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- Someone made a pi version of the OQO!
- How was he caught?
- If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
I think a similar thing happened to journalism ethics over the course of the 20th century up through the 1st quarter of the 21st.
The XKCD counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/915/
(I think this shows how arrogant Randall Munroe can be sometimes. He does a lot of great stuff, but when he's wrong, he's egregiously so!)
- The sphere for all liquid water seems to be close in size to the asteroid Ceres.
https://lightsinthedark.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ceres...
- Instead of just downvoting me, how about doing some actual research:
Proof that Tesla demand is up in July 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHiAIZsXT1Q
- > but are not executable.
Fixed it for you.
Dude, if you say the flow in the diagram is not executable, blanket in any fashion, then are you saying all of the programming projects you've been in are either monolithic systems, or have all failed?
- I'm very disappointed that (Number four will shock you) wasn't some kind of break statement or event handling.
- Bret Victor might argue visualizing a program is still "drawing dead fish".
The power of visual programming is diminished if the programmer aims to produce source-code as the final medium and only use visualization on top of language.
I disagree. We frequently break up large systems into chunks like modules, or micro-services, or subsystems. Often, these chunks' relationships are described using diagrams, like flowcharts or state transition diagrams, etc.
Furthermore, quite often there are zero direct code references between these chunks. Effectively, we are already organizing large systems in exactly the fashion the op is proposing. Inside each chunk, we just have code. But at a higher level viewpoint, we often have the abstraction described by a diagram. (Which is often maintained manually, separate from the repo.)
What exactly are the disadvantages here?
- Sounds like the consumer tech version of "$70k EVs aren't selling anymore!"
Misinformation. The good EVs are selling quite well. It's just that their price has effectively dropped quite a lot. My wife's Model Y which cost us nearly $80k (we bought at peak price: the prior Corolla got totalled) now has the equivalent 2024 model selling for $42k!
The crappy EVs (ie most everyone else's) aren't selling, because they are inferior in efficiency and software implementation. Rivian and Lucid vehicles are pretty good, but those companies are still at risk of never showing a profit. I've been in a Hyundai Ionic 5, and that seemed decent too.
- Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt. Like I said, I am not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious here.
Long term, here's what I suspect may happen. Robotics+AI is going to eat the lunch of VR. VR is only used when it's not economical to have the actual stuff, but the realm of nifty real world stuff is going to expand tremendously.
This may well result in a societal bifurcation, where the rich have a bunch of robots, and the poor have to settle for VR.
- An enormous percentage (like 90%+) of requests to Hubble, JWTC, etc get denied, so the market is seemingly there.
What is the TAM? Would it be worth it?
However, considering that the Hubble was developed from spy satellite tech, could this also happen in reverse? What uses would a 9m mirror telescope have in terms of ground observation? Would the US government allow such a thing to go up and be available for hire?
- What would be the effect on the "Grabby Aliens" model?
- Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem.
Tons of things like this were built in Smalltalk. (Including a UI->Domain model connection layer in the IBM VisualAge Smalltalk IDE.) They all had scaling problems, especially, "they don't seem to scale cognitively."
It's not as if the problem doesn't exist in most codebases. It's more that the problem is invisible without such tools. Tools making the tangle visible make themselves seem unusable.
The fundamental problem, is that we don't have ways of introspecting these horrendous relationship graphs for specific contexts. If IDEs and other programming tools generally could create custom browsers/IDE windows for things based in queries like:
"All of the methods that contain references to ClassA.Member1 and ClassB.Member2 which also call function Y."
...where this query can be modified or further specified at runtime. Then there could be specific built in queries that cover everything touched by canned refactorings. Then these further could be intersected or unioned.
EDIT: Forgot to complete my thought. If the graphical diagram could show contextually relevant slices of the system, it would greatly cut down the confusing web aspect of the diagrams.
- What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring.
The problem with that method of evaluation, is that it's not First Principles. Basically, pg's essay in this case just reduces down to, "Is that person steered by First Principles thinking?"
- > All the toxins in the food chain end up in the apex predators
Is there an analogy for media and information?
- > > local
> For now.
Like everyone's music and movie collections.
- Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though.
If this artificial advantage allows Apple to slack off in their other areas of competitive advantage, then this is bad for the consumer, overall. This creates an environment of cynicism, where there's even degraded incentive to try and beat Apple with a better product.
- TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market.
Beyond some threshold, any meta-gaming of the market is bad for the market. It's like patents. When they were first instituted, they did some good by incentivizing innovation. Then, people started meta-gaming them, and used them as legal weapons to suppress competition well beyond the original intention.
I don't think there's a good argument that monopolizing a feature is good for the market, even if the means that allows it is technically legal.
What could be argued, is if legal remedies to this kind of meta-gaming might also be meta-gamed in return and become worse than the thing they were trying to remedy. This seems to always happen in a variety of forms.
- This risk should be evaluated iteratively. It won't kill Apple if some small fraction of the time, their releases are delayed. Overall, if their record is that they have stuff their competitors can't even get their hands on, they win.
