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kd0amg

1,587 karma · joined December 1, 2009

Interested in language design/implementation, architecture, security, and graph theory

Reachable at jrslepak@gmail.com

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kd0amg··on Concrete Semantics
How does being classical help with automation? I'm more familiar with ACL2, which seems to gain a lot more on the automation front from being first-order than from anything else (though it has sort of a weird take on the excluded middle).
kd0amg··on Jeffrey Epstein and MIT: FAQs
Full-year sabbatical is the norm, but the home institution does not necessarily offer salary for that full year, so it's up to the professor to find funding for the rest of it from the host or some grant. According to their web site[1], MIT pays salary for half of the sabbatical year, leaving Lloyd to raise the other half himself. 125k sounds to me like a believable half-year salary for a full professor at MIT.

1: https://vpf.mit.edu/300-sabbaticals

kd0amg··on Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
how much tenants can be bled for before they give up and leave

That's demand.

kd0amg··on How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure
if alternative ideas received little funding support, it was because NIH’s Alzheimer’s budget was woefully insufficient ($425 million in 2012, $2.4 billion in 2019)

low NIH funding for Alzheimer’s from the 1980s through the 2000s is to blame for alternative ideas languishing

This seems like a hollow excuse. AFAIK, NIH doesn't have a mandate to put a certain amount of funding towards one line of inquiry before funding another.

kd0amg··on How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure
The few that turn out to be right get funding and recognition, exactly as many of the researchers mentioned in this article are getting now.

Some of the ones that are right eventually get funding, as long as their proponents stick around long enough and produce enough results to convince someone to fund them. On the time scale this article talks about, I'd expect a quite a few people who had ideas worth looking into gave up and went off to do something else instead.

kd0amg··on Reimagining the PhD
Even there, if your goal is to learn to write in that currently preferred style, your odds are much better if you have someone who can point out when you deviate from it.
kd0amg··on A programmable programming language (2018) [pdf]
You don't know what all those library calls do behind the scenes either.
kd0amg··on Interactive Linear Algebra
I think you could do some interesting stuff with error-correcting codes or polynomial spaces (or more generally function spaces).

I'm not too familiar with representation theory. Do you know where I could find a worked example of constructing, say, a representation of (F_p)^m on R^n? (for prime p and m>1)

kd0amg··on Interactive Linear Algebra
Linear: having to do with lines, planes, etc.

This definition makes me worry that the book is going to operate entirely in R^n. Is there anything here about substantively different vector spaces?

kd0amg··on A History of APL in Fifty Functions (2016)
It takes a fair amount of work on top of "set theory and traditional mathematics" if you want to actually state a semantics for APL.
kd0amg··on Nostalgia for Minecraft
Spoilage would happen even in storage, but the rate was temperature-dependent so you could make it last longer by keeping it somewhere colder. I remember there being some work on preserving food indefinitely by storing it in a barrel of vinegar.

You'd have to adjust your food production strategy to fit your climate. In a cold climate, you'd have a short growing season and need to set up cool storage/pickling barrels in order to survive the winter. In a very warm climate, you might not be able to get anything to keep very long, but you'd be able to grow crops year-round.

kd0amg··on Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
communities that formerly bought locally produced goods

How long has it been since these communities actually did that? Small towns can't really support the diversity of industry it takes to buy more local goods than shipped-in goods in a modern-day lifestyle.

kd0amg··on ABC news is trying to pass gun range videos as combat footage from Syria
Hanlon's Rogaine?
kd0amg··on Why Enterprise Software Sucks
What do administrators use Blackboard for, and is it actually very good at that?
kd0amg··on Why Enterprise Software Sucks
The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows

I strongly doubt that support for complex and unique workflows is why Blackboard is so bad at entirely conventional workflows.

kd0amg··on Pedestrian detection systems don’t work well, AAA finds
I don't think I have ever seen any vehicle whose ABS wasn't essentially rapid cadence braking, and in bad road conditions, the car will turn a bit during the intervals while the wheels are locked (so I generally found threshold braking more useful). If the road is bad enough, even leaving the wheels free won't necessarily keep the car pointed forward. That said, I haven't really had issues recovering from these situations.
kd0amg··on Pedestrian detection systems don’t work well, AAA finds
That's pretty normal behavior, in my experience.
kd0amg··on Pedestrian detection systems don’t work well, AAA finds
You’re describing and absolute failure of the ABS system.

In that scenario, braking hard enough to engage ABS at all is the failure. It is not a failure on ABS's part unless you consider all ABS faulty. Some loss of yaw control is inevitable whenever ABS is engaged. ABS only gives better yaw control than completely locking the wheels.

kd0amg··on Do you have a problem? Write a compiler
Might still be useful if you're placing enough nails in the right arrangement, sort of like railroad track laying machines.
kd0amg··on The myth of the teacher pay gap?
Hiring and compensation decisions have enough of a principal-agent problem that value to the business doesn't even set a firm ceiling.
kd0amg··on MyPayrollHR CEO Arrested, Admits to $70M Fraud
I wonder that about pretty much any case of embezzlement these days. With conventional larceny, a thief can appear clean after fencing the stolen goods, but moving money around other than as cash leaves a paper trail indefinitely. There's no point where you can say, "Now I've escaped with the loot, and everything's done."
kd0amg··on WeWork to List Shares on Nasdaq, Make Governance Changes
If you live in a downtown area, you likely don't have the space for a proper setup.

When the money's tight, being short on space doesn't necessarily keep you from doing it anyway. Hot desking at WeWork would cost more than half my rent.

kd0amg··on California Approves Statewide Rent Control
Specifically, it's an attempt to hedge against the possibility of the market rate increasing by more than 7% in a year.
kd0amg··on Philosophy of Computer Science [pdf]
The table of contents is surprisingly thorough in covering this topic.
kd0amg··on Alcohol Belts of Europe
The grain can influence flavor a lot, but that's more from how the grain was processed than where it was grown. I don't think I could tell American 2-row pale malt from British 2-row pale malt or Belgian pilsner malt, but they'll both be pretty different from Vienna malt, which is kilned darker. Small additions of "specialty" malts like roasted barley or various caramelized malts can also shift flavor quite a bit.
kd0amg··on Alcohol Belts of Europe
There's generally more to a spirit than water and ethanol.
kd0amg··on No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers
Even if they did, there's often a substantial cost difference between delivering an order form and delivering the goods being ordered. I'm not sure I've ever ordered something as small and light as a letter.
kd0amg··on Software was eating the world – now landlords are eating everything
They generally didn't just decide to become wealthy. They got lucky about price movement.
kd0amg··on Software was eating the world – now landlords are eating everything
The claim was that being the owner of high-priced land is easy, not that becoming the owner of high-priced land is easy. Your question is essentially asking why people don't decide to just time the market successfully or inherit valuable estates.
kd0amg··on A Common Lisp library for solving linear programming problems
The first argument seems to be a normal Lisp expression, with no special syntax, and the second argument has the solution variable and all the variables mentioned in the expression bound to (the solution object, the values of the variables in the solution it found).

That doesn't sound any more unhygienic than pattern matching.

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