groos

Would he have gone to jail if the money had come from Zionists? Because that's how campaign finance currently works in the US.

'Learning must be uncomfortable' - this is the key reason there are some professions which pay more than others. Some people are willing to bear the mental discomfort while others aren't. A lot of people are far more willing to bear physical discomfort but that's almost never monetarily rewarded.

Any meaning associated with the Nobel Peace Prize was demolished when Obama got it without having done anything meaningful except running a campaign on 'Hope'. This was the person that subsequently ok'd 3,000+ drone strikes in Afghanistan, a huge number of which caused heavy collateral damage. Imho, the Nobel Peace Prize should have no money associated with it and be given only posthumously.

It wasn't shut down but definitely hobbled after they lost the lawsuit and were forced to pull copyrighted content from their site that they used to allow signed-in users to check out an hour at a time. My visits to the site dropped 10x after this.

Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.

After reading the Road, I started on Blood Meridian and could not continue, swearing never to read McCarthy again. The man's soul was just too dark.

What is the point? Who wants to watch these videos?

No Curta? This is the one I actually own.

Some statistics from the sentencing page:

Median age 27 Male: 98% Female: 2% Youngest: 19 Oldest: 64 Median prison time: 12 months Median probation time: 24 months

All of the above were Copilot inferred. Don't know why I need to know the above, though. :-)

Have you not seen any news coming out of Gaza for the past two years? It's a desolate flattened lunarscape. Israel never had any intent of avoiding civilian deaths. Quite the contrary in fact and they still have their eyes on the West Bank.

You don't need repro steps if Apple is serious about quality. Just the description of what's happening should give enough to a senior Apple engineer to intuit where this is possibly happening and create tests that will stress their software to repro this.

Many thanks.

Is there a reference for ODEs that you like?

I always see RK(Fe) mentioned but almost never Bulirsch-Stoer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulirsch%E2%80%93Stoer_algorit...). Some years ago, I was looking to do high precision orbital motion (involving several bodies) simulations, and came across this in Numerical Recipes for C. I don't pretend to understand how B-S works, but it produced amazing precision with adaptive step size adjustment. For highly chaotic systems, it held out far longer than RK.

Why would I use it, when it has every possibility of getting yanked in the future?

The two main parts of a typical C++ compiler are the front-end, which handles language syntax and semantic analysis, and the back-end, which handles code generation. C++ makes it difficult to implement the front-end as a multithreaded program because it has context‑sensitive syntax (as does C). The meaning of a construct can change depending on whether a name encountered during parsing refers to an existing declaration or not.

As a result, parsing and semantic analysis cannot be easily divided into independent parts to run in parallel, so they must be performed serially. A modern implementation will typically carry out semantic analysis in phases, for example binding names first, then analyzing types, and so on, before lowering the resulting representation to a form suitable for code generation.

Generally speaking, declarations that introduce names into non‑local scopes must be compiled serially. This also makes the symbol table a limiting factor for parallelism, since it must be accessed in a mutually exclusive manner. _Some_ constructs can be compiled in parallel, such as function bodies and function template instantiations, but given that build systems already implement per‑translation‑unit parallelism, the additional effort is often not worthwhile.

In contrast, a language like C# is designed with context‑free syntax. This allows a top‑level fast parse to break up the source file (there are no #include's in C#) into declarations that can, in principle, be processed in parallel. There will still be dependencies between declarations, and these will limit parallelism. But given that C# source files are a tiny fraction of the size of a typical C++ translation unit, even here parallel compilation is probably not a big win.

The C++ back-end can take advantage of multithreading far more than the front end. Once global optimizations are complete, the remaining work can be queued in parallel for code generation. MSVC works in exactly this way and provides options to control this parallelism. However, parallelism is limited by Amdahl’s Law, specifically the need to read in the IR generated by the front-end and to perform global optimizations.

Needs a tweak for programming: () looks like []. Otherwise, I like it.

We, in the tech industry, go all starry-eyed when we imagine utopian futures filled with robots that will do all your tedious chores. But a dark side of this that goes unnoticed is that such automation is often just a way for money to be transferred from the poorest sections of society to the richest.

This fact was driven home to me recently when dropping my mother off at the airport. For various reasons, my mother us to use wheelchair assistance when flying, and I usually get a "gate pass" to accompany her to the gate. An airline provided wheelchair is pushed by an airline employee whom I usually tip a decent amount every time. The last time she flew, the employee insisted that we had to make a detour, otherwise they would "write him up". Not wishing to make his life hard, we agreed and he brought us to an area where they were trialing robotic wheelchairs. They insisted my mother use the robotic wheelchair and since I was with her an a little curious, we agreed. In the process of tranferring her, I forgot to tip the wheelchair pusher.

