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nxobject

4,349 karma · joined August 4, 2023

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nxobject··on Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst
I get it – in my (limited) opinion, there's a lot that's quirkily (but avoidably) named about ggplot and the surrounding R ecosystem in general.
nxobject··on Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst
I suspect for consistency with ggplot - the same reason why ‘aes’ is shorthand and everyone forgets that it stands for “aesthetic”.

https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/labs.html

nxobject··on Midjourney Medical
> That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service.

I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.

nxobject··on Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct
FWIW, Tesco just divested from all of the Lotuses… now it’s the awkwardly named Lotus’s.
nxobject··on Midjourney Medical
> Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.

Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.

https://voices.uchicago.edu/pearsonlab/

nxobject··on Midjourney Medical
Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?
nxobject··on Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
At this point the Accessbility preference panes are just crammed full with tweaks and tools – good if you need them, bad for discovery!
nxobject··on The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Does that make you the first in a long tradition of GPU developers going to blockbuster app devs to say "hey, you should be doing this instead?"

PS – I am looking through the NuBus cards that I have... did you work for SuperMac or RasterOps?

nxobject··on Apple Foundation Models
> And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future.

Well, in domains like SWE where Anthropic's putting in the effort. I don't they'll make the claims that OpenAI makes about how their models are pushing the life sciences forward, for example.

nxobject··on A calculator that doesn't round
Well, you know, you go into your Smalltalk-80 workstation for a hack sesh, and an all-nighter later you end up with an implementatkon of Swing...
nxobject··on LaserWriter seeds
To put the mad profit that Xerox got from laser printers into context: Alan Kay estimated it alone paid off everything that Xerox had invested in PARC, and then a lot, lot more. (I think PARC in the 70s cost less than $10 mil annually.)
nxobject··on What happens to an economy when it's too hot to work?
What a choice: heatstroke, or chronic respiratory disease?
nxobject··on Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality.

Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from national opinion surveys based on tens of thousands of respondents, to small community surveys. A Census product with the most diverse participation pays off almost infinitely for America. It benefits everyone from national newspapers to rural counties.

If the smallest communities lose what little trust remains in the privacy of the Census, they have the most to lose in all of these ways.

nxobject··on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model
They're decentralized enough as well that some of their local offices have hilarious online presences. For example, Portland...

https://www.instagram.com/corpsofengineers_portland/

nxobject··on Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint
For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.
nxobject··on MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production
> Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?

Did the old 11" MacBook Air not teach the Wintel brands anything?

nxobject··on Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance
> But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this.

I might be missing something here, but wouldn't any UI toolkit that doesn't live within a WebView work?

nxobject··on Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange
> So I guess my question is: what do you see as the reasons why you'd pick a particular school of micro control flow as a microcode engine implementer?

For a comprehensive answer, a good vintage introductory digital design textbook is Ward and Halstead's 1989 Computation Structures, from the "peak CISC" era! [1]

There, the second (vertical) type is often used for highly complex instructions/fancy addressing modes, that you might want to implement with some sort of procedure abstraction, loops, working memory, etc. A "luxury" vertical microcode engine would have facilities like "microprocedure calls", a micro-stack and workspace RAM, a micro-ALU, dispatch table micro-instructions. The authors use the suggestive term "interpretive microcode".

String instructions come to mind as a complex example; non-register machine architectures (stack machines); tagged data architectures that have instruction-level polymorphism (e.g. Lisp machines).

The culminating project of Ward and Halstead is an elaborate two-level microcode system (vertical on horizontal/second on first). I think the first Motorola 68k had this architecture -- here is the patent. [2]

It's genuinely a fun read. The "write an micro-interpreter for your CISC ISA" approach is hopelessly out of date now that we need pervasive microarchitectural parallelism, and have HDLs.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Computation-Structures-Optical-Electr...

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0011412A1/en?inventor=Ha...

nxobject··on “The Apple Boogie“ 1987 Mac Promo Album Cassette Tape [video]
"Breaking Through" (~22:00) is, truly, an artifact from a lost era. They don't write power ballads like that any more.
nxobject··on “The Apple Boogie“ 1987 Mac Promo Album Cassette Tape [video]
Making life better and better!

Apple II forever!

Bringing the rainbow to you!

(Join us.)

nxobject··on SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims
> “Sorry :( Did my best!” said a pithy message the group left on a whiteboard on his scuffed-up dining table.

Well, no wonder people don't have faith in the people selling AI.

nxobject··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
So many characters worthy of an epic story. The last one would be the Good Samaritan, or some sort of elderly sage...

> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.

> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.

> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.

> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."

nxobject··on SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)
Oh wow – were you working under Larry Tesler? I've yet to grasp just the sheer diversity of projects that lived under him in his Apple tenure.
nxobject··on U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators
Hi there – someone who's worked on NIH (NIMH) funded projects. Our primary interest is in being transparent and reproducible. NIH has supported this for a long time – e.g. pushing people to post deidentified datasets online in central repositories. Since it's also good practice to provide your code in a reproducibility package, there is, literally, nothing to hide.

Recent MAHA-era large-scale funding opportunities have embraced this as "gold-standard science", and explicitly require separate reproducibility teams.

nxobject··on A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft
This is amazing. And it's all done in 8 KLOC – half of it Java, half of it Rust.

Link to source: https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft

nxobject··on SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)
> Using SBCL as a macro-assembler is extremely cool, and then allowing CL code to call into the VM is where it really blows my mind.

Absolutely. I think TFA is hooking into the actual code emitter used by SBCL's evaluator-compiler, since it's not actually primitive, but implemented in Lisp and loaded into the image itself.

My guess at context: from the earliest days of Lisp, I think there was an expectation that Lisp systems would expose as much of their internals as possible... including their internal JIT, which is being plugged into here. I think the name for it was the "LISP Assembly Program" (LAP).

nxobject··on Agora-1: The Multi-Agent World Model
It's either games or pornography – pick your poison.
nxobject··on A Good Lemma Is Worth a Thousand Theorems (2007)
I guess homological algebra must be worth at least a million theorems, then?
nxobject··on Palantir has hired more than 30 senior UK Government officials
I really do love the American "but the veterans!" script, despite only them being a minority of the people involved:

> Of [the 32], 14 no longer work for, or with, us, some of whom stopped as long as five years ago. Six are ex-armed forces veterans whose public sector experience involved serving and protecting their country.

> Not only do we entirely reject claims of an alleged ‘revolving door’ strategy, but we also believe it is inappropriate to include veterans in a report alleging such a strategy. Aside from the immense value of their experience, there is rightly an undertaking by government and society to ensure they are afforded the opportunity to build a career outside the armed forces when the time is right for them.

nxobject··on WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward
For that matter, AppKit was first released on a NeXT with a 25 MHz 68030 and 8MB of RAM.
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