taeric

My favorite thing like this is when Scrooge McDuck has made it into legal proceedings.

Yes, constraint learning is a huge deal. And there is a fun trick to solving sudoku that is basically this. Someone realized that you can essentially build an extra ring around the board that has the same constraints as elsewhere. Phistomefel Ring is the name, I believe. (This may be a different one, I just reached for the first thing a google search found for my vague description.)

Agreed. I don't know if I would be shocked, but I would be surprised.

This is one that is hard for people to really internalize, I think? The SAT solvers many are likely to use today are not at all the same as the ones they would have used 20 years ago. They have made some amazing advances in how to approach those problems.

There are also probably some very poorly conceived models that people use to adapt a problem to some of these solvers.

Absolutely this. The game is a prime example of how characters can drive engagement.

This always feels odd to me. It would seem a fairly straight forward optimization of the interpreter to special case the different types that it can reduce.

That is, why couldn't they have done the essentially same trick that you reference for += with reduce?

Amortized is a bit different, though? It largely implies that there is a heavy cost periodically. Average just implies that it varies. Which, fair that "massive cost periodically" is compatible with that. Just seems to have a very different context, to me.

With hashtables, it was more that it was not guaranteed to be the minimal cost. Just, depending on statistics of the data that you feed to it, it shouldn't be the worst case.

I used to think of it more as O(1) being the expected average of the cases. My guess is I'm probably thinking of it more as an amortized cost, in that framing? (That is, not that it is the average case. Is the average of all cases.)

To your point on the worst case being something you may worry about in denial of service, I think it is often the case that people should set bounds on what size N they will deal with in a program. And then decide from there on whether you are worried about some of the more esoteric growth patterns.

I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.

I maintain my, "what is abundance good for, if we can't make it safe for kids to walk places?!" stance. :(

This is true of a ton of online discourse. Worse, when the headline of a claim doesn't even match the article it is fronting. I've seen more than a few articles that basically contradict the headline, but end in a "despite all evidence, we think it is correct to say X."

Yeah, what bit me was the place we were staying was off a JR line. Oops.

Huge shout out that if you are going to be in Japan, you need one of these cards. I had thought I could just buy a two day pass in Tokyo. Which, you can, but you are almost certainly going to be limited to what routes and lines you can use, then. Which is brutal when you can't tell google maps which card you have.

I think, in general, one should have the view that anything that can miss, will miss. Agreed that it is better to have something with a lower miss rate.

I always assumed it was a bit of a common practice from image based development practices. I'm now assuming I was incorrect on that being the case?

I'd love to read a good history of the different development styles. I know we often have a good exploration of the parts of an executable file. I don't recall seeing a good exploration of different compilation/build styles through the years.

This is silly. Fun. But silly. Is like claiming that math on the numbers that everyone knows is actually typed. Ignoring that that is only true if you do the effort to also do your operations on the types.

There are CDNs everywhere, true. It is not true that everyone deploys to them all, though. Also it dodges that the networks available to everyone are still not equal.

The deficit has far more closely followed tax cuts than anything else.

I'm sympathetic to this; but hard for me to really think this is actionable. Odds are quite high that someone did push for these perspectives a few times, but someone didn't have the vantage point to appreciate them at the time.

That can be a really hard thing for people to realize. We will ask, "why didn't someone use this really compelling framing to get me hooked on something?!" And then move to something like "how come nobody has ever said just walking an hour a day will get you in pretty good physical shape?" Thing is, plenty of people say stuff like that.

And don't mistake this as blaming the listener! The point is messages can often come when you flat out aren't prepared for them.

So, what do we do? We spend time on the rote muscle memory of facts. In the hopes that that will prepare you for the next time a message comes and you are then ready for it.

Ideally, you rinse and repeat this. Constantly. All too often, the cycle gets subverted, though, and you forget to reopen yourself to the messages that came before.

I'm curious that the latency of these is actually worse than the latency of floating operations. Yes, they are worse than many integer instructions, but they seem to be on basically the same order as the equivalent float operations?

This feels like an excessive hate of "Silicon Valley" that is just awkward. Yes, it turns out it is easier to do easier tasks. No, it is not cheaper to pound the table with claims that all infrastructure should be better.

This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?

It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!

Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.

This is great news! That was such a fun game.

Right, but that about halves the age of JavaScript as noted in this thread.

I fully agree that it is reaching a more stable place now than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It is still nowhere near as old as elisp.

Also notable that the way changes are introduced to the different languages is so different that this is just hard to really look at. Notably, elisp of today is not dramatically different from elisp of 20 years ago. JavaScript? Basically a brand new language after ES6+.

Many people that do this are almost certainly freelance contractors in some facility?

Probably, though, many are just using personal as not strictly personal, but the kind of personal things you might do while at a desk job.

Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.

This depends heavily on the industry of the area. Go to a college town and you will find owner occupancy is not that big of a deal. Go to a luxury resort town and they literally make their money from non-residents transiently moving through.

I don't think you can get any of these situations non-organically. But schools and worker dormitories have a lot in common. More than most seem to admit to.

I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.

Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.

So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.

To be fair, I think they just meant the stock price shape post IPO. Jumped up, then fell back down.

That said, I'm also not sure how accurate that is.

This feels apples to oranges. There has to be a "cost of inventory" consideration that applies to non digital goods far far stronger than to digital ones. To the point that expecting electronic book sales to give any insight to durable goods feels farcical.

Similarly, the marginal cost of a new release has to include all of the creative production of it to that point. Authoring and editing. Not just the marginal cost of replication of a completed work.

That is, the marginal cost of a new release is creating the new release's content! Which is very very different from the marginal cost of just making a copy of it months later.