So, GNUStep all over again, or...?
197 karma · joined May 4, 2017
Can normal people sign up and immediately get QPU time, API access, etc? The D-Wave offering is much more complete, I think.
The tradeoff is pretty obvious: on the one hand you get full control over what code you bring in, but you also get full responsibility of keeping it up to date and it does indeed take up more space. On the other hand you get systemwide updates, but also unpredictability which can break things.
In the former, you have a lot of work to do yourself to maintain your ecosystem between releases. In the latter, a greater amount of effort and responsibility goes onto those who maintain the packages at a distribution level to ensure mutually compatible package selections. This can be done (viz. most of the top tier distributions successfully doing this with occasional problems for decades) but we keep trying new all-in-one mechanisms every few years.
I'm not convinced that there's ever going to be a final answer to this, but it is clear that storage is cheap as chips...
It's far from a glass bead game. Just because you and I don't know how to make an annealer do something useful doesn't mean others aren't already getting exciting and useful results from it.
I'm not great with it yet, but it feels intuitively like a step forward to be able to pass objects around instead of spending so much of my time using awk-ward 40 year old tools to tease text out of various fields.
Do I really want to POST logs? What if the logging endpoint is not available? Don't I want log delivery uncoupled from the application, so logging failures don't become application failures?
Anyone remember KeyDraw? GEM-based vector graphics package for DOS, based on the GUI libraries from GEM Desktop which was the descendant of GEOS / GeoWorks, if I recall. Fantastically learnable program that introduced 5-year-old me into the world of vector art.
(On that front, anyone remember Aldus Intellidraw? Even better, _still_ a better UI than Illustrator, though held back by lack of antialiasing and weak postscript support).
In many ways we're doing that exact thing. The computer at my desk is powerful but somewhat useless; the grand oracle in the form of Google et. al. does the real heavy lifting of giving me useful information. Whether it's a single computer or a bunch of separate ones acting as a whole is pretty immaterial in that sense.
Think of the impact on forensics when every single article contains its source of origin.
Time to start a company selling an invisible privacy spray for your cereal box that coats it in UV ink and obscures the original invisible barcode...
Near as I can tell, it's the only form of practical quantum computation that's available to end-users in any meaningful way. Everything else so far is vaporware with ridiculously high error rates.
> (it is not particularly "quantum" either)
The qubits - josephson junctions and superconducting loops - are indeed in quantum superposition with each other if their claims are true. This is a macroscopic quantum-mechanical effect; to call it "not particularly quantum" belies a lack of understanding as to what they're doing.
> most researchers are fairly annoyed at D-wave for originally pushing this nonsense
D-Wave is making their system publicly available for free. Have you signed up and taken a look at their demos? Admittedly it's a bit beyond my mathematical ability but it's clear the basic seed is there for something that works; they just need a bigger graph and more connections between qubits. There's no reason to assume they won't have their own equivalent of Moore's Law at some point where these things grow year over year.
> transmon qubits at Google/IBM/Yale for some well known prototypes of quantum computing hardware (which are admittedly quite far from being practical or usable).
Do they have _any_ results worth caring about yet? I don't think they're anywhere near something working on a practical scale. You can buy a D-Wave machine, or time on it - it's not vaporware, even if most people don't find it useful. For the first few years of gate model machines people aren't really going to find them all that useful for day to day things either - just like computers in the 1940s and 50s, it was very specific, high-dollar applications first, and things for the common man decades later.
IANACS, but I'd say the point at which it becomes capable of running Turing-complete languages. This probably covers anything that has a firmware, save maybe if there exist firmwares programmed in limited languages that can't execute arbitrary computation.
Well, the D-Wave quantum computer seems to be functionally an analogue machine, so while you're limited to some variety of floating point precision when specifying the values for qubit and connection bias, it's certainly not 0 and 1 when it hits the hardware.
In comparison, Unix provides all the tools needed to take it apart and put it back together again. When you do need to interact with some syscall interface, there's almost always a complete CLI around it. It really makes it much easier to get into the nooks and crannies, inconsistencies aside.
Sure, it's not a gate model, but they have a pile of working, useful applications already. Significantly more useful than anything MS is doing on the topic, that's for sure.
There's also something about the snappiness of desktop apps on hardware 1/100th the speed of what we're running now that I dearly miss.
- Was focused on empire building, wanted lots of underlings to help prop him up into management, vs. actually getting his project done, to the extent where he actively blew out the scope and made requirements gathering take almost an entire year - for a simple IT ticketing system - just so he could hire a team of BAs
- Had different versions of the truth for every person he talked to, insisted on closed-door conversations with individuals, avoided ever bringing multiple people together, but consistently talked about people who weren't in the room in a disparaging way. No doubt he was disparaging me when I wasn't there.
