mokus

If it can’t be built, how does the patent harm anyone except the one who wasted their money to get the patent? There will never be a licensee or infringement to sue over.

Just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20201118010404/https://www.cisa....

I’m not sure exactly what you mean so maybe I’m missing the point, but pre-NeXT Mac software handled multiple monitors back in at least the early 90’s, maybe even the 80’s. A friend of mine had 4 displays on his Power Mac 8600 for example. I wouldn’t call this a new challenge (for Apple at least), but rather a disappointing regression.

I’d be thrilled if self-driving cars could meet that bar, because then I can feel at least as comfortable napping in the car as I do driving it. And unlike humans, I have the expectation that my car learns when other cars crash, so I have a lot of reason to expect that once the system rolls out it will continue to improve.

I hate almost everything about Tesla and their business model but the idea of full automatic driving, once vetted to even a bare minimum level of approximate human parity, is enough to make me consider one anyway.

On top of the issues raised by this article I have another problem with people telling me the indicator LED makes it unnecessary to cover my camera.

It’s quite simple, really - the indicator only works if I look at the indicator. A sticker works all the time.

I always felt like the explanations people give are way too complicated. The simple version, to me at least, is this:

A mirror doesn’t flip left to right. It flips front to back. YOU flip left to right when you turn things to the mirror.

What about the idea that parallel lines do not intersect and that there is exactly one line through a point parallel to another given line? These were thousands of years old and well accepted until pretty recently.

Maybe I should apply to WD and fill my resume with things like “25-years-class experience as distinguished-class engineer-class for HGST-class employer”.

What’s wrong with letting the language die?

You can get in serious legal trouble for a “booby-trap” inside your own home, if a criminal accidentally is injured by it.

Placing one in a publicly accessible place without even notifying the people living in the nearest homes? Failing to notify occupants of permanent residences in the area shows there was no meaningful attempt at all to notify the public.

Isn’t QI specifically an immunity against civil suits?

I’ve done it in Agda - it’s not even hard. The naive definitions are accepted without issue.

https://github.com/mokus0/junkbox/blob/master/Agda/ack.agda

Guaranteed termination of a sound dependent type system is only useful as a mathematical property, not a practical one (yes, I know the mathematical consequences have practical benefit but I mean directly it doesn’t say anything about what a typical user thinks of as “termination”). You could still trivially write an algorithm at the type level which is Turing-complete in a practical sense.

For example, write a type that implements a Turing machine parameterized by a program and a natural number N of evaluation steps to take. Apply that type to Graham’s number or some suitably large natural number. You now have a type that is, for all practical purposes, Turing-complete, even though it is theoretically guaranteed to terminate.

My gut feel is the same. Ironically, the fact that this usage sounds wrong might, in fact, be a paradox :)

It’s an apparent contradiction between our understanding of the meaning of the word and the actual usage of the word. The resolution of this paradox could be that there is widespread wrong usage of the word. Alternately it could be that our understanding of the meaning is wrong - which itself could be for multiple reasons. Perhaps our understanding of the definition is incomplete. Or it could be that the definition itself is simply wrong because it doesn’t reflect actual real-world usage.

Upon some reflection I think that a core part of the idea of a paradox is that there are many possible solutions to a problem and that some people, but almost certainly not all, will initially fail to even recognize the existence of solutions other than the one they expect, due to unconscious assumptions.

Naturally in many cases there will also be people who do not make those problematic assumptions to begin with, but that doesn’t on its own invalidate the use of the word “paradox” in that situation. The birthday paradox probably fits this definition just fine - ask anyone not trained in statistics about the subject and you’ll likely find a lot of people have unconscious assumptions that lead them to wrong answers, and in some cases thy will even be exceptionally confident in their wrong answers.

You might object to the “not trained in statistics” part but that objection itself would be circular - modern statistics education was designed with paradoxes like this in mind, specifically to lay down a foundation that doesn’t lead you down the wrong paths in cases like that. The solutions to the basic paradoxes of statistics are built into the way statistics is taught, just like the solutions to Godel’s and Russel’s and many others’ paradoxes are built into the foundations of any modern logical system.

