johngossman

I suggest you go meet some PhD mathematicians and have that discussion.

Newton and Gauss and Euler did just fine without such solid foundations. If you get a PhD, very likely even a undergraduate degree in mathematics you cover this stuff, then (unless you choose foundations as your field) you go about doing statistics, or algebra (the higher kind), or analysis knowing you're working on solid fundamentals. It would be crazy if every time you proved something in one of those fields you had to state which derivation of real number you were using. And I guarantee at least 90% of PhD mathematicians could do so if they really needed to.

Citation?

Not to mention that a lot of Japanese cafes don't open until late morning or early afternoon.

Oh boy...more memories. About a decade later at work I identified a bottleneck in our line-drawing code. The final step was to cast two floats (a point) to integers, which the compiler turned into ftoa() calls. Unfortunately, ftoa changed and restored the floating point control flags in order to set the rounding behavior (the Intel default did not match the standard library spec). Even more unfortunately, this stalled the Pentium's instruction pipeline. Replacing the casts with a simple fld/fist pair was another 100x speedup. A few years later I noticed the compilers started adding optimization flags controlling this behavior.

Sometime in the 80s, I implemented the core of the Mandelbrot Set calculation using assembly on an 8087. As the article mentions, the compilers did math very inefficiently on this stack architecture. For example, if you multiplied two numbers together and then added a third, they would push the first two numbers, multiply, pop the result, push the result back onto the stack (perhaps clearing the stack? after 40 years I don't remember), push the third number, add, pop the result. For the Mandelbrot loop this was even worse, as it never kept the results of the loop. My assembly kept all the intermediate results on the stack for a 100x speed up.

Running this code, the 8087 emitted a high-pitched whine. I could tell when my code was broken and it had gone into an infinite loop by the sound. Which was convenient because, of course, there was no debugger.

Thanks for bringing back this memory.

Mathematics is such an old field, older than anything except arguably philosophy, that it's too broad and deep for anyone to really understand everything. Even in graduate school I often took classes in things discovered by Gauss or Euler centuries before. A lot of the mathematical topics the HN crowd seems to like--things like the Collatz conjecture or Busy Beavers--are 60, 80 years old. So, you end up having to spend years specializing and then struggle to find other with the same background.

All of which is compounded by the desire to provide minimal "proofs from the book" and leave out the intuitions behind them.

And you don't think she knows this? She's clearly fascinated with the Romans, despite all she finds unappealing about them. Which can easily be said about a lot (most?) of history. Based on books and TV, WW2 is possibly the historical period that draws the most attention, which doesn't mean the historians (or their readers) "love WW2."

I have a b&w photo of my (considerably) older brother, from the early 1960s, reading a pile of comic books a foot high. The only cover visible is Spiderman #4. When I was a kid I used to stare at that picture and dream.

Needless to say, I kept all my old comics.

I think you're right that the inelegant part is how AI seems to just consist of endless loops of multiplication. I say this as a graphics programmer who realized years ago that all those beautiful images were just lots of MxNs, and AI takes this to a whole new level. When I was in college they told us most of computing resources were used doing Linear Programming. I wonder when that crossed over to graphics or AI (or some networking operation like SSL)?

I've been reading Hanselman's blog for ages. That's just the way he writes. Compare this post from 2013 (clearly pre-LLM)

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ipad-surface-ultrabook-are-we...

Agreed. It's a fine article but leaves half the story on the table. It is supposedly comparing what these movies looked like in the theater to the modern streaming and bluray versions, but is actually comparing what a film scan (scanner settings unspecified) projected on a TV (or other unspecified screen) looks like compared to the digital versions on (presumably) the same screen. And then we can ask: how were the comparison images captured, rendered to jpeg for the web, before we the readers view them on our own screens? I'm not arguing Catmull and company didn't do a great job of rendering to film, but this comparison doesn't necessarily tell us anything.

Don't believe me? Download the comparison pictures in the article to your device and play with filters and settings. You can get almost anything you want and the same was true at every step in the render pipeline to your TV.

Ps - and don't get me started on how my 60-year old eyes see color to what they perceived when I saw this in the theater

Iirc, Chris Whittle proposed this idea of refrigerator advertising in the 1980s. Seemed dystopian then. Ugh.

As bad as AI experiences often are, I speculate that we are actually in a golden age before they are fully enshittified.

Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I'd say people took nuclear war seriously. People had different opinions on how likely it was and whether it was an extinction event, but there was near unanimity that it was "a really bad idea." The obvious difference was that was impossible to doubt it was man-made and it wasn't something that slowly built up over decades--there was no way to say it was "normal"

On the other hand, a lot more books are published now. There are a lot of books, especially in the genre of experimental literature, that are stranger and more difficult than this. I'd classify Infinite Jest or any of the Irving Welsh books as more ghoulish and harder to read, and those are almost mainstream compared to some things.

