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szemet

1,146 karma · joined October 20, 2015

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szemet··on Variable tyre pressure wheelset is a mountain biking breakthrough
Looking at the photos, I can imagine it is even rotating. Ok-ok, it is near the axle, but you do not see racing bikes with huge internally geared hubs neither, so...
szemet··on Julia adoption keeps climbing
> Using extension modules is just a time-tested, highly organized, modular, robust design pattern.

I really don't get this. I'am fully on the side that limitations may increase design quality. E.g I accept the argument that Haskell immutability often leads to good design, I also believe the same true for Rust ownership rules (it often forces a design where components have a well defined responsibility: this component only manages resource X starting from { until }.)

But having a performance boundary between components, why would that help?

E.g. This algorithm will be fast with floats but will be slow with complex numbers. Or: You can provide X,Y as callback function to our component, it will be blessed and fast, but providing your custom function Z it will be slow.

So you should implement support for callback Z in a different layer but not for callback X,Y, and you should rewrite your algorithm in a lower level layer just to support complex numbers. Will this really lead to a better design?

szemet··on Casio F-91W: The strangely ubiquitous watch (2011)
Another, but much cheaper trick is to always leave the alarm on: then you have around 10 seconds of chance every morning to find it, if not - then better luck next day!
szemet··on "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
Yes. But economics is different for local and remote work:

Like it is natural to pay the same price for something we both order from China, and in the same time it is also completely normal that we will pay different prices for potatoes at our local market.

szemet··on TimescaleDB 2.0 released, now distributed multi-node
Based on more mature codebase.

/When I tried Clickhouse, I managed to segfault it with NULL pointer dereference error. Ok it is anecdotal, and maybe I just had bad luck, same could happen with Postgres etc etc... But anyway: it can be a deciding factor. (And they fixed it quickly - issue 7955 on github) /

szemet··on Kitty – A fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
I use tabbed for Alacritty, it works in any WM.

https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/

szemet··on Italian Ruby
I actually liked the mixed language approach (keywords/library functions in english, my stuff localized) when I've learned programming (and did not speak english well):

Even then, you can learn the keywords and standard library function names easily - but to name things, that needs a different level of language knowledge.

So teaching in mixed languages is a good compromise. And it is also very helpful to immediately distinguish between things that were already there, and things have been defined in the actual program. I remember this being a helpful feature to learn language/stdlib by simply reading others code.

The more I think of it: it would be good to get back this kind of easy differentiation (maybe with IDE extension?) now...

On the other hand Scratch have localization support, and lack of syntax errors - maybe the two largest blockers for smaller children...

szemet··on The Hard Problem of Breakfast
So is it a joke on "Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind"?

But it just reiterates his first example using breakfast instead of university...

'The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired "But where is the University?"[3] The visitor's mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category "units of physical infrastructure" rather than that of an "institution".'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

szemet··on Does Having an Anime Profile Picture Make You a Better Programmer?
> an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

1. certain (genetic) diseases lowers both intelligence and attractiveness

2. I vaugly remember some theory from the early time of population statistics (Galton maybe?), that if successful men (which may correlate with intelligence) tend to marry beautiful women - then on the long run we can expect attractivenes and intelligence to correlate more - but have not heard if it was ever empirically verified or not...

szemet··on Editorial board of Index and more than 70 staff members resign
"Opposition parties are so inept: they could not even operate corruption."

(Do not know if it is original or some old joke: I have heard it from hungarian stand-up comedian Tibor Bödőcs - who is btw basically the only comedian left who dare (or talented enough to get away with) criticizing every side of the political spectrum here - nowadays mostly Orbán of course...)

szemet··on Turing and Wittgenstein on Logic and Mathematics [pdf]
> Who invents the rules

Anywho is:

they could be someone with states of mind, bending over endless amount of paper, paging, writing and deleting symbols on them with their pencil for some time (or forever)

Otherwise how could anyone invent rules?

It would be so great to get out some general&universal results starting from this setup... ;)

szemet··on Lincos language
> I called water a "mild" solvent because it's not so reactive as to instantly destroy everything in its path.

Ok. But I guess the proper common terminology would be "corrosives" for those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance

szemet··on Lincos language
> Water is ... a mild solvent

I remember, when I was a child I asked my parents (both are chemists), about what the most powerful solvent is. To my suprise they answered: water.

Wow, that can be true, it is everywhere, I tought...

It is somewhat a point of view question, considering that there are different categories of solvents - it is like asking a biologist about the most dangerous animal: human - of course! But that can't be true, humans are everywhere and I'm still alive.

These kind of suprises happens if you do not specify the questions exactly (Dangerous to what and how? Solving exactly what kind of things?)

edit: it is natural to think, that something is mild and friedly (in general) - if you are made of that...

szemet··on The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself
https://boardgamegeek.com/abstracts/browse/boardgame

I play patchwork and Azul regularly and like them.

szemet··on Rubyists, we must do better
To show a positive example, without word redefinitions: IMHO western society largely managed to end prejudice against left-handiness, while keeping the word "right".

