365 karma · joined November 18, 2016
https://thelogicofscience.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/hierar...
Well that’s certainly a perspective.
Ugh. Hope you picked up a gallon of eye bleach on your way out.
Plus pure FP code should time-independent in its evaluation, so it doesn’t take a genius to imagine the benefits of (safely!) introducing a time axis on top of that. Procedural generation, animation; great potential there.
This is not all idle speculation, BTW: I wrote a semi-declarative DSL for 2D artwork production that blew its traditional imperative rivals out of the water while also being easy enough for non-programmers to use. So I know there’s potential there, and I’d be fascinated to see what kind of language someone with a mind for 3D math could shape for the task. Plus as a trained sculptor turned automation junkie who can’t stand GUI-based 3D drawing apps (they just don’t fit my head), I’d love to try something with a language-based interface instead.
See also:
- PostScript, a complete concatenative programming language for 2D drawing (incidentally, Adobe used to do a vector-based 3D drawing tool too: https://web.archive.org/web/19991127092153/http://www.adobe....)
- Alan Kay’s Maru/Nile/Gezira stack (or how to write a full 2D graphics engine in 500LOC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10540031).
Uh-huh.
“If all goes well, there will be millions of scanners deployed by this fall”
Ageing well…
Though having both witnessed and perpetrated the very real human damage that dishonest/irrational/delusional belief systems can and will do, you’ll forgive me if I do not congratulate you on the rest.
Change is Threat to the status quo.
PDF format is perfectly capable of holding structured text and other machine-readable/accessibility data, alongside the print-ready representation. Ask the developers of document authoring tools (starting with MS Office) and the various PDF generation libraries why they don’t include all that data as standard.
One can argue the appropriateness of a print-derived format in a constantly fluid digital world, but it does what it was designed to do and does it pretty well, and it could provide a lot more if developers and users could be bothered to do it.
And yes, HTML is its own exercise in awfulness that is equally bad at everything. I’d rather set my feet on fire that propagate that horror further.
Honestly, what we really need is a 21st-century Donald Knuth. I only wish she’d hurry up.
Plenty of it is also on managers who simply aren’t competent to manage, of which there is a tragic abundance. If that really bothers you, move up to management and start doing the job better or go find a new job. Otherwise, not your circus, not your monkeys.† Just make sure to keep your papertrail.
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† Whereas the liabilities for screwing with production code outside your scope of work def should be. Though again, that assumes a management that actually understands what’s going on in its own shop, and isn’t just running around with its hair on fire 24/7.
“jq 1.5 released, including new datetime, math, and regexp functions, try/catch syntax, array and object destructuring, a streaming parser, and a module system”
These big bloated behavioral silos that keep popping up on Unix are neither good nor accidental: they’re the symptom of a fundamental fault in the underlying host. Because when the most complex concept it is capable of communicating on clients’ behalf is “Ugg bang rock!”, it should come as no surprise when its clients all go “fuckit, I’ll just do it all myself”. And so it goes.
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That’s not a bad customer. They may be a tough and unpleasant one, but as long as they’re bringing in more money for your company than you’re paying out to support them, you’re solid†. The bad ones are the ones who land you in the red for your trouble.
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† Of course, if you can find yourself other customers who’ll generate more revenue for less pain, by all means cut the ballaches loose just as soon as you contractually can. That’s just good business.
Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than it earns back in revenue. It’s simple arithmetic.
Maybe they don’t bother to pay their bills. Maybe they run you ragged with endless change requests. Maybe they repeatedly start new projects then, just as you’ve done all the prep work, put them “on hold”. Maybe they string you along with promises of “big projects” coming down the pipeline that never actually arrive. Whatever it is, every hour you sink on them is an hour not spent on a customer that is profitable.
The article may be thin, but it’s absolutely right: get rid of those assholes ASAP, and then fix your own damn processes so you don’t get screwed again. Otherwise they’ll drag you down and drain your business for you.
FP is predicated on referential transparency. FP decides the order of operations, not the programmer. If you don’t have that, you don’t have FP: you’ve got procedural programming with closures. Which is nice, but claiming you’re doing “Functional Programming” smells of this:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
An effective tool is defined as much by what it cannot do as by what it can. In FP’s case, forbidding the unpredictability of mutable-state-over-time permits the automation of higher-level mathematical reasoning, enabling both compiler and runtime to make their own optimizations as they see fit: stronger guarantees of program correctness, deferring costly operations until/if they’re needed, caching the results for fast cheap reuse, parallelizing calculations without fear of races. Powerful stuff, as long as you’re willing to cede a bit of control.
If C and its procedural ilk are all a Swiss Army hammer, declarative programming systems (functional, logic, dataflow, etc) are these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/
A good craftsman should know when to use which; alas, we all too often end up seeing this instead:
I’d also suggest that the toxo-inflicted depression will be offset by the many added joys of being personally owned by a furry, purry, and only occasionally—ow, sharp!—bundle of utterly adorable fluff. Which is to say, humans are a bit more complex than ants, thus effects will be a lot less clear-cut.