Popularity is another matter, but then literary fiction has never been popular, almost by definition, compared to genres: romance, mystery, etc.

This is one of these nuanced takes that will please few. It acknowledges all sorts of uncertainty and adopts ethical priorities that cannot be established empirically even if (unlikely) the facts are universally agreed upon. I applaud the attempt and wish there could be real debate over this and other complex positions.

There's already plenty to go around. It's like paintings in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa is overrun because there's a kind of mythology about it, not because nobody paints anymore.

As another poster commented, there are people who still build with traditional materials and methods. The temples are made of wood and have to be renovated. Some are completely rebuilt, symbolic of the transitory nature of the material world. Enryakuji is undergoing renovations and they had to completely cover it with a metal shed while they work on the roof. But it's still open and you can still visit either as a sacred site or to learn about the traditional methods. It is supposed to finished in 2026.

As far as building new temples. Those monasteries had thousands of resident monks. They were significant military powers they were so populated. Even though the overall population of Japan has grown, far fewer people want to live that life. But again, there's no shortage of temples.

An interesting feature of getting old is when you see something you haven't in 30+ years and it suddenly snaps into focus. X-Copy was invaluable.

The author interviews both Pico Iyer and Alex Kerr. I can't recommend these two authors highly enough. Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk" and Kerr's "Another Kyoto" are worth reading even if you don't travel to Japan.

I was in Kyoto last year for two weeks. There are still lots of places where you can be completely alone in nature or a garden or a lovely street. But "the Big Five" are off limits unless you love human traffic jams.

That said, Gion before 10am is practically empty. You can wander around and look at the architecture. And I know quiet places within five blocks of central Gion.

I have mixed feelings about even saying this. Please, don't go . But if you are a respectful, slow traveler, Kyoto is still doable.

At which point you're not just memory mapping the file. And if the new version changes the size of the object, it doesn't pack in the same place in memory, so you have to repack before saving. Even serializing with versioning is very hard. Memory mapping is much worse. Several other comments indicate that I am not the only one with bad experiences here.

Your mileage may be different. I didn't work on Word (though I talked to those guys about their format) but I worked on two other apps that used the same strategy in the same era. One, on load you had to fix up runtime data that landed in that part of the data segment. Two, the in memory representation was actually somewhat sparse. This meant that a serializer actually read and wrote less to disk than mapping the file. So documents were smaller and there was actually less i/o and faster loads.

The reason I hated it though was because it was very hard to version. I know the Word team had that problem, especially when the mandate came down for older versions to be able to read newer versions. Hard enough to organize the disk format so old versions can ignore stuff, but now you're putting the same requirements on the in-memory representation. Maybe Word did it better.

New Yorker did a great interview with Parker in 2007. Even if you're not a guitarists, a good read about innovation: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/struts-and-fre...

I think the title is a little tongue in cheek. The rest of the blog post develops the Foundations of arithmetic in a clear, well-grounded manner. This is probably a really good introduction for someone about to take a Foundations course. I say this having just Potter's "Set Theory and it's Philosophy" which covers the same material (and a lot more obviously) in 300 some pages. Another good introduction is Frederic Schuller's YouTube lectures, though already there you can start to see the over abstraction.

Things never change. When I was a kid, the librarian at the public library in my little rural town with 23 churches tried to steer me away from Lord of the Rings (which I had already read) and towards Narnia (also read) because CS Lewis was such a good Christian. Ironically, she didn't know Lewis and Tolkien were best friends and that Tolkien had guided Lewis to go back to church after a youthful agnostic phase.

Almost a paraphrase of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides

I've always assumed they tell you to arrive early in order to account for the chance it will take you longer than you guess to get there, just like doctors do. I've never had it take 2 hours from arrival to gate, but I have been 90 minutes late because of traffic and would have missed my flight (not a big deal) if I hadn't aimed for being there two hours early. In any case, the assumption that this time is wasted is spurious whether you're a road warrior catching up with e-mail or a tourist researching your trip, you're not sitting in a lounge chair like a zombie.

One of the plot points in Seven Samurai is that the peasants save their rice for the samurai and themselves eat millet. When the samurai learn this, they are horrified at the privation the peasants are putting themselves through.

Apparently it has been done. There were BBC readings and I found this:

https://variety.com/2009/legit/reviews/war-music-1200507311/

You should be amazed then. It's brilliant.