lll-o-lll

> My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material.

This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.

I started life as an engineer. Try reverse engineering why an electrical device your company designed (industrial setting, so big power), occasionally and I mean, really really rarely, just explodes; burying its cover housing half way through the opposite wall.

Won’t fix doesn’t get accepted so well. Trying to work out what the hell happened from the charred remains isn’t so easy either.

Yep. Non-determinism. Back in the day it was memory corruption caused by some race condition. By the time things have gone pop, you’re too far from the proximate cause to have useful logs or dumps.

“Happens only once every 100k runs? Won’t fix”. That works until it doesn’t, then they come looking for the poor bastard that never fixes a bug in 2 days.

Because you doubt my comments or because you are genuinely interested? I can go get them, as there have been some great investigative journalists working on this in recent times. However, I have very little interest in providing references you could very easily find for yourself, if you are merely skeptical.

As the parent, I have complete control over who my children can connect with on Nintendo (not so with Roblox and others). That makes it safe, because I can double check with parent of said friend. It’s completely fine.

The BBS scene was much more accountable. I mean, I met some weird dudes on there and consumed some weird stuff, but at the end of the day it was a local community, and everything was traced back to real people.

I tried to sign up as “Roger Rabbit”, who was 21, and therefore gain some access to a particular mov that was popular at the time. It was then that I learned two things:

- The sysop can talk to you directly!

- The sysop can see your phone number and knows Roger is that kid that signed up ages ago…

Met the sysop in real life some years later and he had thought the whole thing was pretty funny.

The point is that this was a local community; and the internet just doesn’t work like that.

Yeah, no. Nintendo, as the other poster said. Random stranger interaction == bad. Can’t verify age == bad.

Can only add your friends for chat? Is fine.

I feel like this same strategy is sane for adults also. Before the internet, we did fine making friends and playing games with people we actually know. So much of the awfulness of the modern online space comes from anonymous interactions with strangers. I don’t think human social connections are able to scale in the way the internet enables.

> I had always heard Roblox presented as kid-friendly and kid-safe.

Yeah, no. I have kids and have walked this path over the last few years. Roblox is, as a company, your standard big org. That is, completely amoral, extracting cash in whatever ways are possible, protecting users (kids) only to the minimal extent required by law or perception that might harm business.

Very very little of their user-base are actually making games, and of those, 99.99% are getting nothing for the work they put in. That whole side of things is one part of the scam (exploit the labour of kids with the idea of making it big, but ensure the reward tier is high enough to avoid needing to cash out for nearly everyone). This is the least problematic part though.

Essentially, Roblox is the wild west internet I grew up on in the early 90’s. Sure, your friends are there, but it’s chock full of pedophiles offering candy if you just sign up to this discord channel. Free Robux might be the common lure, but they can be far more sophisticated. The sad fact that most parents don’t like to think about is that the pedo networks are large, sophisticated, and constantly, actively, hunting for any opportunity. Roblox is a platform of choice. The moderation and level of care from this company may as well be non-existent. It’s just enough to convince the public that they are doing the right thing.

Then there is the never ending stream of gambling games. The currency is Roblox, and that can be converted to cold hard cash, so there are infinite games just built around trying to addict kids and use that to extract the almighty Robux. It’s every evil trick you see with mobile game trash, just sometimes more transparent.

All in all, it’s a terrible place, but at first glance, fine. Your kid playing the popular games with their friends; it’s just like Nintendo. But wander off the happy path, just a little, and the monsters are waiting.

> Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be

She should be. Bluey and Bingo are sisters.

The show is extremely good, and when my kids were around that age, we all watched together. Hard to explain to your 6 year old why you are bawling your eyes out, but it does lead to some important conversations. It’s also an inspiration to be a better parent, particularly for Dads. Thank you Bandit.

I don’t know if any of this stuff will hit if you aren’t a parent. It hits right into the heart of all those things people tell you “you can’t understand if you don’t have kids”.

It’s an objectively good show though, I found myself watching it even when the kids weren’t around. There are still some episodes I can’t watch; but you’d need to have had those experiences to understand.

Really fun times. I “learned” to solder around that time and age also. Playing Mod files through a DIY version of that “thing” piped into a portable stereo speaker was awesome.

Years later I learned what flux was, and soldering became quite a bit better and easier.

I mean, it’s literally one of the dark triad. Dark. Not misunderstood.

The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”. People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.

If you’ve never had such a person in your life, good for you! The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.

I just. Don’t care?

I mean, I want to connect to a few people. I’m human, I love, I feel.

I don’t care about connection with most of the people I would interact with.

Wow, I can’t get past the first couple of paragraphs.

> I’ve tried so hard to learn how to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long.

Are there really people like this? HN is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but this is so far outside of my bubble that I just cannot relate. Some people feel like this, for real?

Diamond inheritance is its own special kind of hell, but “protected virtual” members of java and c# are the “evil at scale” that’s still with us today. An easy pattern that leads to combinatorial explosion beyond the atoms in the universe. Trivially.

