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jhbadger

7,889 karma · joined June 4, 2014

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jhbadger··on Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
"A museum" is already a lot more than visitors can see. As stated they generally only show a tiny fraction of their collections and besides that many museums employ dozens of full time researchers who use the collections to do analyses and publish papers. It is as prestigious to be faculty at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, or the Smithsonian in DC as it is at a major university. But without visitors it is hard to bring in money either directly or indirectly.
jhbadger··on Watson Jr. memo about CDC 6600 (1963)
Cray had a funny quote on the virtues of fast CPUs over parallelism "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?". Of course history has shown that the "chickens" was the strategy the field went with.
jhbadger··on Bill Draper has died
I do wish that "Silicon Valley" would have been elsewhere less useful, though. As mentioned, before it became the tech hub, the Santa Clara valley was extremely productive agricultural land that is now paved over.
jhbadger··on Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
And in natural history museums their primary purpose isn't to show little Jimmy a T. rex skeleton but to preserve the fossils and other specimens for scientific research.
jhbadger··on Show HN: Pyxel – A Python retro game engine with built-in art and sound editors
To follow up on kitao's response, with its editor system allowing you to interactively edit sprites and sounds, pyxel is more like a "fantasy console" like PICO-8 and TIC-80 if you are familar with those.
jhbadger··on Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)
The problem is that they used to say that about chess. In the 1980s it was thought that grandmaster-level chess wasn't just algorithically looking at the board and computing scores for moves as chess programs did but something that required the intuitive powers of the human mind. After all, it's clear that Kasparov wasn't computing the scores of millions of possible moves across future board states in his head but simply "saw" the right one to take by a process he couldn't explain. And yet he was eventually beaten by a machine - not even one using a clever algorithm - just a machine that did pretty much what any stupid chess program did but faster. It turned out that human "intuition" wasn't needed.
jhbadger··on NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates
"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" -- Carl Sagan
jhbadger··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
And in some places they are. Japan works that way - houses generally lose value over time and there is even a cultural stigma against living in a "used house" - if you can afford it the convention is to buy a house and knock it down and start fresh.
jhbadger··on My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
A hobby of mine is finding "walking guides" to various places in used book stores and trying to replicate them in Google Maps.
jhbadger··on Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived
Funny if it were, but I was in Wisconsin.
jhbadger··on Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived
I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I worked part time in the university library working on databases and interfaces first in dBase III then Foxbase (the predecessor to Foxpro; basically an extended dBase III clone) then DOS FoxPro. I rather liked them, but this was long before I had ever seen SQL or anything like that. The weird thing was that my boss (besides being the library's IT guy) was a taekwondo instructor! What is it about FoxPro and that?
jhbadger··on What Sun got wrong
I seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
jhbadger··on Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point
The US is weird in that we can't really decide if you are an adult at 16 (can work a standard job, can drive), 18 (can vote, can serve in the military) or 21 (can drink). In fact for a while between the Vietnam War and the late 1980s, the drinking/smoking age was 18 in many states (or odd compromises where you could drink beer at 18 but liquor at 21). It was largely pressure from groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that increased the drinking age.
jhbadger··on College Is Coming Apart After Successive, Overlapping Crises
It starts out that way, but moves more into the viewpoint that the American university system is several things bundled together that are coming apart and AI is only part of the issue (others are just the Internet in general creating a parallel social life and the current American government deciding that research funding is a political tool rather than a value in itself.) Basically university traditionally is where young people figure out their interests and people they want to hang out with are, the education and credentialing system they need to get a job, and independent of these undergraduates, a research institution bringing in millions of dollars of grant money a year per university, which people not professors or grad students only vaguely aware exist.
jhbadger··on UFO Series Home Page: "UFO" TV Series from 1970
Mel Brooks also lessened the effect of Blazing Saddles by reusing a lot of the gags in other of his movies -- like the joke where dramatic music is played and the characters look around wondering where the music is coming from, implying that they can hear it too.
jhbadger··on We are unconsciously becoming someone else
I think the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on rivers manages it nicely, with no confusion with aqueducts: "A river is a natural stream of fresh water that flows on land or inside caves towards another body of water at a lower elevation, such as an ocean, lake, or another river."
jhbadger··on AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
>That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing.

By the people not involved in the things breaking maybe. If you didn't drive a taxi or run a hotel the tech companies "disrupting" things by breaking laws didn't affect you directly. Now with LLMs, they do.

jhbadger··on Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
That's a huge number given that there were only 26 in total, and many of them had historically used Cyrillic anyway. Basically everybody who weren't Russian (or a close relative) switched.
jhbadger··on Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?
I think it is true in general at least for people older than their twenties. People who have gotten divorced dread getting back into the dating scene.
jhbadger··on Lucasart's Afterlife
True. But they were still kind of addictive (at least to me)
jhbadger··on Lucasart's Afterlife
There was also Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures which used the same engine. Both were rather harshly reviewed at the time for being "pointless" - presumably the reviewers didn't like the random generation - while "rogue" (and Nethack, etc) existed, the idea of a "roguelike" hadn't quite gelled as a concept in pop culture yet.
jhbadger··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
Some people might actually prefer physical books and are making an informed decision, but I suspect more simply haven't experienced e-books, or only have tried on a suboptimal device like their phone and just assume that e-books are an inferior experience. While I still have hundreds of physical books, as I age I much prefer reading on an e-ink device where I can choose the font size I prefer.
jhbadger··on We've followed their lives for six decades; now the stars of 7 Up are bowing out
The Up series is genuinely interesting though and previous installments directed by the late Michael Apted were critically acclaimed. The fact that these people are normal British people (from various socioeconomic classes) is the point -- you can look at them at different ages and see how the intersection of personality, ability, and class affected their development.
jhbadger··on The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.
jhbadger··on The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
The difference is some taboos are just based on tradition, and others are based on actual damage. Nobody is hurt by seeing someone walking and eating -- they can just not look at them and the problem is solved. You can't not just hear the noise people inconsiderate not to use headphones make.
jhbadger··on AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust
I think it started in 2000 when Al Gore who clearly won the election was discarded in favor of Dubya thanks to a biased Supreme Court.
jhbadger··on AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust
I think you are vastly exaggerating the power of a few nerds -- the vast majority of people have never heard of Gamergate. I'm a nerd and even I only vaguely heard about it at the time.
jhbadger··on Logo Programming
Logo is a serious programming language. People maybe only know it as the thing to teach kids programming via turtle graphics, but people like Brian Harvey at Berkley have used it to teach functional programming rather than Lisp or Scheme.
jhbadger··on Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
jhbadger··on The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
Well, not quite. Not showing your hair or not eating in public may have meaning in somebody's culture/religion, but it doesn't hurt anyone else either way. Playing video/music without earphones does. And surely people must have experienced it from the other side when people nearby were playing music they didn't care for. I think it is reasonable for people to ask themselves "Would I like it if someone near me did <X>?", and if the answer is 'No' to not do it themselves. Maybe this is "shame" or maybe simple empathy.
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