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leephillips

24,280 karma · joined February 22, 2012

Dr. Lee Phillips

https://lee-phillips.org

lee@lee-phillips.org

Einstein’s Tutor published by PublicAffairs, a book about Emmy Noether and her Theorem:

     https://lee-phillips.org/noether/
Practical Julia published by No Starch Press:

      https://lee-phillips.org/juliabook/
My book Gnuplot 5:

     https://alogus.com/publishing/gnuplot5/
submissionscomments
leephillips··on Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
That’s bad. I wouldn’t have submitted this article had I known that. Why would they do that?
leephillips··on Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
Yes, except for podcasts.
leephillips··on Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
The article is correct. Anyone who knows what they’re doing builds an Atom feed, not RSS. In fact, I thought this was common knowledge a decade ago.
leephillips··on Google has abandoned Google News?
Jaron Lanier is eloquent here in expressing a point of view that I find I share about Wikipedia and similar crowd-sourced phenomena:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

I was watching in real time as Gopher, Wais, and the Web were all equally in play, and as the Web won. I had a personal website at the beginning, and I still have it. It seemed to be the next revolution in the dissemination of ideas after Gutenberg. Individuals could make their creations available to the entire world at almost no cost. Individual sites, individual voices, in all their eccentric glory, arose in profusion. Then it all became swamped by anonymous, unaccountable corporate voices. Wikipedia is a salient example of a collective, bland, plagiarising substitute for individual expertise that can not be held responsible for its words and that is accorded a false authority. it is part of the tragedy of the Web that could have been.

leephillips··on Google has abandoned Google News?
I agree with your point in general but

> Wikipedia is better than no Wikipedia.

In my opinion Wikipedia is worse than no Wikipedia. Wikipedia played a big part in suppressing what the Web might have been and started out becoming before it changed direction.

leephillips··on An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan
It did an excellent job of articulating the causes of what I experienced: a movie that lacked the emotional impact of the poem. A movie that failed for me despite some spectacular visuals.
leephillips··on An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan
Haha, exactly the same experience: I also watched in C.A. and benefited from the Spanish subtitles to clarify occasional dialog.

Agree about dubbing.

leephillips··on Fourth Circuit: Border Agents Can Search Your Phone by Hand, No Suspicion Needed
You may have “incriminating” stuff that you are unaware of:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/02/denied-entry-united-states...

leephillips··on Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium
Very illuminating.
leephillips··on Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium
Oh, I see. Well I won’t be installing this then.
leephillips··on Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium
Why were your projects no longer welcomed at Codeberg?
leephillips··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
Then I won’t try! And I understand your opinion. But like everyone else I have many programs using many different configuration syntaxes, some using more than one file, some files in nonstandard locations, and some combining configuration from one or more files in my user directory with others somewhere in /etc or who knows where. I find the dwm approach refreshing.

Pontification added later: And it has a beneficial side-effect. I’m not much of a C programmer these days (if I ever was), but I found I was able to understand the dwm code well enough to make some small changes in behavior. So the dwm approach encouraged me to go beyond changing definitions in the headers. (This is aside from 3rd party patches. I was even able to contribute one of those.) This is really in the spirit of free software.

leephillips··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
I think dwm has the best approach to configuration: change the program and recompile.

This works for dwm because it compiles in two seconds and has minimal dependencies. I don’t know about hyprland.

https://dwm.suckless.org/customisation/

leephillips··on Dumber Mini: A Nokia-Style Phone with WhatsApp and Maps
“The small screen discourages watching Youtube and scrolling social media.”

I don’t get it. If you don’t want to do these things, don’t do them. Why do you need to buy a device that “discourages” you from doing them?

leephillips··on An Elite NYC Public School Admitted 777 Students. Only 3 Were Black
I noticed the same lumping, and came to the same conclusion. When reading the NYT, keep in mind that the agenda comes first, and the way information is imparted serves that agenda. And, at times, if the facts can't be massaged to serve the agenda, the paper resorts to outright lying: http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA
leephillips··on Kitty Chases the Mouse
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1080821/2b26e92cfbab110c/
leephillips··on Kitty Chases the Mouse
All HN readers should, obviously, subscribe to LWN. But, just in case, here’s a free guest link:

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1080821/2b26e92cfbab110c/

leephillips··on A Forlorn Hope of Fortran Modernisation
But he didn’t say “scientific computing”. There are not “many other languages” that are used for the stuff that he did describe. Nevertheless, his claim is incorrect. C, C++, Julia, and Fortran are all routinely used for these purposes, sometimes with parts written in assembly. Nothing else, really. The “scientific computing” that people do with Python, Matlab, etc. is not this.

And of these four languages that are successful in this arena, only Fortran and Julia are enjoyable to program in. Between those two, Julia is far more fun and flexible (but brings other drawbacks, of course).

leephillips··on Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)
Seems clear to me: it’s a silly number that people think is important. Like the Dow, H-index, GNP, ...
leephillips··on Pandoc Lua Filters
Lua filters for Pandoc have been around for a quite a while. What’s newer is Pandoc’s ability to be used in web browsers. There’s a bit more about this and a general rundown of Pandoc in my recent article for LWN:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/

leephillips··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
Exactly. I pointed this out in another comment before seeing yours. They admit they found nothing.
leephillips··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
From the Conclusion:

“High-intensity training reduced fat and maintained lean mass in apparently healthy older adults, though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity and considering measurement error.”

I didn’t read the whole paper (didn’t see any reason to after seeing this). But the title seems to be contradicted by this conclusion.

leephillips··on Making Sense of Proof by Contradiction [pdf]
All difficult conjectures should be proved by reductio ad absurdum arguments. For if the proof is long and complicated enough you are bound to make a mistake somewhere and hence a contradiction will inevitably appear, and so the truth of the original conjecture is established QED.

-- John Barrow

leephillips··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
You’re welcome. I hope it’s useful. And I’m glad you loved my book!
leephillips··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers:

https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

leephillips··on AI and Liability
It should be obvious that a company is responsible for what it says. I hope this decision spreads to other countries.
leephillips··on Blogger defeats photographer's copyright claim
These are civil penalties. I wonder if the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments applies to the (high) statutory punitive damages. Any legal scholars want to help us out?
leephillips··on Vulgar Materialism
Good points, especially if one is familiar with the actions if U.S. banana companies in Central America (mainly 19th, early 20th c.).
leephillips··on Blogger defeats photographer's copyright claim
“life-ruining sums of money from legally careless bloggers” is deterrence. Don’t do the crime if you can’t .....
leephillips··on Blogger defeats photographer's copyright claim
The language of the article is strongly biased in favor of people stealing artwork: “photographers should stop suing bloggers for copyright infringement!”

The plaintiff gets scolded for not trying to settle. But, by the article’s own account, the defendant ignored emails from the plaintiff!

Photographers should not stop suing if that’s what it takes. People should stop stealing.

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