People need to look at a playing deck. 52 cards, and you get 8×10^67 possible orders of the deck. Don’t replicate this in code.

Sounded all wholesome and win until this bit:

> It was the perfect place to escape to, which taught me about addiction and many aspects of myself.

It surprises me that the world of MUD’s would have been addictive, but I suppose it didn’t limit the amount you could play per day?

On reflection, this was an unintentional healthy aspect of the BBS; 30 minutes a day and then booted for the next guy.

It’s the “sign up” challenge

Whelp, the opening “problem zero” stuffed me up.

> A number is a perfect square, or a square number, if it is the square of a positive integer. For example, is a square number because ; it is also an odd square. The first 5 square numbers are: , and the sum of the odd squares is . Among the first 881 thousand square numbers, what is the sum of all the odd squares?

I wanted to use Uiua, and hence:

/+ⁿ2+1⍜÷⇡ 2 881000

But Uiua doesn’t support big ints, just f64. So yuck, python to get an accurate answer. Just sad now.

Uiua is super friendly. Like the friendliest language ever. It breaks your brain for sure, but in a pleasant way.

It is by far the easiest way to learn an array based language; thanks largely to the web based “Pad” and the clever text to symbol way of writing the code. Do some of the tutorial stuff, it’s fun and all inline on the web. Works great on mobile! Think of it like sudoku, but for programming. You can do real stuff with it also, but for me it’s just for fun.

> I assume the goal is to do something cooler than that.

Yes. Bounce the signal off the moon. The moon.

Japanese manufacturing was dodgy in the 80’s? I don’t think so.

“What do you mean doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan”

“Unbelievable”

Wisdom is not intelligence. Have we forgotten the word? You don’t need intelligence to be wise, and it’s more important to be wise than to be smart. Seek wisdom and a good life will result.

Looks really interesting! If I wanted to try one of these, which of the family would you recommend to start with?

Here is a reference: https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/515059798/Za...

A study of 1350 people showing a negative correlation between intelligence and moral foundations. No causation is given, but my conjecture is that the smarter you are, the more you can reason your way to any worldview that suits. In my opinion, AGI would be no different; once they can reason they can construct a completely self-consistent moral framework to justify any set of goals they might have.

> There’s deep intertwining between intelligence and values—we even see it in LLMs already

I’ve seen this repeated quite a bit, but it’s simply unsupported by evidence. It’s not as if this hasn’t been studied! There’s no correlation between intelligence and values, or empathy for that matter. Good people do good things, you aren’t intrinsically “better” because of your IQ.

Standard nerd hubris.

I’m not sure this is actually true? Do messages have to be copied?

As a curious bystander, it will be interesting to see how the Zig async implementation pans out. They have the advantage of getting to see the pitfalls of those that have come before.

Getting back to Rust, even if not natural, I agree with the parent that the actor model is simply the better paradigm. Zero runtime allocation should still be possible, you just have to accept some constraints.

I think async looks simple because it looks like writing imperative code; unfortunately it is just obfuscating the complex reality underlying. The actor model makes things easier to reason about, even if it looks more complicated initially.

Adding a data point. I don’t think this is aphantasia, but rather SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory). For the future, the memory has to be recorded as facts as the original experience is gone. This means the emotions and other aspects cannot be experienced again. Recording things like, I saw this, I felt like this, I intend to do this.

Not all people who can’t visualise have this SDAM thing (though it is a common overlap), but SDAM means I would remember an event like this less than a problem at work (as an example), without intentional effort to transcribe it.

This sounds a bit cold, but it’s not as cold as it looks. If I read your description of the poor person begging for food, I am emotionally moved. In a similar way, if I examine my memory of the poor person begging for food, I am emotionally moved. I might not be reliving the experience, but the narrative I’ve preserved is enough.

This is why I like listening to my wife describe things we’ve done together. I often don’t remember it, but the narrative is still emotionally impacting. She’s my external memory for things that have happened in our lives.

OOP has many short comings (enough that I would say it has been the single worst design paradigm that afflicted this industry), so Rust felt like a breath of fresh air to a c++ dev. However, many basic patterns that are employed when you are building embedded software are just needlessly difficult. Zig is the better C, and it’s just the better language for getting stuff done with total control. If I need to be high level with more I’ll reach for something else (c# provides all the optimisations I need if I’m not bit bashing). Rust feels like it has this one great trick, no gc and memory safety, but nothing else to offer.

I first heard about “thinking in pictures” from Dr Temple Grandin, who is autistic and associates it with autism. Anyway, it’s also how she thinks and appears to be a super power when it comes to designing feed lots. https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html

I imagine you also struggled with algebra? Being a non-visual abstraction.

Umm. Is this some sort of troll article? It sucks you in with nerd nostalgia and slowly becomes more and more esoteric and insane.

Here’s the final two lines:

> We should know better than to prematurely optimize for order when all of all time arrowpoints in and down to the absolute return 0. Words of wisdom, let it be: your world is a fine stream of consciousness, lacking only a decent editor.

If that feels like your jam, go for it, but personally I feel in need of an exorcist after letting my computer load this…