And +1 for failing fast. It is failing slow that’s the disaster.
Been there, done that, lost the shirt. Lessons learned.
From reading the article author’s failure was failing to ask that question of himself. With no clear objective or milestones, the project ate a huge amount of manpower for no material gain and left him thoroughly burnt out.
It doesn’t matter if your project is for-profit or Free. Identify your deliverables, identify your schedule, and never turn a blind-eye to your failures to meet both.
Oh, and never mistake makework for productivity either. If your product isn’t selling, what it doesn’t need is more features. What it does need is better marketing and sales skills. Quite frankly, building the technology part is the least important part of building a successful Product. Being geeks, it’s awfully easy to work on (i.e. fiddle with) the one bit that you’re naturally good at, when what you should be doing is working on all the parts that you’re not.
As for heart disease, that’s largely a product of lifestyle choices: smoking, obesity, inactivity. And doctors already tell their patients to eat healthily and exercise daily, but who wants to hear that when they’re young enough not to feel the consequences, or old enough not to want to change their ways now?
Hence the eternal market for easy, quick magical pills and their silver-tongued salesmen that promise to cure it all.
We began as a species programmed to spot the difference between a zebra and lion on the plains of the Serengeti, and we’ve barely evolved since—if anything, we’re even easier to hack now. Just ask the vampires.
IANAS, but even I know Correlation does not mean Causation. The paper itself only says “associated with”, not “responsible for”. Being an observational study of self-selecting cohorts, even with the authors’ attempts to control the confounders will be massive.
Honestly, this is the standard of reporting I’d expect from yellow-bellied fish wrappers like the Daily Mail. Please do better.
And profitable too, I have no doubt. Thanks to Orrin Hatch, US supplement peddlers don’t even have to prove their products are safe, never mind effective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...
I bet the oft-reviled Big Pharma (who, amusingly enough, are some of the biggest manufactures of supplements too) just wish all their products could enjoy such lax standards of regulation. Meanwhile, to everyone else, I wholeheartedly recommend The Poison Squad:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squ...
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312067/the-poison-s...
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=glucosamine
Still, I took a look at Dr Stanfield’s youtube channel (because nothing says “primary source” like a YT link):
As a side note, here's all the supplements I currently take (affiliate links):
WAKE UP:
• Sulforaphane 8mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Niacin 50-500mg ( https://amzn.to/… ) - start low to help with flushing
WORKOUT:
• Creatine 2.5g before & after ( https://amzn.to/… )
BREAKFAST:
• Vitamin K2 MK-7 90μg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Vitamin D3 3,000 IU ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Omega-3 (DHA/EPA) two capsules ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Trans-Resveratrol 500mg ( https://amzn.to/… or https://cntr.click/… )
• Pterostilbene 150mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Collagen 10g ( https://amzn.to/… )
LUNCH:
• Niacin 50-500mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Trimethylglycine (TMG) 750mg ( https://amzn.to/… or https://cntr.click/… )
NIGHT (one hour before sleeping):
• Metformin 1 gram (only on non-workout days)
• Melatonin 500mcg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Magnesium Taurate 125mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
ONCE I can afford it (will take in the morning):
• Nicotinamide Mononucleotide (NMN) 1 gram ( https://amzn.to/… or https://cntr.click/… )
BTW, here’s what your own Cochrane link says, which suggests you didn’t even bother to read it yourself:
“The current evidence does not support the use of antioxidant supplements in the general population or in patients with various diseases.”
IANAD, but I advise you apply some skepticism to that burn ASAP.
The logistical problem is, well… see all the other comments from those who don’t want it to change, whether through laziness, apathy, turf protection, or whatever. Next to the People Problem, the technical problem is the easy part to solve.
Incidentally, here’s what a good 1980s CLI looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
Whereas the nix craphouse we’re now stuck with isn’t even a good 1970s* CLI.
Honestly, at this point I wouldn’t even bother trying incremental improvement. The *nix CLI does what it was built to do, and that’s all. When substantive change does come to text UIs it will be as revolution, not evolution.
Draw a line under it. Learn its lessons, both the DOs and DON’Ts. Then whiteboard from the ground-up what needs to come next. Work out where UI/UX needs to be in 2040 to effectively serve the billions of users of the generations to come, and make a start on building that. Dash ahead of history for a change, not be shackled and dragged back by it.
As old, traditional divisions between text, voice, and touch interaction become increasingly frustrating impediments in modern mass-market devices, there’s a killing to be made in smashing down all those old artificial barriers and replacing them all a single unified interaction model that can transition seamlessly between all three modes as its users’ needs and wishes direct.
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-d...
Programmers like you are the reason I finally taught myself how to code, so I would never have to depend on your sort for anything. You’re a smug, condescending martinet with a grossly inflated sense of your own specialness, and the sooner you grow up/the world kicks you to the curb, the better.
So here’s me expressing my freedom of thought and expression by having nothing more to do with you.
https://jaxenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/women-in-com...