MattPalmer1086

I loved Gnomon. It's not complexity or depth that bothers me in Harrison's work, it's the apparent lack of it, just meandering weirdness.

I am tempted to try this one just because it has won a major award, and I'm a huge sci fi reader.

However, I suspect I will be one of the one star or DNF reviewers - I haven't enjoyed any of the other M John Harrison books I tried. The ideas are usually interesting but the execution tends towards weirdness and not much plot. Great at creating atmosphere but not so good at holding my attention. Maybe I will give it a go...

I certainly used XSLT for report generation. Have to say though, it was slow and painful to use.

For what we needed it would really have been faster - both to develop and certainly to run - to just write some custom code. Some reports on not that much data would take minutes or even an hour to run using XSLT.

Could have extracted the data from the database and written it out in whatever format in about a second. I do not mourn the gradual decline of XSLT.

Haha, yes. It does not account for releases which made UX dramatically worse (win 8) which were then reverted to some extent.

A comprehensive look at why dark matter does not adequately explain galactic dynamics by a leading scientist in the field, Stacy McGaugh. Specifically, it addresses the criticism that DM should provide natural explanations for MONDian phenomonology.

Newtonian is just plain determinism. One thing causes another, but does not imply things are fixed in any particular way.

Superdeterminism implies that things are fixed in advance in such a way that the things we "choose" to measure always looks as if there are no local hidden variables (e.g. Bell's inequality) even though there are.

MOND has one constant parameter, a0. This is hardly a good example of a theory tweaking many parameters to fit the data.

Yes, it is empirically determined and provides no deeper insight into why it works.

There are always exceptions that need additional explanation. The majority do spin exactly as the Tully Ficsher relation suggests. What specific examples are you thinking of?

Apparently they all have just the right amount arranged in the right way to give the same result in each case.

TeVes (one relatistic formulation of MOND) predicts gravity propagation at different speeds than light. This is not a general result of MOND theories.

If you read the rebuttal by Professor McGaugh, you can include those 3 as perfectly good examples of MOND too.

You do make a good point though - astronomy and astrophysics is hard. There are often many ways of interpreting the observations we have. They can be misleading and take careful interpretation, particularly when they seem unusual in some way.

Yep, pretty much. They all have a flat rotation curve (which makes no sense unless gravity works differently or there is unseen mass), and that rotation correlates to the visible matter in the galaxy (the Tully Fischer relation).

Maybe it should - but it does not prove that the subject is a crank. Thomas Khun's theory of paradigms shows that science is not an entirely objective undertaking.

Having read Prof McGaugh's blog and some of his published papers for quite some time, I do not place him in the crank bucket. Make your own mind up I guess. My take is he is a legitimate scientist who holds views outside the mainstream.

The fun question to ask is why almost all galaxies (no matter how they differ) spin as though a simple modification of gravity explains them. That dark matter is organising itself to produce the same outcome over many different circumstances!

He is a professional scientist with a blog - he has written a lot of papers as well [1]. It is worth taking his views seriously, even if you have reason to dispute them.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lM8J8noAAAAJ&hl=en

Professor McGaugh has commented many times on the sociology of science and how the dominant paradigm tends to be hostile or indifferent to alternate views. He is also quite frank about the limitations of MOND as well, although he is definitely in the MOND camp overall.

He is hardly a crank - but he is definitely not in the mainstream camp.

Also see [1], a follow up post by Stacy McGaugh, a MOND proponent, who is quoted in the Quanta article. He does not agree with the evidence as presented in that article.

[1] https://tritonstation.com/2026/10/15/ghostly-galaxies-in-the...

Actually, most operating systems were designed as multi-user systems where users cannot access each other's data. Trusted administrators installed software. This made sense in a world of expensive computers that needed to be shared.

In the modern world we do not share our computers with other users, and allow untrusted software to run on our machines from the internet. Without further sandboxing, it would execute as the user with access to everything for that user - which in practice means mostly everything.

> If there is one thing i've seen in software engineering over many years is that sometimes software engineers prefer using flashy stuff even though it doesn't have that much benefits

We used to call this RDD - Resume Driven Development.

Well, it answers the technical questions of what changes when you stick your search indexes on slower and more expensive storage - but not why you would do that in the first place.

The point is they have less algebraic structure than things like elliptic curves. If you want "math resistant" properties, this is a good thing.

The "vampire" thing was a bit cheesy to be honest, despite being scientifically explained. But conceptually it was quite key to the story. There would probably have been another way to do this.

Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.

It is no surprise I guess that the "move fast and break things" culture is itself misaligned with developing potentially highly dangerous technologies. Safety culture and risk aversion are very different of course.

Is this the first time we have been in this position? Can anyone think of some prior examples?

It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.

Did anyone say that this model was "the one"?

From a corporate liability perspective, if your product is going to go off and hack loads of other companies, I would call it too dangerous (to the company) to release.

Pretty good!

Could maybe use a "Catastrophic failure!" error message (experienced for real last week)

Real windows is still actually worse...

So glad I moved off Windows at home back in 2003.

25? At least in the UK, most degrees are 3 years long and most people start when they are 18.

Haha, we are ahead of you. We realised we were gonna get owned a long time ago, since business and engineering teams prioritised speed over security. And also that it is genuinely hard to secure everything.

This is why there are so many resilience initiatives in serious organisations. Assume it is gonna happen. Limit blast radius, ensure effective recovery.

It is interesting that a philosophy opposed to ownership and restriction of control has pretty much the most controlling terms of any OSS license - to the extent it is usually banned in any commercial software development.

I do understand the copy left rationale - to ensure the freedom to modify and for the community to benefit from those modifications, it is necessary to use the machinery of control!

No, it isn't an attempt to make copyright irrelevant. Almost all OSS licenses impose some conditions - even if it is only attribution.

OSS licenses are fully part of the copyright system and could not exist without it. Maybe you are thinking of "public domain".