Even though it's not technically illegal, there's something about this that feels unfair and bad for the market.
- What makes Lisp macros so intuitive is not the prefix notation
The culture is the ultimate "reality distortion field." Prefix notation would be seen as intuitive, if that were culturally established. We'd see something like PEMDAS as arbitrary and silly.
Just look at how much content there is around PEMDAS and interpretation of math problems. Clearly, it really isn't "intuitive." We just have this enshrined in the culture. (That said, one of the biggest UX mistakes the designers of Smalltalk made, was to eschew operator precedence!)
- We could potentially get over the bikeshedding by letting everyone configure their IDEs per their own taste for syntax.
We Smalltalkers were discussing doing this at Camp Smalltalks in the 2000's.
I'm currently working in golang, and I've noticed that Goland IDE expends quite a bit of compute indexing and parsing source files. Not only that, but, a significant portion of the bug fixes have to do with this, and the primary motivation for restarting Goland has to do with stale indexing.
Wouldn't tools like git simply work better, if they were working off of some kind of direct representation of the semantic programming language structures? Merging could become 100% accurate, for one thing. (It's not for some edge cases, though many might mistakenly think otherwise.)
- I think there's some connection between your comment:
For example, if outside developers had more capability to explore different ways...
...and these 2 sentences from the article:
For the sake of this argument, let’s posit that there exist tens of millions — perhaps 100 million — users who love the iPad for what it is. People who feel empowered, not hamstrung, by how it works, and who have no or very little need for a computer that exposes the complexity of a desktop OS like MacOS or Windows. And that there exist tens of millions more people who enjoy having an iPad to complement, not replace, their desktop computer.
If someone did come up with an iPad competitor that had all of the ease of use, UX simplicity, and ecosystem benefits, but also better enabled power users with something nearer a desktop replacement, then this would simply kill the iPad.
The fact that Apple seems reticent to do this themselves, indicates that there is a kind of organizational blind spot there, driven by self interest. Either that, or there are typical Apple long term plans that we're not fully aware of, and they're taking their own sweet time.
- > I tried everything to make it more tolerable, and hot water was by far the best. The effect didn't last forever, but it was remarkable how it a) was actually pleasurable and b) muted the itchiness
I've been thinking of a "low fantasy" story, which is actually Sci-fi under the covers. In it, the "fey" characters are just indigenous people who have immunity to a plant which is similar to poison oak, but which grows in nigh impenetrable hedge like clumps and walls. Your mention of hot water for relief gave me an idea for a story beat, where another character discovers the hot water effect, and simultaneously discovers how to infiltrate the "fey" character's territory and bathing practices similar to Japanese and Finnish bathing.
- I suspect hermetically sealed enclosed mini ecosystems are going to take on tremendous economic and technological importance as we move out into the solar system.
I've started to wonder why there aren't more closed loop experiments out there. These would be very cheap to make! (By space research standards.) A closed water loop habitat could be built in the middle of isolated land, like West Texas. Go from there to incrementally incorporating more of an ecosystem. Try and recycle the air last, of course, as that is potentially life threatening.
- One thing I've noticed about Liu Cixin's books, is that for people who follow futurism and hard Sci-fi beyond the shallow level of a typical mainstream layperson, there are huge glaring plotholes. Here's perhaps the big one: Ask, what if instead of doing [X], [certain characters] put those resources instead into building space industrial infrastructure space colonies?
This also applies to The Wandering Earth.
- Law enforcement impersonation is apparently, "a thing." To the point, where police talk about the phenomenon as something they expect to see in the course of a normal career.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nQyuP0RU4
I had my own run in with a police impersonator in Texas. I was held up very early in the morning at gunpoint by a guy who came out of a white pickup truck. I had to explain to him that I needed to take my foot off the brake and lower my hands in order to shift into park, before I could get out of the car. His story, was that he was staking out the ATM because a number of robberies were happening there.
Later on, I told the story to a musician friend of mine who happened to be a judge, and he told me that wasn't a police officer. There were absolutely no unmarked pickup trucks being used by the police.
Some impersonators apparently go to great lengths to equip themselves, even to the point of building their own fake police cars.
- I keep on noticing moments bad UX creeping into apps, more and more, for little possible benefit. Do frontend people simply not think about 2nd and 3rd order consequences anymore?
Here's an example: Disappearing affordances. For some reason, the button to remove the background from Google Meet went from being its own "Remove Background" button, to all background thumbnails becoming a toggle button.
This is fine, so long as the selected background is visible. But if it's not, perhaps because the selected background is outside the viewport of the scrollable selector, then what's happened, is that the affordance of the "Remove Background" button simply disappeared.
- "is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?"
This is just a matter of syntax, right? So could it be determined by a stack machine? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Perl is not context free!
https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393
As just a guess, this question maps to the Halting Problem. (EDIT: That would have to be the question where the input is a programming language, not just for Perl. That question has been answered empirically.)
EDIT: Finding more evidence for convergence between scientific fields is also worthy. (Though the delta is very small at this point.)