The robotic wheelchair was an unconditional disaster. In a busy airport, it stopped every time it detected anyone within 5 feet of it and took 20 min to get where it would have taken less than 5 with the cherry on top being that it stopped and told my mother to get off 3 gates away. Had I not been with her, I'm not sure what she would have done, being too weak to lift her carry-on and walking to the gate.

But thinking about it a bit, I realized that sooner or later, the robotic wheelchair would be improved to the point that it did just as good a job as the human pusher at which point, all the income earned by the humans, all of whom are from the poorer sections of society, would be transferred to the robotic wheelchair company and its shareholders, all of whom are probably in the top 2% wealth-wise.

This transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich seems to be a recurrent theme in tech. Sure new wealth eventually is made, but it seems it's mostly for the top strata, with us techies being paid well enough to prevent us from feeling too many scruples.

What most people don't realize is that Alzheimer's - and its friend FTD - are terminal diseases with life expectancy just as bad as many cancers. Hardly anyone makes it to 5 years after diagnosis. The bodily degeneration that eventually results in the patient being utterly unable to function is heartbreaking. Forgetting things is a relatively minor symptom. It's also terrible on the family members of the patient whose mental health also suffers along the way.

Suicide is quite a stretch without any supporting evidence from the pilots' backgrounds. I would take mental fog, cognitive overload, wrong muscle memory, even a defective fuel cutoff system over suicide.

One thing I've experienced in trying to use LLMs to code in an existing large code base is that it's _extremely_ hard to accurately describe what you want to do. Oftentimes, you are working on a problem with a web of interactions all over the code and describing the problem to an LLM will take far longer than just doing it manually. This is not the case with generating new (boilerplate) code for projects, which is where users report the most favorable interaction with LLMs.

It's the general ellipsoid formula: x*2/a*2 + y*2/b*2 + z*2/c*2 = 1, where a, b and c are all unequal. The interesting part is actually that this shape could be made of a liquid, held by gravitation and maintain this asymmetrical shape. Normally, one would imagine it would be ellipsoid of revolution, where two of the axes are equal.

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

To make a plot in software such as JMol, you really need parametric equations, which are also given in the above page.

All Abrahamic faiths ban lending where the returned amount is greater than that borrowed, i.e. charging interest. Judaism "worked around" it by banning it amongs Jews but allowed lending on interest to non-Jews. Christianity originally followed Jewish law in this regard but abandoned it later on. Islam, adheres to banning interest strictly, but this is subject to different interpretations. E.g., buying an item at a higher price but paying in installments is allowed by some schools of jurisprudence, while others disallow it, while there is unanimous condemnation of a loan whose interest "doubles and redoubles" [explicit in the Quran], which is the typical credit card or mortgage. The main difference in buying at a higher price + installments from a conventional interest based lone is that the profit gets agreed to at sale, and it holds regardless of whether the full payment is made early or not.

Muslims have got around the problem of not being able to pay for houses in cash by constructing a joint ownership scheme, where the lender and buyer enter into a joint ownership of the house; the buyer pays rent and adds extra to buy more equity, and the rent goes to both the buyer and lender in proportion to their equity as a business partnership. Over time, the rent part decreases and the equity buying accelerates. There are other models, but this is the most popular one. Due to Federal and state laws, such mortgages are often reported with interest rates even though, technically, interest is not being charged.

Ignore the naysayers here. Good job!

What a delight! Thanks for the link.

I once pulled on a glass pipette too hard and got benzene in my mouth. This was 36 years ago, still doing well :-)

I had this conversation with a friend:

HIM: AI is going to take all entry level jobs soon. ME: So the next level one up will become entry level? HIM: Yes. ME: Inductively, this can continue up to the CEO. What about the CEO? HIM. Wait...

OP should try Scholax as well. I'm very partial to it.

I had the same thought - what Matt's examples required was strong typing and that has existed for very long time outside of the C family world.

What a strange statement. Turkish (the Language) existed before the Ataturk's forced conversion into Romanized script and previously used the extended Arabic script. There are other languages which are written in multiple scripts, even outside of computing. In today's world, it's just as possible to type in Arabic as in Romanized Turkish, so whoever wants to do whatever, the capability exists.