My initial gut response was the same - that this isn’t a paradox, but rather a proof by contradiction that one or more of the assumptions are wrong. But after thinking about it a bit more, I don’t think there’s really that much of a difference. It’s just that some people have already learned not to apply those assumptions in this context (or by chance never stumbled into them in the first place).

Perhaps it’s fair to say that all paradoxes are “just” part of a proof by contradiction and the only difference between ones that feel truly paradoxical and those that feel obvious is something subjective about a person’s understanding of the situation. Maybe it’s down to whether someone has enough of an understanding of the conceptual landscape to be able to actually recognize some of the problematic assumptions from the start of the problem statement or not, or maybe it’s something else, but either way I’m suspecting that it’s something subjective related to a person’s state of knowledge and/or approach to organizing their own knowledge.

I guess the list of things keeping me off catalina (and, by extension, new Mac hardware) just got one item longer.

I recently bought a new System76 laptop as a stopgap, but it might end up becoming permanent. Kind of a sad end for 25+ years of Mac use.

Just wait, someone will implement that as May 4, 2020.

Wow, I have been using iOS (and keeping it up to date) and macOS and Photos.app and uploading images to sites regularly for quite some time and this is the first time I’ve ever even heard of HEIC. Whatever they are doing has been beyond seamless for me.

It’s really quite infuriating to me that I can’t just say “yeah I made this, but anyone can have it.”

I mean, really. It just seems batshit insane to me that this is problematic.

I agree with your overall point, but regarding your “could you design....” rhetorical: in that example, isn’t it already inspecting the type of the list elements and then doing a specific different thing (printing that message) if it happens to be a list of strings? Why not just go one step further and just do the thing instead of nag the user to do the thing?

Speaking for myself only, I haven’t changed my preference, I’ve just given up hoping that any company gives a shit about my preference.

Normally, yes. Today, I’m not even able to find isopropyl at many stores. I’m actually thinking about ordering flux cleaner for my soldering, for the first time in my life.

To be fair, that’s probably true. It’s just that the particles at that scale are other molecules and they are indeed very hard to filter out mechanically.

> The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.

The fact that you are arguing against this might be why you are getting downvoted. The original comment was saying “if you are in a small org you probably haven’t worked with SAP”, which is not the same thing.

Edit for further clarification: I can see how it might look like they were arguing what you stated, but it was more of a Bayesian inference. Many HN readers are at a small company, therefore a plausible reason that an arbitrary HN reader might not have heard of SAP would be that they are in the large pool of HN readers that are {in small companies and, therefore, do not work with SAP}

Kleenex is a specific product too, but is often used as a generic term. “Bitcoin” might not be commonly used that way but it parses just fine to me.

Providing remote control options is probably the first step to automating the last 10%, too. Once the control and feedback channels are completely digital, it’s just a matter of time until the decision-making is too, at least for jobs where wrong decisions are not too costly.

That would explain why in our current system the conservative faction is more like this than the liberal faction. But what I was getting at is the reason that the conservative faction is essentially singular. In a less broken system, there could be multiple conservative factions and multiple liberal factions without the sub-factions feeling needing to choose whether to band together on every single issue or be irrelevant.

They could dynamically band together on a per-issue basis and have more reasoned discussions focusing on those issues instead of making sure to pronounce “shibboleth” correctly.

This is speculation but it seems like we should inevitably see political factions in the US being defined in this way (and it happens in the Democratic Party too, maybe not in as obvious or extreme a way) as a result of the well-known two-party endgame of our voting system. If your faction isn’t one of the two, your choices are to join one or be irrelevant.

So you jump on the bandwagon with whoever you hate least, and pretty soon you find out that’s almost all you have in common with the rest of the riders.

> There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform

It feels like in many circles the most accurate word would be “heretic”. (and the same is true in many conservative circles - if you don’t hold the right beliefs in the right way you are a “liberal” - in this context, meaning “heretic”). It’s fucking exhausting to get into politics with anyone at all because it’s all just witch hunts and inquisitions.

And that’s not even going into the inevitable push-back over transporting that kind of power wirelessly in public spaces.

Consider how much more virulent the 5G panic would be if 5G involved these kinds of power levels. I feel like politically this is at least 50 years from being viable even if the technology were perfect today.