What flavour of hackathon and what does "done right" constitute for you?
9,938 karma · joined February 2, 2008
Most unexpected benefit (perhaps predictable to an outsider, but I didn't see it coming) was getting married and moving to Sweden :)
I must say it hadn't aged all that well when we saw it fairly recently. Not horrible, just a bit slow paced and not quite as funny as I remembered it being.
>> You did. Quote "It may annoy you,". But nevermind.
You misinterpret. It may annoy you. It may not. A cat may look at a king.
>> I think you also believe this, we only disagree in which grammatical forms. Or are you arguing that "Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?" is grammatically correct?
I'm arguing that the question is meaningless. Some will sound correct to my ear. Some will not. Some will sound correct to nobody. None of them are "wrong" because there is no authority beyond convention to dictate which is "correct" - and conventions differ between different users of language.
I would never say "on accident" but it would be fatuous to say that it was "wrong" just because I don't use it when millions do.
> ...only disagree on where the line is.
I don't really agree that there's a line. If one person uses an unconventional construction is it wrong? Not really, though they may be hard to understand. Or not. Half the art of great usage of the language is coming up with unconventional forms.
> No bad feelings anyway. Nice chat.
None felt, none intended. Likewise.
You're entitled to believe that some grammatical forms are "wrong" and I'm entitled to have no respect for that opinion.
I, for example, strongly dislike the change of meaning of "disinterested" to mean "uninterested", but have no illusion that there's some absolute truth of His Majesty's Royal English Language to prop up my ego.
In practice, where such institutes do exist, they trail after the language bringing the rules into alignment with it, or are utterly ignored by all but the most officious.
It may annoy you, and you may be convinced that you are right and others are "wrong" but if a substantial body of people use English in a way that you dislike then it's just tough shit I'm afraid.
> But then "Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?".
Because nobody actually talks like that, that's why.
You don't speak Elizabethan English, or Regency English, or late Saxon, or Old English, but you presumably don't think those are "wrong" - why do you think Estuary English is wrong; could it be gasp because you're in a different linguistic group? /me clutches pearls...
While nobody would say "fewer sand", "less" is in practice often used by native English speakers for both count and non-count nouns so it's not really wrong so much as it is revealing.
It's been interesting seeing how coding agents take to it - candidly they're much better at Rust than me :)
Handcoded projects are mostly a bunch of trivial conversion tools⁰ that I don't bother to share, but I have a little dictionary tool¹ and a UI for my webcam² that went up on my Github. From Agent-coded stuff I have a container manager³ and a VM (QEMU) manager⁴ that I found useful and figured why not share them. All for Linux as I'm a happy Linux user for both business and pleasure.
I haven't found much use for Rust professionally, but it's definitely my language of choice when hand-coding stuff for fun and I seem to get better results with it for agent coding on complex backend and UI stuff too.
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⁰ For example one of them took some text and an outline truetype font as input and then spat out the GCode to drive my 3D printer with a pen strapped to the print head to "hand" draw text. I screwed something up somewhere, though and always had to hand edit some stuff before it was usable - not interesting for anyone without my own very DIY setup.
¹ https://github.com/dcminter/rs-define
² https://github.com/dcminter/zoomies
My point is that while you can see the full subject you get it from the exact same point of view as that part of the hologram before it was chopped up.
If you couldn't see part of the subject from part of the intact plate you won't be able to after either.
The phrasing you used, "two copies of the hologram" is very misleading in the same way that my Usborne book was.
Chopping a hologram in half gives you two copies of the hologram in exactly the same sense that chopping a photo in half gives you two copies of the photo.
In both cases what you can see from that part of the plate/print is the same before and after you chop it up.
Not to mention the large number of "legitimate interest" exceptions that are absolutely not justifiable.
The main problem with the legislation is its lack of teeth and enforcement.
One image that I remember being particularly impressed by was a model of a radio telescope dish. You could look around the dish and see all the support gantry. The contrast between the smooth dish face and the structure on the other side made the 3D nature very dramatic.
On the counter they had a nice mirror illusion¹ of a floating "help" button - not a plate hologram but a really nice effect and you can still get these. They tend to be cheap plastic and dust and scratches affect them over time, but it's still a really nice effect if you've not seen it before.
You get pretty much what you would naively expect from chopping up a hologram before reading that kind of misleading "two copies" text: exactly the same view of the object as you had from that part of the hologram before you cut it up.
Yep, but I think it's intended to be a visual mnemonic. å looks like a tiny 'o' over the top of an 'a' even though that's not the letter combination it originated with.
> it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
The series of RSI inducing vulcan neck pinches required to write C-like languages on a Nordic Mac layout drives me a bit mad, but I do have it in my body memory now when needs must!
I toy with the idea of designing my own 40%-ish keyboard just so I only have myself to blame for bad layout :)
It's quite a good system: you press compose-character and then two letters to be combined. E.g. CC/o/" gives ö and CC/a/o gives å and so on. If you don't know the exact combination, you can usually guess within one or two attempts e.g. just now trying to get ç I guessed CC/c/s (š) and then CC/c/c (č) before getting it right with CC/c/,
Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating. They're a lot less annoying on a Swedish PC keyboard.
Damnit.
Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Would you consider including a mastodon feed for this for those of us who don't habitually include the X formerly known as Twitter in our diet?
I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.
Edit: By the by I do intend to visit again at some point if only to see the DEC exhibition at the town museum (if that's still on) and perhaps swing by Sweeney's pie shop (if that's still open).
Oh, and now I see from a sibling comment that there was another bid in 2022! It gives me a twinge of national pride that British rules on City-hood are so weird!
It was very unclear that this was your argument. Sure. Maybe. I don't much care either way.
> Those uses probably won’t end up replacing white collar work
Ironically the only way I see you being correct here is if it generates so much economic growth that it indirectly creates more jobs than it destroys (which I don't think is a wildly unlikely scenario).l
Edit: Perhaps you mean all white collar work though, in which case sure, I don't buy that either.