zephjc

47 ms·

451.
by zephjc 17y ago
All other things being equal (natural resources and energy), technological progress is directly proportional to a population's size and density (for degree of progress) and its growth delta (for the rate of progress). More specifically, it
452.
by zephjc 17y ago
It's WinMac (as evidenced by the URL) - some hacks that let your windows machine look like various flavors of the classic MacOS
453.
by zephjc 17y ago
Give a man enough rope to hang himself, and he'll shoot himself in the foot.
454.
by zephjc 17y ago
I gather it's because, as far as I can tell, Rich is from and lives on the east coast.
455.
by zephjc 17y ago
I know very little about SF Pluses: It's a gorgeous city, the people are generally nice, the weather in the whole Bay Area tends to stay pretty close to perfect year round, lots of cultural variety, lots to do and see. Minuses: the parkin
456.
by zephjc 17y ago
He needs to find a benevolent benefactor-company that will employ him to freely work on Clojure full-time, the way Google lets Guido work on Python full-time, and Rob Pike,Ken Thompson et al. (presumably) get to work on Go full-time.
457.
by zephjc 17y ago
That's quite the REPL prompt...
458.
by zephjc 17y ago
My predictions, in haiku: Life on Europa, And then Jupiter fuses. Who saw *this* coming?
459.
by zephjc 17y ago
Getting sick is not fun, so naturally they think "I should avoid getting sick and keep my kids from getting sick, since is better than getting sick". This is the emotional reaction, not an intellectual one, and most people ignore or don't
460.
by zephjc 17y ago
I wouldn't call those singularity movies. Maybe movies with transhuman/posthuman themes, but the singularity implies things about the rate of technological progress - certainly there wasn't much rapid progress in Terminator after the machin
461.
by zephjc 17y ago
Eh, I don't know about this. It sounds like it has a plot and conflict, but will it be good storytelling? However, it's kind of cool to see so many big AI-community/singularitarian names in the cast credits!
462.
by zephjc 17y ago
What if his statement was not intended as a moral imperative, but as practical advice? Not that you could tell from the article's headline. Either The Register is being sensationalist, or just didn't see it in those terms.
463.
by zephjc 17y ago
This reminds me of "Eastern Polish Christmas Tree Notation": http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/6/1/43942/41236
464.
by zephjc 17y ago
This article title is ambiguous enough that it makes what happened sound like it was a bad thing...
465.
by zephjc 17y ago
Clearly you need to present more of your work as scifi :) As scifi incorporates more and more transhuman elements, these concepts become less radical. I recently read the decently-written novel 'Darwinia' which spoiler takes a hard 90-deg
466.
by zephjc 17y ago
Minksy is no dummy, but his ideas about AI and cognition are dated (though I admit it's been a while since I've read anything he's had to say on the subject).
467.
by zephjc 17y ago
There is a lot of banality in SL, but there are some really talented and creative people in there too; it's a matter of knowing where to look.
468.
by zephjc 17y ago
"The one that really gets me is the assertion that the moratorium was some ego-driven “python is perfect” statement. That Guido/core dev think the language is “done” and that no new syntax or constructs are needed." I'm pretty sure anyone w
469.
by zephjc 17y ago
It was my understanding that the Go language is still a moving target; the something closer to the final language spec should be known before discussing what it is missing.
470.
by zephjc 17y ago
The inner function just falls out of scope, and is presumably collected. >>> def foo(mylist): ... def n_to_the_n(n): ... if n > 1: ... return n**n ... return 1 ... return [n_to_the_n(i) for i
471.
by zephjc 17y ago
IMO, it's generally bad form for a program to be dynamically creating named functions, filling the namespace. That's what inner functions are for. This isn't the best example, but you get the idea: def foo(mylist): def n_to_the_n
472.
by zephjc 17y ago
What would be interesting is to take someone out of a non-technical and very 'foreign' culture, like the Maasai, and have them help derive a programmatic problem solving methodology. For example, give them a set of known classical programmi
473.
by zephjc 17y ago
Eat your heart out, Obfuscated Perl! :-) This might be misplaced effort - the many chinese coders could be helping improve standard Python, libraries, i18n in various Chinese dialects, etc. - but this is still fascinating.
474.
by zephjc 17y ago
I only have some familiarity with Erlang, Does anyone know the rational behind not being able to change a variable's value? Is it simply historical? It seems you have to call f() to 'forget' a variable before assigning a new value to it - w
475.
by zephjc 17y ago
I use Python, and the only thing missing from it is ugliness.
476.
by zephjc 17y ago
Why? I've been happily ignoring it for the last 10 years, and I think I can continue to do so ;)
477.
by zephjc 17y ago
Here is an article from a few years back that addresses this: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml It's main points are is games like WoW teach the wrong lessons, like "investing a lot of time in something is worth m
478.
by zephjc 17y ago
it's not so mysterious if you know what the intent of a 'finally' block is.
479.
by zephjc 17y ago
In OS X from 10.5 on, the Help menu has a quick search box (command-shift-/ aka command-?) that works somewhat like this. I find it most useful in programs like Photoshop which I don't use enough to memorize the menu layout, but enough to
480.
by zephjc 17y ago
I haven't had time to look at much other than the ToC, but aren't a lot of these issues addressed by Objective-C?

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