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baruzon Simple circuits can create complex behaviors

A K Dewdney did a quick sketch of the early chapters of Braitenberg’s book in his Computer Recreations column in _Scientific American_ in the late 1980s.

baruzon Computers Cannot Make Decisions

Let’s go over their statement.

> Inadequate or broken safeguards do not fall under my definition of reasonable.

I see no such assumption there. In my reading, the implicit assumption is that adequate safeguards are necessary and that anyone who doesn’t build them is irresponsible. And I feel that that is correct.

baruzon Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs

>maybe Xerox before that?

Yes, the cut/copy/paste system and its shortcuts were developed at the Xerox PARC LRG as part of Smalltalk-76. They used a Control key.

>and adopted by DOS

DOS inherited it from CP/M by way of the 86-DOS clone that Gates purchased. Kildall used the TOPS-10 while developing PL/M and CP/M and adopted some of its conventions, including control-break.

baruzon Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs

Ah yes, computing luminary Larry Tesler, what an idiot, working at Xerox PARC. Whoof.

Decades is an exaggeration. It was less than a decade after Digital started using Control-C as a process interrupt in their PDP-10 operating systems (1967) to when Mr Tesler devised his mapping to a copy operation (1974-1976) for Smalltalk-76, and only four years after C was born. CP/M is the much more likely source of widespread usage of control-C as an interrupt, and it was contemporaneous (1974) with Tesler’s mapping.

baruzon The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]

A researcher submitted a paper to the medical journal _Diabetes care_ in the nineties that basically redescribed integral calculus as a novel finding. How’s that for a silo?

baruzon I said no and Apple said yes

Do you mean Epstein? I missed the Elon bit.

baruzon Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek

Ktesibios and Heron of Alexandria

Anthemios of Tralles, quite the prankster

baruzon The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

That does not sound correct. Priests in Eastern rite Catholic churches get married, but they do not own the land in which their parish chirch stands and they do not pass that land on to their children. Note that the Catholic Church itself does not own that land, either. As I understand it, in most cases the parish land is owned by a Catholic episcopal See or eparchia, as in Latin rite Catholic Churches, in which the diocese owns the land.

baruzon Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)

Different ships that can survive and bounce on slower or glancing hits, shields, more maneuverable saucer ships. Wave fifteen the ships reload and fire really rapidly, decimated a crowded field in seconds.

baruzon Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)

Around wave ten, I think the ships can teleport.

baruzon Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)

The number of ships increases, and then the speed, and then the accuracy with which they fire. The gravity generator seems slower to recharge, and the asteroids are slower to generate, or that may be subjective.

baruzon iPhone Duo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

It was presented as an investment, but the $150 million was just the initial payment of a much larger settlement which was not disclosed.

baruzon Aging Brains Blend Memories Together Instead of Just Forgetting Them

Anecdatum: I confidently told a woman that her son, who was looking for a research opportunity in Berne, Switzerland, was heading for the birthplace of the World Wide Web, which is actually a couple of hours west and south at CERN.

baruzon An implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Windows 3.1x and later

Thank you!

baruzon An implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Windows 3.1x and later

I am not too familiar with Windows development in the 16-bit era, so I do not understand what Raiter means when he writes that he “de-Petzoldized” the code. I thought Petzold’s work on documenting the Windows API was foundational. Was it the style?

baruzon Fences, Not Sandboxes

He’s using a $5k/month account to access the “equivalent” of $122k worth of tokens.

baruzon Scrap

Reminds me a bit of some of Dave Secretary’s TIME FOR SOME STORIES.

baruzon I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

But let’s not pretend that the plastic and painterly arts are so much more self-evidently “thick” than literature is. Despite their immediacy, these arts have their own conventions, motifs, and demands that must be understood to “find the treasure in the dark cave.”

I have tried to convince someone I know that an art museum merits more than a one-minute-per-painting, four minutes-max-per-room, pretty/not-pretty approach. She still does not understand why I linger over books or works of art, and I have not the wherewithal to lead her through the techniques, the conventions, or the history that makes this worthwhile for me.

baruzon Seven books I keep close because I love them

A lot of books that call themselves Roget’s have abandoned the dual structure (classification-index) in favor of a single index structure built like a dictionary, basically constructed for people who want a different word than what they would normally use, as mjd writes, rather than people who are interested in the store-house (thesaurus) of the English language.

baruzon Earth.nullschool.net

A quick trip to Wikipedia says that the Spanish name was Río del Espíritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit, and the initial French name was fleuve de l'Immaculée Conception, River of the Immaculate Conception, and later the fleuve Colbert or the rivière Saint-Louis.

baruzon Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

I was interested in astronomy as a six-year-old, which led me to Greek myths, which led me to Greek poetry, all of that in translation, as well as Gene Wolfe’s Latro books as they came out.

I was learning to program at the same time, following along A K Dewdney’s Computer Recreations column. I went into college to learn pre-med but always found myself more interested in the humanities, like my survey of Greek literature, which was supposed to accelerate my prerequisites. Also hung out with friends in the engineering labs on Sun Sparcstations playing netrek and MUDs, which did for me.

Anyway, I pivoted and started taking computer courses, like artificial intelligence, reading from Russell and Norvig, Clocksin and Mellisa, and Paul Graham.

I learned Greek while consulting for companies across the country, programming network performance tests, to have something to do in the hotels.

Fast forward to 2008, 2009, and I see that the Lispy Hackers and Painters guy had a new website. I started an account but lost it. Or did they reset it after disuse? Anyway, that’s me.

Oh, I did take Latin in Catholic high school, but did not really use any of it for reading, just vocabulary, but it did help with the old-style grammar-first Greek texts I learned from.

baruzon Writing by hand is good for your brain

Many of the things you mention, crossing out, circling, I do not think of as actively engaging with the material, which a quick skim of the underlying research pointed out in the TFA (or maybe an earlier 2017 paper of theirs) requires using the fine motor control of actually writing. Writing marginalia is good for the brain; if you disagree, write out why, if you agree, write your reaction. Highlighting, circling, crossing out are mere consumption and only useful for finding passages later, not engaging your brain.

baruzon Writing by hand is good for your brain

Those are called commonplace books.

baruzon Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

People keep saying that Microsoft invested in Apple to defeat anti-trust measures. They did not. They lost the Video for Windows lawsuit (Apple v San Francisco Canyon Company, Microsoft, Intel). Buying the non-voting stock was part of the remedy. Microsoft would gladly become a monopoly if they could get away with it.

baruzon Writing on Mount Hymettos in Duplo

I thought the use of the eta in ΣΗΜΙΟΙ ΔΙ to be later, like the late fifth century, at least in Athens, than the eighth century implied by the text. Before that, they would have been writing ΣΕΜΙΟΙ ΔΙ with what is now called simple E, epsilon.

baruzon I’m joining OpenAI

What got acquired?

baruzon Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

_Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?

baruzon Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

I think you mean romance? A romance used to be a Roman-style long narrative fictional work that described extraordinary deeds, soap opera plots. Novels were more concerned with realistic narratives describing the nitty gritty of everyday life.

baruzon Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

Not with that attitude you won’t! But dip your toe in, _Pride and prejudice_ is pretty light and breezy while having some depth to it.

baruzon The Eggstraordinary Fortress

I do not know about TFA and the egg cooker, but I usually boil the water first so I can pull the eggs out at a specific time (6:30 to 7:00) so the yolk is gooey. When I put an egg into boiling water without putting a hole through to the air sac, I think there's a higher chance that the egg will crack and spew albumen throughout the boiling water.