(And this "left -> bad" or "right" -> good (or both) association is as (or more) prevalent in languages of the world as the "dark -> bad" association)

szemet··on Why I Use Suckless Tools
I like "tabbed". Traditionally I use terminal tabs on local machines, and tmux on remote. (tmux in tmux is just too much tmux for me)

After I've changed to alacritty, which does not supports tabs, I could easily recreate my old workflow with "tabbed".

(I've never heard of suckless previously, I just knew that I want some generic X11 tabbing SW (and I was sure it must exists somewhere, so have put a lot of effort in googling) - maybe I should check the other things there too...)

szemet··on Editors (Vim)
It happens me every day: I just start to type while still in command mode, and then have to press "u" a couple of times.

(But ok, thats maybe just me - thought this is a common experience, and I just wouldn't like to sit behind a pilot doing the same...)

szemet··on Editors (Vim)
The only thing what makes modal editing bearable (from UX PoV) is the unlimited undo.

e.g. Would anyone take a plane that has modal cockpit buttons?

szemet··on Immutable Databases
IANAL but I recall some vauge memories that Datomic was to be modifed, to provide real physical deletion according to the GDPR reqs...
szemet··on Tiger at Bronx Zoo tests positive for Covid-19
Italy has hordes of feral cats so does Spain.

I would be interested to see now a feral cat/capita - Covid-19 growth rate chart.

szemet··on Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat
Its a bad logic anywaz:

old people are the base voters for many populist ruling party in Europe

szemet··on Greater male than female variability in regional brain structure (Paper)
Has already been done in the Polgar family, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

The article has some quotations about Judits opinion:

"I always say that women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players, but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players."

and after a tournsment in 1988 (12yo)

"These other girls are not serious about chess...I practice five or six hours a day, but they get distracted by cooking and work around the house."

szemet··on Classification of the Principal Programming Paradigms (2009)
Haskell has dataflow support too (just to mention a better known language), but not sure how popular this compared to all the other concurrency libraries Haskell provides.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/parallel-and-concurrent...

szemet··on ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD
Doesn't mt76* count? It is in since 4.19.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1808.0/04276.html

I know, because I've immediately bought an usb wifi dongle for my desktop with this chipset. (and it is working perfectly OOB with every linux kernel for me since then).

szemet··on The ‘consciousness causes quantum collapse’ hypothesis (2017)
Just skimmed over, but this is only about the oil droplets experiment - which would have been a great macroscopic model/demonstration of pilot wave theory.

If it fails the double slit experiment - then simply it is not a good macroscopic model/demonstration of the Broglie-Bohm quantum interpretation. But AFAIK Broglie-Bohm has been already proven to be equivalent to all the other popular quantum interpretations (if you give up locality), so it has not been falsified at all (and actually can't be - as it gives the same experimental forecasts as the other theories)

szemet··on Some scientists are serious about resurrecting zeppelins for cargo
Why not use hydrogen, its cheap and zeppelins can be smaller and fly higher.

We will maybe better in avoiding accidents compared to 1937:

- have better materials

- can use it only for cargo with drones - no human should travel with them!

- should/can use routes to avoid cities, and should/could build some separate safe landing space

etc...

finally:

Hydrogen fires are less destructive to immediate surroundings than gasoline explosions because of the buoyancy of H2, which causes heat of combustion to be released upwards more than circumferentially as the leaked mass ascends in the atmosphere; hydrogen fires are more survivable than fires of gasoline or wood.[22] The hydrogen in the Hindenburg burned out within about 90 seconds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster

szemet··on McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality
Also there is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#Narrative

If this is not a traditional example, then what?

szemet··on How Containers Work: Overlayfs
Another difference that may matter for some:

on block based CoW FS, shared executables and libs will not be shared among containers, because file cache is file based not block based.

Using Overlayfs - or other file level CoW storage, when one starts several containers from the same image, shared libraries and executables will be loaded only once(so will be actually shared) across containers.

szemet··on Fast Markov chains in ~20 lines of sh, grep, cut and Awk
In case of huge enough models it possibly can be made even faster using look (binary search), instead of grep... It is better in O terms, with maybe some large constant factor due to file seeking...

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/look.1.html

szemet··on F# RISC-V Instruction Set Formal Specification
Maybe it could be ported to SML, because:

> "It is distinctive among widely used languages in that it has a formal specification, given as typing rules and operational semantics in The Definition of Standard ML (1990, revised and simplified as The Definition of Standard ML (Revised) in 1997)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML

edit, the specification itself: http://sml-family.org/sml97-defn.pdf

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