Tloewald

"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."

King James

Cigarettes were never wonderful. They were addictive.

I think that's unfair to PHP.

If you squint at JSX it also looks like JSP…

The first generation Newton was insanely good at recognizing really terrible cursive handwriting and terrible at recognizing tidy or printed handwriting. The second generation Newton was very good at recognizing tidy handwriting (and you could switch back to the old system if you were one of the freaks whose handwriting the old system grokked). The Newton also had really nice correction system, e.g. gestures for changing the case of a single character or word. In my opinion the later Newton generations recognized handwriting as well as you could expect, when it failed you forgave it and could easily correct the errors, and was decently fast on the 192MHz ARM CPUs.

Speech is way, way harder.

I totally get what it does, even if I hadn't seen it before. What I don't get is (a) the use of the word 'match' (that's unfamiliarity) and (b) the proposed syntax which looks like an absolute mess, something worthy of PHP, and the fact that we end up with something that isn't a function but is recursive. Or something.

'x => x = 1' in Javascript, is an expression that resolves to a function. I do understand the difference, and it's important.

'match(x) { {x} => foo }' is not a bag of functions but a new use of the '=>' operator that is confusing/surprising. I can get over it, but why should I have to?

'match(x) { {x} : foo }' would be less surprising.

You're saying 'match({x:1}) { ....}' is an expression, but is 'match(x) { {x} => foo }'?, What does it resolve to? It smells like it either isn't an expression (just as you can't write x = switch(x) {...};) or it's a new kind of function.

So the proposal is super confusing to me (but I hadn't seen match before). At first I thought it had something to do with regex.

Essentially it's a switch variant that is (a) confusingly named 'match' (bad) (b) returns a value (good?) (c) and is actually a kind of function (wha?), since it (d) supports recursion, but (e) doesn't require break (good), (f) looks like a bag of inline functions but isn't (bad).

How about provide a replacement for switch, with a name that isn't confusing that doesn't require break but otherwise has switch semantics, isn't recursive (we have a mechanism for that) and has the matching behavior suggested? Assuming we stick with 'match' it would look like:

foo = match(x) { case {y: 1} : /* result if x.y === 1 */; ... }

Seems far less confusing.

Thanks for giving credit where it's due and your own work. I note that landru posted a GIF which is ironically much nicer than the video:

https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040

Seems to me that among other things the writer has completely missed the point of the Primer was not to educate in the sense they mean it but to build character.

So we can get within epsilon for an undefined delta because humans can do something, although not always.

Right, that whole claim about engineering a system that always knows when it’s not working sounds rock solid to me. After all, we can build a human, right?

Which sounds like a lot of work.

Oh, … and find an old mac to run it on …

Oh, and a copy of the right version of CodeWarrior.

Arguing that it's possible to build an autonomous that is sometimes wrong but always knows when it's wrong seems like a stretch to me.

I have a copy of _System Shock_ for Mac somewhere. I played it on the PC but never finished it and picked up the Mac version later at a discount. I was very disappointed to discover it had a crashing bug mid-game for which I could find no workaround.

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed

This seems to me to be a clearly incorrect (and self-contradictory) claim. It entirely depends on your definition of failure.

Your analysis seems fine. The big problem is that the "autonomous" driver is using one signal (where are the lines on the edge of the road?) to the near exclusion of all others (is there a large stationary solid object in front of me?)

Maybe Tesla should have hired George Hotz (sp?) if only to write a lightweight sanity-check system that could argue with the main system about whether it was working.

One possibly nice fallout of this would be Intel offering Xeons to consumers to leverage its economies of scale on the server-side for the consumer market (since I believe Apple is the biggest customer for high-end consumer CPUs).

To what are you sarcastically referring?

Apple's switch to PowerPC which gave them a performance lead over Intel for five years and kept them competitive for another five or Apple's switch to its own ARM Core designs which have given them a 12-24 month performance lead over the entire Android ecosystem?

Bear in mind that Apple dominates the high-end desktop / laptop market, both in market share and profit share* which could put a huge dent in Intel's economies of scale for high end consumer CPUs.

* I'm assuming these figures omit servers. Also, there was a lot of noise in around 2009 saying that Apple had over 90% of the high-end PC market, but I've not seen more recent figures one way or another. Given that PC prices seem to have, if anything, slipped, I doubt it's gotten worse for Apple (and goodness knows the tech press loves any statistic that makes Apple look bad).

There’s this thing most countries have called the post office. I suggest it look into providing secure email.

To be really good at something it is necessary (but not sufficient) to be interested in it.

Running a company of 10 people is an experientially different thing than running a company of 1000, just like collaborating is an experientially different thing from doing stuff on your own and playing video games is different from using Excel. Being interested in one is no guarantee of being interested in another.

If somehow a dog dies because of FB or Android then… maybe.

It's more analogous to -- very analogous to -- the "clean room" BIOS clones that enabled the PC Clone industry to take off (and made IBM-compatible PCs actually affordable; before the clones took off, IBM's prices made Apple seem like a bargain).

So you're saying it's an Oracle product?

It’s worse than that:

4) researcher is a serial p-hacker who even boasted about the practice

5) reason given for the small sample (most recipes had changed) was a lie and sample appears to have been cherry-picked

It depends on the details of the case. (IANAL either.)

Criminal law applies to criminal acts. It's possible for do something wrong that "injures" someone (physically or in some other way) without committing a crime.

Criminality generally requires wrongful intent. If you simply screwed up while otherwise obeying the law then you haven't committed a crime (negligence can be a crime, e.g. if you are more careless than a "reasonable man" would be this is in itself a form of bad intent -- so swinging swords around in public places while blind-folded isn't OK).

Also, tort law has a different standard of proof -- it is resolved based on preponderance of evidence rather than proof beyond reasonable doubt, so there's a lower bar than for throwing someone in jail.

Oh, and it's harder to prove criminal charges against nebulous entities. (Who's the criminal in this case? Uber's CEO? The head of the software team? The person who gave uber a permit to test their crap on public streets?)

Uber's overall conduct might approach the point of "criminal enterprise" at which point RICO statutes might be invoked. Not likely though.

Ray Tracing is also a lie! Are they giving us an unbiased renderer?

Looks interesting anyway.

Tort law covers death. Manslaughter is a criminal charge but wrongful death, etc. are how tort law handles the situation. You may recall O.J. Simpson was sued for wrongful death and lost.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/11/us/jury-decides-simpson-mu...

It's still easy to tell banks from tech companies. Banks probably won't offer you 2FA or allow you to use secure passwords and will cheerfully bring down their website for maintenance for twelve hours at a stretch. They'll also charge you mysterious transaction fees.

Off-topic: the PS4's PSVR box is a bit reminiscent of the old Voodoo cards with their passthrough video.

Mozilla’s bizarre stance on H264 coincidentally favored Google’s position. Mozilla’s anti-ad-tracking stuff was all switched off by default. They make their money from ads meaning their incentives parallel those of ad networks.

All ad supported products have bad incentives. It’s the same reason HBO and Nerflix produces great TV shows and ad based broadcast and cable networks mainly produce garbage.

No it’s just beholden to one or another of them.

Doesn’t Spectre just require speculative fetching? In which case in order is not sufficient as to guarantee immunity.

It’s Meltdown that relies on out of order execution.

https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf

https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf

Processes can run a long time and pass data around. This isn’t realistic.