troymc

Thanks, I made a note to update that someday.

I made a poster showing how one might write a Hello World program in 39 different programming languages, and even different versions of some common languages like Java:

https://troymcconaghy.blog/2025/01/13/39-hello-world-program...

I wonder about a Ford F-250 owned by an ox (an ox Ford).

Essential oils from plants (terpenes/terpenoids) are hydrogen-rich hydrocarbons and they smell nice. Menthol is an example, with a hydrogen mass fraction of about 12%. For comparison, water has a hydrogen mass fraction of about 11.2%.

If you abandon the "smell nice" constraint, you can get an even higher hydrogen mass fraction. For example, n-pentane has a hydrogen mass fraction of about 16.8% and it's liquid at a pressure of 1 atmosphere and a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius, but it evaporates rapidly, so you need to keep it in a container.

If you don't mind pressurizing the container a bit, you could put ammonia in there, and it has a hydrogen mass fraction of about 17.6%.

My main learning is that character.ai is consistently in the top four, along with ChatGPT (always #1) and Claude. I didn't even know it was in the running.

It reminds me of that old joke:

- "Say milk ten times fast."

- Wait for them to do that.

- "What do cows drink?"

Are you referring to the Stargate Project? I guess so, since there weren't any other 500 billion USD AI projects announced recently in the USA.

Construction of the first data center Abilene, Texas site is ongoing. Emily Chang visited the site over a month ago and got video footage [1]. So it's not nothing. Will they actually invest 500 billion in the end? I dunno; I guess we'll see. The main challenges seem to be the availability of electrical power and skilled workers, not demand, investment or ambition.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhIJs4zbH0o

Micel mē þynceð þanc, þæt þū gemanst

mǣl-gespreca ealdra.

Wæs þū hāl.

Here's a quote that predates Newton by some centuries:

"We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." -- John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon (1159)

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...

Thank you for your comment. We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

It might make more sense to put data centers on the Moon.

It's fairly close, about 1.3 light seconds away. You wouldn't use it for anything realtime, but it would be fine for long AI training jobs.

You could bury the servers underground to shield them from cosmic rays. That would also be good for any people living there.

You could get power from solar panels on peaks near the poles that get light almost all the time. For example, some ridges around Shackleton Crater are sunlit up to ~90% of the time, with short periods of darkness. Use batteries to smooth out the power supply.

For heating and cooling, just use the standard techniques. It's not easy, but it's a solved problem. As a bonus, near the poles, the temperature extremes aren't as bad as at the equator.

You could also sell tickets to tourists. People will pay to see the darndest things.

People who develop software have to understand what "open source" means (technically, not just some sloppy interpretation), because using a non-open-source package in an otherwise open source project can contaminate the whole thing. License violations can pose high risks, both financial and reputation losses.

Because of that, a lot of effort goes into helping make sure that software stacks are using consistent licenses. There's a whole industry of standards, audit processes, software and companies to help with this; for example, see:

https://licensehawk.com/software-license-compliance-audits/

https://spdx.org/licenses/

https://www.flexera.com/products/flexnet-manager

My current favorite option is Quarto [1]. It's basically a friendly wrapper around Pandoc [2], letting you write in Markdown (+ lots of Quarto-specific extensions) and render to LaTeX, Typst, multi-page HTML, EPUB, docx, and more.

[1] https://quarto.org/

[2] https://pandoc.org/

That was fast. So 2025.

Yep, exactly. Here's a translation of Proclus:

"He [Euclid] lived in the time of Ptolemy the First, for Archimedes, who lived after the time of the first Ptolemy, mentions Euclid. It is also reported that Ptolemy once asked Euclid if there was not a shorter road to geometry that through the Elements, and Euclid replied that there was no royal road to geometry."

Source: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/Euclid.html

Another example akin to the proof of the 4-color map theorem was the proof of the Kepler conjecture [1], i.e. "Grocers stack their oranges in the densest-possible way."

We "know" it's true, but only because a machine ground mechanically through lots of tedious cases. I'm sure most mathematicians would appreciate a simpler and more elegant proof.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_conjecture

I never understood that quote until recently.

The story goes that the (royal) pharaoh of Egypt wanted to learn geometry, but didn't want to have to read Euclid. He wanted a faster route. But, "there is no royal road to geometry."

Also known as "treknobabble."

I looked around some more and it seems that it is, in fact, the total number of units sold that peaked, not the total dollars of sales.

I found a good video that outlines all the reasons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsXxfx_UsVI

I was rather hoping that a "Telegraph Simulator" simulated the electric and magnetic fields along a telegraph line. This is more of a Morse Code toy.

This is true. Using a neutrino beam, the minimum latency would be approximately:

(diameter of Earth) / (speed of light) ~= 42.5 milliseconds

Some high-frequency traders might actually be able to justify the investment needed to enable such low-latency communications!

Come to think of it, you could also use gravitational waves...

One use case is to estimate the minimum latency for communications between two points on opposite sides of the Earth, which would be how long it takes light to travel halfway around the Earth:

= 20,000 km / (speed of light)

~= 66.7 milliseconds

The French definition of the meter can also be described as "such that the distance from the equator to the North Pole, through Paris, is 10,000 km." This is a handy number to know!

It means, for example, that the circumference of the Earth is four times as big, or 40,000 km (roughly speaking; I know that the Earth is smooshed due to its rotation etc.). And then to estimate the diameter, you just divide that by pi:

40,000 km / 3.14159... ~= 12,732 km

and half that is the radius of the Earth:

r_Earth ~= 6366 km

Maybe that's true, but maybe the average cost of a new car in Asia is quite a bit lower, so the overall effect is still declining total overall sales (measured in USD)?

Here's a fascinating video about a city in China that's full of cute electric cars that cost less than $5000 USD each:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AomxytSwrkY

The latest version of Tectonic is 0.15.0 (i.e. pre-release), and is dated February 5, 2024. Looking at the contributions on GitHub [1], there's not much activity happening in the repo.

Frankly, there are better ways to get and use TeX and friends (i.e. LaTeX, XeTeX, XeLaTeX, etc.); see https://www.latex-project.org/get/

[1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/graphs/cont...

Meta Horizon Worlds launched in 2021, so I guess it doesn't count. (Meta continues to invest in it.)

VIVERSE (from HTC) was announced in March 2022. It's still around. It's something you can do with your HTC VIVE headset. It's kinda like HTC's competitor to Meta Horizon Worlds. HTC continues to invest in it. For example, in August of 2024, they announced "VIVERSE Create v1.0" a no-code tool to create interactive multiplayer worlds (for VIVERSE).

CVEs are very important, of course, especially nowadays, but...

Many licenses, such as the MIT license, are very open. All you have to do is include the license text and the names of the software creators, because they want attribution. In other words, it really is about who made what, even with some of the most open licenses.

Licenses matter, a lot. After all, some licenses are share-alike/viral: if you "use" code with such a license, your code might inherit that license. (I put "use" in scare quotes because this is where the lawyers get involved. It depends how exactly you use the code.)

It sounds like you and your fellow employees are generating those sboms while on the clock. In other words, your employer is paying for those sboms, indirectly, already. From your employer's point of view, sboms are an expense. Maybe it's a small expense, maybe it's a big one. If it gets big enough, I suppose they might consider outsourcing it.

This was not intended to be a serious article, like something you'd submit for publication in an ACM journal.

The last sentence is: "(Also I decided to try writing this thread in the style of a linkedin influencer lol, sorry about that.)"

From the linked post: 'A "computer algebra system" would have accomplished a similar goal, but been much slower and much more complicated'