DougMerritt

Yes. One source I just double checked says that a 300mm silicon wafer weighs 840 grams, which seems to be in the right range anyway.

Right, but he assumed he knew a technical term when he didn't, which is unwise.

Lisp CPUs had type bits stored with values, but I can't think of any typed CPUs still in use. What are you thinking of?

Aha, I had missed that! Thanks.

You really cannot expect audio processing to yield color information.

Beyond that, you are correct that the 3D shapes themselves cannot be derived perfectly accurately (see my other post)

That's not an unreasonable question, however the larger point is that this sort of thing cannot be done perfectly accurately.

This was established mathematically, answering an old 1966 question from famous mathematician Mark Kac: "You can't hear the shape of a drum" -- there isn't a unique answer even when allowed to use arbitrary test sounds.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_the_shape_of_a_drum

Article in American Scientist 1996 Jan-Feb: https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~kazdan/425S11/Drum-Gordon-Webb....

On raw hardware, yes, but they're talking about running on a Samsung hypervisor.

"Continued on next scroll"

To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with synonymous constructions that use more words.

(note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.

> The whole industry has swung from fat clients to thin clients and back since time immemorial. The pendulum will keep swinging after this too.

Indeed, graphics pioneer and all-around-genius Ivan Sutherland observed (and named) this back in 1968:

"wheel of reincarnation "[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

"Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of Samsara, and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also blitter."

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht...

Zot is (at least in part) from the old comic Wizard of Id and (by the same artist, Johnny Hart and Brant Parker) BC. It was the sound of a lightning bolt (natural or wizard-created).

Reprint cover of "Ala Ka Zot!":

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61hytBWmsqL._SL1000_.jpg

Sure, but not all interactions are observations, yet they can still cause collapse.

Hi there, long time.

I'm a big believer in crafting whatever you personally need, whether interpreters or generators.

What is this month's best choice to run at home?

That hexapodia business seemed like a hint in a murder mystery; some of the connections to the rest of the story were reasonably clear, but I always felt like I was missing some insight there.

Hmm. In light of that, maybe it would have been more accurate if I said he was famous rather than popular, and for all I know it was only the Science Fiction Book Club that gave him that degree of fame?

His stuff is weird, and therefore a niche/acquired taste.

> Dick's genius was recognized only after his death

Yes and no. It should certainly be noted that he was very popular during his life, not a nearly unknown author. Book clubs selected multiple of his novels, as one of many examples of that.

His stuff became a huge fad when they made many movies based on his works, but that's not the same thing as him previously being an unsung genius.

James Tiptree Jr (yes, aka Alice Sheldon) is often forgotten? That would be criminal!

People who aren't familiar with the Sokal affair may miss the critical point that word salad was the author's whole intent, to expose the problem.

'a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal...to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies...[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

'The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

IMHO it is the most amazing academic comeuppance in history.

Edit: See the author's great book: Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1998), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1st ed.), New York: Picador USA, ISBN 0-312-19545-1

I agree, but mind you, libraries have always been consciously desired and heavily implemented. Lady Ada did it. Historically but more recently, the first operating systems began life as mere libraries.

But the worst problem I ever had was a vice president (acquired when our company was acquired) who insisted that all programming was, should, and must by-edict be only about gluing together existing libraries.

Talk about incompetent -- and about misguided beliefs in his own "superior intelligence".

I had to protect my team of 20+ from him and his stupid edicts and complaints, while still having us meet tight deadlines of various sorts (via programming, not so much by gluing).

Part of our team did graphical design for the web. Doing that by only gluing together existing images makes as little sense as it does for programming.

I strongly agree, but then again "generation" has always been a highly imprecise unit, enough so that I wouldn't outright call "30 years" wrong.

We have lots of examples like that, for instance lots of people complain when "a couple" refers to any number other than two, and yet common usage is for it to be pretty synonymous with the more obviously vague term "a few".

Another reason to be strict with output and flexible with input.

Yep. IIRC the ubiquitous 8051 originally took 10-20 clocks just to execute a NOP, and everything else was even slower. For example.

It kind of does, all else being equal. What else do you have in mind? Parasitic capacitance on signal lines?

They very likely will not elaborate, since I see that since 2018 they've made only about a dozen comments, 3 of which were nothing but "."

Yes? What is the state of the art?

I think it's at the level where one has to say only humans have non-trivial fully recursive grammar -- word order has to matter. Various animals have been shown to have fairly impressive language abilities otherwise.

A long time ago one didn't have to phrase it carefully.

> I don't think I'll dox myself, since she kept to herself a lot.

It took me very little detective work to determine that you ...(drum roll) are me.

No wonder I almost posted the above.

> I judge books by their covers.

On second thought, although I like great covers, you're not me. Carry on; you do you.

Thank you; that does make more sense.

You're absolutely right. On the other hand, really extensive meditation can have some very strange effects on sleeping and some other things, so I personally withhold judgement.

If nothing else, take into account the studies that said that the placebo effect can actually help about 30% of people -- even if they know it's a placebo. So I don't know. Things get weird quickly.

Ok, you're joking, but still, are you referring to the 1987 Liskov Substitution Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle