xioxox

It's also commonly used in astronomy to measure the distance on the sky between two objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula

I could imagine these could be useful to be defined by computer libraries, as (see article) it would help reduce large reductions in accuracy for some calculations (e.g. by subtracting similar numbers, or wanting to calculate sin^2).

I wish more games had better ways to reduce difficulty. There's a particularly obnoxious culture of purism in the gaming community, particularly for platforming games. People having difficulty are told to "get gud" or stop playing. I could complete the game VVVVVV because it has a slow down option. Although I have no serious disability, my reactions are not as good as a teenager's and my joints are stiffer. I've got nowhere with the Hollow Knight because it has no difficulty controls. The game's fans just say get gud, which is impossible for me, and make the community repellent.

thanks - I'll look into this

Related question. I'm trying to sample something with no gradient information (messy astronomical likelihood computation). I'm currently using emcee which uses a Goodman-Weare sampler which breaks down with too many parameters. Are there any better samplers which don't need a gradient?

It was great. It showed that it is actually possible to run fast Python from within the standard interpreter with excellent compatibility. The only downside I remember was the memory usage.

Blake's 7 is an interesting old series with an arc and strong characters. You definitely need concessions with the special effects, though.

Indeed, have a look at what too much eye contact looks like: https://samharris.org/look-into-my-eyes/

I think that's rather unfair. The measurements are still ongoing with ever-increasing accuracy. In 2018 they managed to record the closest approach of the star S2, measuring a velocity of 7000 km/s at its maximum. This was after mapping the full 16 year orbit. I know that Genzel is still actively researching this topic with his group, see e.g. https://www.mpe.mpg.de/7433286/news20200416

Have a look at the linked documents giving the popular science background.

They led the teams that gave the decisive proof that there is black hole at the galactic centre. The teams developed techniques to precisely measure the orbits of the stars which orbit the central black hole. Looking at the speed of the stars, particularly as they pass close to the object, you can measure its mass and put a constraint on its size. The only thing which is small enough and heavy enough is a black hole. Doing this required lots of advances in data analysis and adaptive optics to be able to measure the stars orbits to enough precision.

At least Qt cares more about compatibility: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt-Version-Compatibility - Qt 5.x.y releases are supposed to be binary compatible with each other.

It could at least prevent access to dot files or places where dangerous things could be dropped (e.g. ${HOME}/bin).

Qt. It supports Wayland. It can do high DPI scaling.

Yes - Fortan doesn't have a built-in pi constant, but does have trigonometric functions. Usually programs define pi based on atan or some other trig relation.

CPython had one as an external module, but unfortunately it's no longer maintained as PyPy was supposed to supersede it: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/

It actually worked quite well, though was pretty memory hungry.

I wish for better reviews and scores too. The animated reviews are simply awful. In some genres virtually everything has near 5 stars, even the most derivative badly written dross. I now ignore any positive reviews and look at the negative reviews instead. I look at those which seem the most level-headed and mention things I care about.

One advantage of putting ssh on a non-standard port is that your logs, which are otherwise filled with automated ssh break-in attempts, now become almost empty. It's much easier to look for other problems when the signal to noise is increased.

Despite this, Germans seem to use a lot of bottles. Most German people seem to prefer to drink bottled water rather than tap water, even though tap water is of very high quality. They also don't have the concentrated drinks available in other countries (cordial/squash) and insist on shipping around diluted drinks in heavy glass bottles.

Twisting by the Pool? :-) I don't dislike any others. I think this poor taste thing seems to occur if something becomes too popular, it becomes poor taste in the eyes of many people, even if that thing is actually good. I'm not convinced anyone can seriously listen to Telegraph Road and say that doesn't have artistic merit. Similarly there is Phil Collins that has a huge background in prog rock and is a top class musician, that is now maligned by many people because he wrote some highly catchy and accessible pop songs.

I wonder if they've improved the screen hinges? I've given up on slim Lenovos as they had this weak metal bonded to plastic hinges which are easy to break through regular use. The screen snaps off the base and the case just gets bent and twisted. They seem very poorly designed and are hard to fix.

Have a go with the Veusz package (I'm lead author). It does interactive 3D plots, has a GUI and Python interface. I think the 3D speed is reasonable (providing the BSP clipping isn't switched on).

http://veusz.github.io/

There is also Doom (2016) which (mostly) honours the simplicity of play found in Doom and Quake, but I found the mostly arena-style action rather dull and repetitive after a while. I missed the tunnels and so on in original games. Personally I'm now into modern games like the Dishonored series or Prey (2017), which a great mix of story, puzzle solving and action.

The letter is from 1994. See Starlink Bulletin #13, pg : http://starlink.eao.hawaii.edu/starlink/Bulletins

The Psyco project (now dead) used to get very reasonable speedups (factors of several) in pure Python code, particularly for numeric algorithms. It was retired because PyPy was being developed and was expected to solve all speed problems. I wonder why this approach worked while other python JITs did not.

HiDPI is pretty good on a KDE desktop nowadays

Though a lot of these errors are in the package metadata, Debian doesn't make it easy for itself as the build system and packaging format is very complex. There are lots of different build system variants, relying on weird poorly-documented helper scripts which have strange interactions. In my opinion, there's just too much magic in the debhelper system to understand how to fix problems. You also have the long, complex and constantly changing list of rules which need to be applied for each update. They are very strict about noting down the copyright of all the files, for example (which I can understand to some extent).

I think the biggest issue is the social problem of the long and arduous process to become a trusted Debian Developer. Although there's now an easier Debian Maintainer option for restricted access, it's still not easy to become one. Other people have to go through a developer to update or add packages. If you can't find a responsive developer, then package changes can sit for months or years in a broken state before they are applied (as I have found out). The whole packaging process is a frustrating exercise in bureaucracy compared to other non-Debian distributions (e.g. Fedora), which is no fun to be involved in for most people.

RedReader is a good Reddit app for Android on F-Droid

There are also alternative much better apps (e.g. redreader from the F-Droid store for Android).

I have a Toshiba Portege R500 in a cupboard somewhere. It was a very impressive machine. It's extremely light at less than a kg (particularly compared to others at the time). It has an SSD (albeit on some weird interface). The keyboard is also rather nice. The most interesting part is the transflective screen which works in direct sunlight. One nice point was that Toshiba repaired it free of charge when the screen broken off due to a korfball incident.

It's a shame they've exited when they used to have such innovative machines.

x86 has much stronger guarantees about memory ordering compared to ARM [1]. Maybe this comes under x86 features, but multithreaded software will not work if assumptions of memory ordering guarantees are made.

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

3D is hard to do in real time as you have many more grid points. The method I linked to is much faster than properly solving the fluid equations, so is suitable for a 3D interactive simulation.