gavanwoolery

I want to ask two (genuine) questions. Note that these are not statements or attempting to imply something, they are just questions and I am looking for answers, not critiques of my questions (it is silly that I even have to state this, but I do).

1) What percentage of women in each stage of the pipeline want to become full professors?

2) What is the expected level of sexism at the university? I have always seen universities tending towards very liberal, progressive views (generally speaking), both in the student body and the staff, but that is just my observation.

Good guess, but in this case the size of the vector container was always constant - 4 elements (even if only 2 or 3 of them were ever used). Presumably what made it faster was being able to unroll loops? (only a guess, never looked at the disassembly) -- so instead of 0 to x on each vector element, it would loop through 0 to 2 and could optimize around this for each function.

Const won't necessarily make things faster but constant values will (whether or not explicitly inferred). I noticed, for example, a 2x+ speedup in one of my ray tracers by downgrading my dynamic 2d/3d/4d vector class* to always have a constant size of 3.

* (poor choice, I know)

I share your thoughts on this. :)

very cool, I like their design principles!

Every time an Amiga article comes up, I say the same thing. I want to put together a dream team and reboot it. :D Imagine if the Ferrari brand died and nobody used it ever again...that is how I feel about the Amiga.

[Edit: to be clear, I am aware of the existing stuff...what I would like to see is the Amiga used to reimagine what a computer is - new hardware, new OS, new "web browser" (that ditches current conventions) ... I am aware this is a pipe dream :) ]

Location: San Diego

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Full stack web, mobile, native. C/C++, DirectX/OpenGL, PHP, SQL, HTML, JS, CSS, React, computer graphics, AI, everything....

Résumé/CV: linkedin.com/in/gavanw

Email: gavanw@gmail.com

There is a much larger problem here than RTs, and that is lack of journalistic integrity.

You can spread pretty much any sort of information without research or even a logical basis. Weirdly, we tend to default to accepting it as valid rather than questioning it.

The only realistic cure for this, outside of draconian authority, is to teach people how to be more skeptical and educate them on logical fallacies.

These are things that should be taught from elementary school and onwards IMHO.

The cognitive dissonance I have observed is in real-world observations vs other data (social media, news, etc). Basically, if you follow the news frequently, you'd be inclined to think the world was on fire because that's what gets the clicks. But if you observe the world around you, talk to real-world people of differing political opinions, you will find that everything is relatively tame compared to the picture people are inclined to paint.

Oh I'm aware of this. They even charge double for each ultrasound!

From the onset, they were classified as high risk due to being mo/di twins (monochorionic/diamniotic). It is now known that these pregnancies are much higher risk due to entanglement and other issues ("high risk" being a relative term). As it turns out, the doctors were right to assume this risk, as one of the twins has already received brain damage from (what they hypothesize) was inadequate blood flow.

I'm generally against anything but procedures that are absolutely necessary, and the ultrasounds and MRI certainly were not voluntary on our part. Personally, from all the research I have gathered it seems like ultrasounds are quite safe, although I am not an expert.

As for taking action, I had the same dilemma. Before we knew anything was wrong, one of the doctors ordered an MRI based on a hunch. I did not want to do the MRI unless it gave us some sort of information we could act on, and abortion was out of the question, legally and morally speaking under these circumstances. But we did it anyway, and at least the information has prepared us for what to expect.

I did switch to the best available plan at the soonest date I could, but that was halfway into the pregnancy

I'm having identical twins, classified as high risk. The cost is mind-boggling. I've already paid $7000+ out of pocket, and they have not even been born yet. Costs are mostly related to having to do ultrasounds all the time, and one MRI.

This falls right in line with the concept of cognitive dissonance [1].

In short, people want the world to fit their narrative, not the other way around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

I have very little knowledge of astrophysics, but I thought it would be an interesting idea if the universe constantly recycled itself. That is, every so often it collapsed in on itself and produced another big bang. Theoretically some parts of the universe would have already achieved escape velocity, but the rest of it is gradually gravitating towards some center of mass. Is such a thing even feasible?

