347
points
Sniffnoy
Joined 5,275 karma
I potato what I potato and that's all that I potato.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~haltman/
(See site for email address.)
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/sniffnoy; my proof: https://keybase.io/sniffnoy/sigs/xjplnllrakRjVORnG-ZvoONp-nF-wo0ZPFFJG8Tp-Zw ]
- Sniffnoy parentHuh, is that legal? I mean I guess it is when the power company is the customer, as they talk about, but otherwise?
Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/tree/develop/package...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.Location: New York City Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Maybe if it's on the east coast Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.comI'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
- 20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
- > But choosing foundation has real implications on the mathematics. You can have a foundation where every total function on the real numbers is continuous. Or one where Banach–Tarski is just false.
I mean, mathematicians do care about the part of the foundations that affect what they do! Classical vs constructive matters, yes. But material vs structural is not something most mathematicians think about. (They don't think about classical vs constructive either, but that's because they don't really know about constructive and it's not what they're trying to do, rather than because it's irrelevant to them like material vs structural.)
- Worth noting that the addition of the interlinear annotation characters was quite controversial, with many commenting that this simply is not plain text and as such does not belong in Unicode. I'm not clear on how it made it in anyway, but it sure seems like the Unicode Consortium now somewhat agrees, as while they haven't formally deprecated the characters, they have kind of discouraged their use.
Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/tree/develop/package...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.Location: New York City Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Probably not Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.comI'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
- An interesting post I read recently about why we haven't: https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-ne...
Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...
- What I'm really wondering is, how much do different memory timing models affect the theory of algorithms?
Everyone here is used to thinking of memory-access as constant-time, but in the theory of algorithms, the standard model used is not a random-access model (which, when fully exploited, allows doing certain things unreasonably fast -- like, linear-time multiplication!), but rather the multi-tape Turing machine model. These tapes are 1-dimensional, effectively making memory access require linear time, larger than the cube-root time discussed here!
Since cube-root time, or using a multidimensional tape, seems more physical, I've often wonder how changing to this -- not necessarily to 3 dimensions, you understand, but to any number of dimensions d -- would affect the theory. (Or if we lived in hyperbolic space, where perhaps memory access could take logarithmic time.) Would it be meaningfully different? Hopefully not, but I have no idea! I've never seen anything on the question, though. Anyone know of anything?
- > Vajra and Vajra 2 - A pair of LaserActive-exclusive rail shooters by Data West
Wait, Data West? Apparently there was indeed such a company: https://www.mobygames.com/company/6613/data-west/
They're founded later than Data East, but also Japanese. They don't appear to be any sort of spinoff of Data East or anything, but I have to wonder if with the name they were hoping to confuse people somewhat into thinking they were Data East, or to ride on their reputation...
- Funny, I remember Gwern asking why people don't do this more often: https://gwern.net/blog/2022/pdf-forgery
- Gwern has some good comments on Project Xanadu and why it failed: https://gwern.net/xanadu
Mostly, he says, its biggest problem is that what it was trying to do (beyond the sort of thing the web actually ended up doing) just isn't that useful.
- 3 points
- This isn't accurate. It's true for positive numbers, and when comparing a positive to a negative, but false for comparisons between negative numbers. Standard floating point uses sign-magnitude representation, while signed integers these days use 2s-complement. On negative numbers, comparisons are reversed between these two encodings. Incrementing a float as if it were an integer will, in ordinary circumstances, get you the next one larger in magnitude, but with the same sign -- i.e., you go up for positives but down for negatives. Whereas with signed integers, you always go up except when there's an overflow into the sign bit.
A more correct version of the statement would be that comparison is the same as on sign-magnitude integers. Of course, this still has the caveats you already mentioned.
- Another little thing: The post mentions that tag sequences are only used for the flags of England, Scotland, and Wales. Those are the only ones that are standard (RGI), but because it's clear how the mechanism would work for other subnational entities, some systems support other ones, such as US state flags! I don't recommend using these if you want other people to be able to see them, but...