qubex

The SAP architecture stores transactions (basically programs or business logic) in the database.

Oh, yet another CV rewriting service, this for the cheap cheap price of $299. Sounds like a steal.

No right at all, nor do I, and indeed nobody is asserting or exerting that right: market forces will adjust prices accordingly in order to ensure that customers will be able to make purchases at the market rate (through reshipping companies, for example).

Math isn’t music, even in a metaphorical sense. The argument by analogy fails at the first hurdle.

Have you ever heard of concrete, aka “the stone for projects too large to be assembled in blocks”?

Absolutely true: there’ll be folks who understand no mathematics at all and who will try to elbow their way in. There will also be (extending the metaphor) an ecology of instrument-makers and lens-grinders who somehow become party to the debate. But to be Frank (though I am James) mathematicians will recognise their own.

I never said one should not know the fundamentals of mathematics, I was trying to express it’s a damned lot easier when once understood you can delegate the lesser aspects to machinery. Abacus, calculator, computer, CAS, now AI: the mathematician’s understanding and intuition are still fundamental, but the instruments they can rely upon are levelling the playing field (and indeed, it is a great field in which to play).

Exactly. I learnt to haul the blocks myself, but it has always been an uncertain and effortful exercise; now I can move them around as effortlessly as if I were playing Tetris.

I’m so sorry but your metaphor totally sprained my brain.

I consider myself an applied mathematician though technically I’m an economist (macro models, mostly) and operations researcher and differential game theorist (odd combination, but whatever). For context I’m 45 and I’ve spent most of my working life in corporate life.

I’ve always been at a disadvantage academically because I’m rather clumsy with my manipulations, derivations, and I’m a disaster at mental arithmetic. I’m also dyslexic. But starting in the late 1990s when I was in High School I started to become fluent with CAS (Computer Algebra Systems): first Derive, then the Symbolics capabilities of Mathlab, and ultimately Mathematica.

The whole transition is turning out quite well for me: I’m now able to delegate exploring my intuitions to increasingly powerful tools, I no longer have to haul the pyramid blocks up the ramp myself but I can drop them in by helicopter (as if were) and what I bring to the party is intuition and understanding.

I view it a bit like astronomy: in ancient times, before telescopes, keen eyesight was a prerequisite to be an astronomer. Later, after telescopes, anybody with eyesight had enormously enhanced capabilities of observation, and now, with radioastronomy and other forms of remote sensing (neutrino observatories, gravitational interferometers) the whole field has opened up to people who by virtue of being blind would’ve literally been excluded only a few decades ago.

Go forth and multiply: everybody can become a mathematician now. There’s an infinite number of potential universes out there with an infinite number of facts to prove and disprove. And while we’re at it: there’s so much more to mathematics than conjectures, proofs and counterexamples. Solve, model, approximate, fiddle around: as long as you’re not doing trite numerics on arbitrary systems of equations you’ve cooked up for your own amusement you’re good in my books.

Enjoy the tools. Keep your wits about you. Work through the steps that are presented to you. Build your intuition. HAVE FUN.

“Surfaces and Essences” is one of my favourite books, but “I Am A Strange Loop” is probably his both most profound and accessible.

You may be broadly correct, but “macOS has always been free” is definitely not true: all the Big Cat releases of Mac OS X were paid-for, right up until MacOS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” released in 2012. Only later, from Mavericks in 2013 onwards, were upgrades free. And further back in time I remember buying a software update for my first-generation iPod Touch up to par with the first-generation iPhone way back in 2008. Apple still sells or provides subscriptions to a lot of software (Final Cut Pro, Logic, et cetera) and back in the day I paid a lot of money for some of their more niche offerings Xsan, for example, which I remember cost me an eye-watering thousand bucks per node. Xgrid on the other hand was free, and it’s extremely unfortunate they killed it because in this day and age of Thunderbolt-interconnected Mac Studios with unified memory architectures running AI workloads “here’s a bunch of Macs regard them as a unified computing resource” would be extremely useful (but I digress from the digression).

Er, uhm… I have to disagree really. You have monolithic kernels versus micro kernels, I’ve used weird stuff such as DragonFlyBSD, Plan9, and BeOS. Even the Windows NT kernel (now mainline Windows) is a very unusual piece of software engineering.

Oh damn so I’m finally going to have to subscribe to Steam. I’ve resisted so diligently for so long I genuinely thought I’d cleared the hurdle.

Them there is fightin’ words. Also, as pointed out by an illustrious colleague: Euler’s formula doesn’t work, and pretty much all of complex analysis breaks along with it.

I’ve had the HP lineage from the HP 49G all the way to the current HP Prime G2, and I have to say: these are excellent devices.

One immediate advantage that rescheduling-capable cores have that rigid compiler-based ones don’t nor ever would is that reschedules can notice patterns in execution in the current context and keep the ALU fed from well-provisioned caches even going as far as speculative execution. IA-64 and typeless or typed-at-runtime (JIT scripts, for example, like JavaScript or Python) would’ve been implemented very differently on Itanium.

EPIC was Explicit Parallel Instruction Computing, the underlying engineering architecture of AI-64. Epyc is an AMD brand name.

And pivoting to concurrency on a rescheduler-intensive core as opposed to concurrency on a scheduler-based core isn’t very pertinent, particularly since we have 25 years of Moore’s Law between then and now.

Yeah EPIC pushed too much effort onto compilers and removed the context awareness of out of order reordering etc and the result was just a lame duck.

Open Source and LLMs seem to be complementary technologies that have resulted in an absolute surge of productivity multipliers.

“It runs quite slowly, (486-levels of performance on a Ryzen 5000 series according to this discord channel)”

I’m sure there’s a joke about that being a huge leap in performance for Windows on IA-64 over the past 23 years waiting to be made from this.

This is personally mildly disturbing because I remember beta-testing Windows 2000 on DEC Alpha back in late 1999, and eventually running Windows 2000 and BeOS on a dual PIII-450 machine (with 256 MB of RAM, SCSI HDs, and eventually an ATI Rage Fury graphics card… amazing back then and archaic nowadays).

Your comment reminds me (no insult intended) of the old adage that every doctor has a favourite disease.

Windows 9x and Me weren’t really the predecessors of Windows 2000; it’s real predecessor was Windows ant 4.0. They are very different lineages, with the former descending from 16 bit MS-DOS and Windows until version 3.11 and arguably being rooted in a copy of 1970s’ CP/M whereas the NT lineage was a clean implementation of a modern OS by David Cutler of VMS fame.

Yeah I keep thinking that Reticulum & QUIC are the TCP/IP of the future.

Oh, a polemic. However justified, how unexpected. As long as systems can inter-operate, who really cares?

I’m a naturist and though we’re butt of many jokes we exist and there are perfectly functional and happy FKK families with perfectly normal kids that will be shattered by this if it goes through.

I have one of these linked to a LimeSDR running GNUradio and it’s absolutely up to the task.

I’m still running an AppleTV HD because my TV is only 1080p (Toshiba Regza) because 4K “smart TVs” spook me.

Personally I hate chatbots and natural language interfaces. Give me a well-structured window with widgets or better still a command line. Case in point: that now when you double click on a time in Apple’s iCal it brings up a free-entry text box to “describe” the engagement rather than a structured window with title, location, beginning and ending times drives me insane.