

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