xamuel

76 ms·

751.
by xamuel 8y ago
>No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is NOT conscious. You might be interested in a very short 2011 paper of mine, "A paradox related to the Turing Test", on page 90 here: https:/&#x
752.
by xamuel 8y ago
Interesting how they mention the coming war between the "computer centers" and the personal computer. And now looking back, we see that's a war that's been fought time and time again, and now we're fighting it all o
753.
by xamuel 8y ago
Darwin himself was keenly aware of the danger of arrogance. One of my favorite quotes from the Origin of Species: "So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic b
754.
by xamuel 8y ago
No, he listed some things that he thinks are broken, he didn't list missing language features
755.
by xamuel 8y ago
>Most language features, really. Name a few. >terrible "prototype" system >malice that is "this" It sounds like you are talking about ES5, not ES6+
756.
by xamuel 8y ago
I'm not a math historian, so I'll take your word for it about the math history. I should have qualified that my statements apply to contemporary mathematics. Paradox: Cantor's theorem is uncontroversial in mathematics. But th
757.
by xamuel 8y ago
Constructivism is subtler than that (the wikipedia intro is misleading). When an intuitionist says that we can't use the principle of excluded middle, they mean it more like in a functional programming sense: if we have two recipes for
758.
by xamuel 8y ago
Welcome to the "office". Your workday will consist of 7 hours 59 minutes of accounting spreadsheets, and 1 minute of rearranging these gumballs on display next to the entrance. If anyone asks, you work at a gumball store :)
759.
by xamuel 8y ago
Cantor's proofs (he gave multiple) are un-controversial. There's absolutely zero question about them from any reputable mathematician. One COULD take issue with the wording: what Cantor demonstrated is that there is no injection f
760.
by xamuel 8y ago
Presumably drvd is referring to the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis: we don't know |R| in the sense that we don't know for which ordinal alpha is |R| the alpha'th infinite cardinal. The Continuum Hypothesis is the cl
761.
by xamuel 8y ago
Reminds me of religious parables. No-one objects to Jesus's parables on the basis of their being factually untrue--they're obviously fiction and that's not a mark against them. On the other hand, the SPE is marketed as empiri
762.
by xamuel 8y ago
>seeing how the homeless live Except you only see the ones who are visibly homeless, so how do you know?
763.
by xamuel 8y ago
Is wallpaper really as hated as the opening paragraph makes it out to be? I fell in love with wallpaper from watching "Yes Minister" which mostly takes place in government offices with beautiful wallpaper. https://www.y
764.
by xamuel 8y ago
What was he trying to accomplish with that speech? Educate a classroom of college students? That's what lecturers are for. What was he trying to accomplish? He was trying to win a political race. He succeeded. It's annoying when p
765.
by xamuel 8y ago
Wasn't it Lincoln who said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly"?
766.
by xamuel 8y ago
We ARE talking about the same company that gave us IE6, you know :P
767.
by xamuel 8y ago
Here's one use-case: where I work, IT is extremely bureaucratic, and it's unbelievably difficult to get something like a Gitlab server up. It would be a huge boon to us if there were some lightweight decentralized program the dev
768.
by xamuel 8y ago
Undefined behavior is almost inevitable if optimum performance is desired. A function which _appears_ to need bounds-checking (for instance a function which takes int *x and immediately returns x[0]) might _in-fact_ only ever be called afte
769.
by xamuel 8y ago
It's who-you-know, not what-you-know. I should mention, by convention, you do not get to see the letters of recommendation yourself, so you're at the writers' mercy. (At least in my field, mathematics; others might be differe
770.
by xamuel 8y ago
I come from academia and can confirm your #2. If you want to get a professor job, it's all about letters of recommendation, publication in prestigious journals, talks at prestigious conferences, etc. Programming interviews are extremel
771.
by xamuel 8y ago
Here's an example where these optimizations are useful. Suppose I create a macro DEREF_AND_FREE(x) which expands to if(x)free(*x). Often times, I'll lazily use that in places where I know x isn't null. It's more readable
772.
by xamuel 8y ago
IIRC in the TV show there's a scene where the Americana shopkeeper (Mr. Childan) shows someone two identical cigarette lighters, one of which was in the pocket of FDR when FDR was assassinated (Man in the High Castle takes place in an
773.
by xamuel 8y ago
>For the general public, AI is a synonym for deep learning I'd contend for the general public, AI is a synonym for machines like: HAL; The Terminator; Star Trek's "Data"; the robots in the film "AI"; and so
774.
by xamuel 8y ago
This. And at the end of the day, deep learning is just a more sophisticated version of linear regression. (To listen to some people talking, you'd think if a machine just curve-fits enough data-points, it'll suddenly wake up and b
775.
by xamuel 8y ago
Same author, earlier exploration: The Man in the High Castle (1962) explored it in the context of otherwise-identical objects, one of which was involved in some historic event, the other of which wasn't
776.
by xamuel 8y ago
I'm not far from being an older dev, and I've been struggling more and more with cynicism in myself. Everything you said is 100% true, but I have to force myself to avoid phrases like "technology fad" or "young, exc
777.
by xamuel 8y ago
Maybe people are worried you'll rock the boat with all those technologies you list. If the group has settled on using React, the last thing they want is someone constantly trying to convert them to Angular. Another possibility is you d
778.
by xamuel 8y ago
The brain damage caused by psychedelics is extremely specific. By your logic, tonsillitis shouldn't be curable by removing the tonsils, because if it were, then shooting someone in the mouth with a shotgun ought to produce similar effe
779.
by xamuel 8y ago
Careful about unintended consequences. I saw a project where someone built a version of "Asteroids" where certain fake asteroids would appear or not based on ":visited" css or something. Then by recording where players s
780.
by xamuel 8y ago
I'll take this opportunity to plug a paper of mine, "A machine that knows its own code", as a humble example of recent progress made in philosophy :) https://philarchive.org/archive/ALEAMT

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