I hear you, it is often hard to decipher intentions online - anyhow, I answered my own question using the power of Google: https://skepticalscience.com/mauna-loa-volcano-co2-measureme...

I assume they put the observatory at that site for a reason as well, I just want to learn why. I honestly have no agenda and personally do believe in anthropogenic global warming. :)

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but is a volcano the best place for an unbiased CO2 observatory? Even if dormant, I assume that CO2 vents out of the volcano naturally? Please note I am not trolling or trying to be skeptical, this is just an honest question.

I like Prolog, I just think that trying to use it as a traditional programming language for an average task is like using a sponge to bail water out of a boat - you can do it, but it is hardly the most effective tool. :) That said, there are very specific problem domains in which Prolog excels.

agree with you - added clarification to my original comment :)

Prolog is a terrible "programming language" - and I would never try to use it as such. But it is (at least conceptually) an excellent query language. In that regard, it is much closer to SQL, as is its domain of reasonably applicable problems.

Clarification: I dont actually think prolog is terrible (I credit it as the most exciting language I have ever learned), I just mean its not intuitive to "program" with in the imperative sense of telling a computer what to do. What I mean by it is excellent as a query language is - given a set of data, it is great for drawing conclusions from that data (but not in the same way as a "traditional" query language like SQL).

As someone who is nearing 40 and worked in many different areas of software (including at 3 startups), with about 10 failed "micro startups" (i.e. hobby projects) under my belt, I can confidently say that I still have not nearly figured everything out. But at least I am not quite as dumb as I once was. :)

There are actually many, many games that are quite similar, some of which are quite successful: Roblox, Survivalcraft, Creativerse ... to name just three

Richard is one of the most down-to-earth tech-celebrities out there. He is easy to talk to on Twitter, or email, or snail mail. He is, IMHO, among the most important historical figures in the game industry.

Things developed by committees often tend to lack the market-driven features of privately-owned products. On the other hand, privately-owned products are just that, and suffer from the usual consequences of closed systems. Would be nice if there was an intersection of the two, somehow (C# sort of comes to mind, as it was privately developed but has open-source implementations).

The one I always think back to is DirectX vs OpenGL. DirectX has had historically better driver support, documentation, and ready-to-compile example code (OpenGL has caught up a lot admittedly over the years, due to greater proliferation of OpenGL-driven devices).

I always thought the deductive power of prolog would be perfect for a mystery game (it need not expose the user to the language). Or for that matter, any sort of game involving story-telling. It becomes particularly interesting when the deductions are chained 3+ levels deep.

Star Controll II, unlike any other game of its time, fired almost perfectly on all cylinders.

  - Excellent storyline, for the most part
  - Well written humor and dialogue
  - Creative dialogue options
  - Unique personalities for every species
  - A sense of vastness in mystery in the universe that rewarded exploration.
  - Great artwork
  - Fun mini games, especially the "Super-Melee" combat
  - Interesting RPG/upgrade element as you acquired new ships and parts for your main ship.
  - Did I mention the music was both ahead of its time (tracker format when everything else was midi), and amazing?

There probably is not an advantage to using multiple threads, unless you really need to free up the main thread, but even then I would just batch the calls sparsely enough that it does not hog the main thread. IIRC you cannot use multiple threads with the same context in vanilla OpenGL but they did become available with Vulkan.

It is totally fair to form an opinion, I just hope that people weigh all the evidence first. In many cases, I see people forming verdicts as soon as someone is accused. The other problem is that the details of these cases are often largely obscured for the public, other than what they are willing to publicly state (and often lawyers discourage this).

In this case, and the case with Andy Rubin, I immediately thought "these people are guilty" - without evidence, without even knowing them or having spoken to them or otherwise having any sort of real judgement about their character.

I had to step back and realize that I was jumping to a conclusion prematurely.

In case you are not familiar with how the law works (outside of the court of social media), an accusation, no matter how believable, is not damning evidence - even when multiple accusations come to light. Objectivity is extremely important in these situations because it has already been demonstrated that our instincts are not impartial.

I'm not saying that any given person is or is not guilty, just that they deserve a fair trial.