- Gaslit multiple people to believe their experience/views (and we're talking about a big team experienced IT professionals) were useless, wrong, that they were out of touch, and that they should be worried about their jobs
- Conspired to get the existing director, who rightfully questioned all of this, fired, and succeeded, and then took his job, which he managed to have for six months before he was fired for incompetence (which is pretty hard to do in academia).
I hear he asked one of my former colleagues who was also a victim of his near-sociopathy to help him find a job not so long ago; he was told to go and f* himself.
I've discovered that my 5-month-old really loves the sound, he wanted to get up and dance a jig. Unexpected and heartwarming.
I can empathize with this. My brother faced the same situation. It is hard to face an uphill battle against an unforgiving public every day. You're right to try to get out and the time is ripe to do so.
> I failed to learn any of these lanagauges.
You need to dig deep and analyze your past failure, and learn from it. What do you think kept you from successfully learning a language?
- Cognitive: were some of the concepts too difficult or too poorly explained, causing a stumbling block you couldn't get past?
- Breadth: did it seem like too big of an effort, resulting in an intimidation effect you couldn't overcome?
- Goals or the lack thereof: did you make decent starting progress, but not find something concrete to work on that was within your capabilities?
- Patience and persistence: did you make some progress and then find yourself unwilling to stick with it long enough to see it through?
In general, the way to learn a language is to come up with a small (and I mean small!) first project that is well within your understanding conceptually, and then tackle it with your new language. When you get stuck, get reading, and stick to your guns. The feeling of success needs to work as your inspiration.
If overcoming the small roadblocks with a learning victory doesn't give you a bit of a rush and some energy to keep going, though, this might not be the path for you. There's no shame in that; there are still plenty of other directions to take your life in that don't involve programming.
Who are these people? Has this actually happened? Is it going to become incumbent upon conference organizers to carefully investigate the political views of every attendee and speaker to ensure they fit some carefully selected parameters of acceptability?
> To be clear, the code of conduct as it was written in 2016 already prohibited harassment of all kinds, including harassment of a political nature. But the 2017 language makes political affiliation a protected class, which means by my reading (and the Wikipedia definition) that people of specific political affiliations qualify for special protection by the authorities in charge of the event.
This sounds like a pretty fantastic change to me. If the code of conduct can serve to enable people from diverse political backgrounds (it's not like a trans advocate doesn't count as "politically diverse"!) to come together at an event and not harass or bother each other, isn't it serving its purpose quite well?
> You can't make marginalized people-- who are enumerated as a protected class-- feel safe, and simultaneously make members of political groups who stand violently opposed to us feel welcome.
Why not? Your "feeling" of safety unfortunately has to matter less, as compared to your actual experience of being safe - and if you can get through the conference without any harassment or people bothering you any moreso than the general population does on a day-to-day basis, aren't the conference organizers doing enough?
> You might think that politics don't belong at a technology conference, but I would argue that politics and software are so tangled that they cannot be reasonably separated.
Largely because of the influence of people like this author, who over the past few decades have taken one of the most equalizing forces in human history - the combination of semi-anonymous internet access and open source projects that welcome any contributor - and have turned it into a war for political correctness. It was arguably much easier to be a transperson and contribute to open source in an era where one's personal identity wasn't necessarily as tied to one's work as it is becoming. Nobody has to care about the politics of User X if they're submitting good patches and making good technical points.
Can these two spaces not exist with minimized overlap? Can politics not be kept to politically-themed conferences / forums / venues, and technical ones try to remain pure on the merit of technical effort and quality?
> Or even simple things, like he/she pronoun selections on sign-up forms. Or health and wellness apps that assume that all women menstruate, or that none of their users menstruate. All of these technologies are inherently political. There is no neutral political position in technology.
I don't see how these things are technical. Technical is the mechanism that displays the form on the screen, the processes that handle the data behind the scenes. The actual choice of what's on screen really isn't as much a technical thing as it is a business thing. There's probably room in some conferences about user experience for this kind of thing, but it doesn't have to be shoehorned in everywhere. It would be like going to a car show and complaining that the cars aren't displayed in your favourite color - it's so immaterial to the point of the event as to make me question whether the author actually gets the point of these conferences, which is supposed to be information exchange, networking, and so forth, not a soapbox for politics.
> Update > Tim O’Reilly published a blog post on LinkedIn saying that the language would be removed and apologizing for its inclusion.
Great, so the effort to be _more_ inclusive has been quashed by someone who in general relies on inclusion efforts. Ironic, much?