johnaspden

In England we have proper laws, so car headlights aren't so bad (even though they're still way brighter than they need to be, they point down).

Our problem is insanely bright LED lights on bicycles (and even joggers)!

I speak as a cyclist who no longer even owns a car.

I never thought I'd get more angry at people riding bikes than driving.....

In France when I was a boy, headlights needed to be yellow rather than white, exactly so they weren't blinding. And everyone did this. If you were visiting from abroad you had to put yellow cellophane over your lights. It was lovely.

As I remember PWM is to control the brightness of the LED. LEDs can only shine at one brightness, they're either on or off, so to dim them to half-brightness you need to have them on half the time, off half the time. That's how you get all the different colours from three LEDs.

But they can switch on and off very fast, so if 50Hz is flickery, you can use 500Hz, or 5000Hz. Most microcontrollers have circuitry for this built in, so you just literally write a different constant into the controller.

I once made an LED dashboard for use in police cars. After it was rolled out, it was discovered that the flicker frequency was interfering with the radio (the only bug ever found in my code!)

My client called me back in to fix it, so I added a zero in the relevant place, and recompiled the code.

£400 for about twenty minutes work.

it's an ironic sarcasm marker

Comparing 90% to 5% would be very silly. What percentage of cancer-related deaths are attributable to tobacco use? (In the same sense of "attributable" as for the alcohol?)

Lancet's British

Using the power of not pronouncing most of the letters and speaking very very fast, they can get it down to:

batlefe pend ki letencoshow

which is more manageable.

It's true, I have no idea what Mastodon is, but if some bastard's trying to stop me finding out about it, I am going to go and find out about it right now!

I imagine you'd hear more about the Opera. But then I am British.

> This is a line I draw in the sand and will hold to.

Would you play him for money at a game where you are both equally skilled and it's easy to cheat?

They also claim 100 million subscribers, so that's 140,000 cheats. Since if you're cheating you probably do quite well (I pity the engine that could lose to me!), that's likely most of the high-rated players on their site.

And actually this tallies quite well with my experience of amateur physical sport, where at the lower levels everyone's honest and sporting and it's all great fun, but as soon as you get to the point where people are putting their heart and soul into the game, everyone's cheating, everyone knows everyone else is cheating, and anyone who's not cheating might as well give up and go home, as far as winning things is concerned.

Once you put money on it, and you're playing against people you're never likely to meet in real life, Jesus I can't imagine what it's like.

But muh perfectly predictable catastrophe a moderately intelligent twelve year old could see coming and that we could avoid by just not doing that, that we're blundering into because our short-term and long-term incentives are not well aligned, that will destroy the world without a shadow of a doubt!

To save anyone else the trouble:

----

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim:

    Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system.

    Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer.

---

If only the people building the AIs were this stupid!

paywall

This is really great, and looks like it might tie into the idea in negotiation theory of 'splitting the pie'.

Indeed! If only people would eat their vegetables, they'd be immortal.

Say researchers in their mid-fifties, the prime of life.

> shebang of old English style college, the Ivy Leagues aren't the Ivy League

I'm not quite sure what this legacy thing is, but I don't think English universities do it. It sounds corrupt to me, and I think it would be a national scandal.

This is how all of maths is. Before you learn it, it's incomprehensible frightening gibberish. After you learn it, you wonder how anyone can not understand ideas so simple and obvious.

How to get from one state to the other is the whole problem.

The terse symbolic language is someone's best attempt to communicate the beautiful simple idea in their head. More than any other discipline, I think, mathematicians write to be understood, to be clear.

> teacher's solution guide

If the person teaching a maths course needs to look the answers up, you are just fucked.

Very few of the maths textbooks I've read have had the answers to the exercises in them. If the author wants to put in a worked example, that will be in the chapter itself, rather than the exercises.

In maths, you know when you've got an exercise right, and so you don't need the answer written out for you. If you're looking up the answer before you get that feeling, you're cheating yourself. You won't learn the material.

It would seem weird if someone put the answers in the textbook, like having the answers to a newspaper crossword on the same page as the crossword itself. You'd have to exert willpower in order to not look at them.

The whole point of the exercises is to play with the ideas until you understand what they're for. If you don't at least partly invent the subject yourself, you never really 'get' it.

Textbooks are really guides to how to reinvent the field, what order to think about things in, what are the cleanest ways to break up the patterns, what are the best notations to use, so you can reinvent it all at a reasonable speed rather than having to spend a whole lifetime on each problem.

If you literally can't do the exercises despite having read the chapter, then it's a bad textbook. Throw it away and get a better one.

(8+8+8)*100

I'd be pretty damned suspicious of someone claiming to be a maths professor who couldn't tell me what seven eights are.

That's a good tip. I just speculatively typed "!r cats adjust" into the search thingy in firefox and got lots of nice reddit threads.

Someone somewhere (probably duckduckgo) thinks 'search on reddit' is useful enough that there's a shortcut for it.

I'm not sure you can call structured programming a fad!

An awful lot of languages (I'd say all commonly used ones) use if/then/else, do..while, for..next, and so on, but I can't remember the last time I saw a program with a complicated control flow done by gotos.

Such things were common in the 1970s, in fact the first professional program I ever read did it that way, and it took me ages to work out what was going on.

One particularly confusing technique was to goto a computed expression. Leads to all sorts of interesting bugs.

The whole point of structured programming was "Don't do that! You can do everything you want to do with a small set of restricted control structures, and the control flow is much easier to read".

I'd say that idea won so hard that we don't even notice it.

centigrade surely?

Hmm, 100 for human body temperature is good, but 0 for the lowest temperature achievable in a lab 300 years ago is not so good.

The Aspden scale has its zero at water-freezing and 100 at this-will-kill-you-if-you-can't-sweat. 50A is "nice". It's really intuitive and perfect for weather reports. For science, use Kelvin of course.

I've also noticed that murderers tend to be real jerks to non-murderers, and non-murderers tend to be real jerks to murderers. There's a true moral equivalence there.

This is priceless, thank you!

> wearing facemasks to prevent the inhalation of germs

so about three hundred years ahead of the WHO, then...

So, it's certainly not a bioweapon. We know that because it is so crap.

I don't see how that means it can't have leaked from a lab. Can anyone enlighten me?