devnulloverflow

How do you get feedback about what works?

As much as I am an old-school Unix zealot, I think it is time to move towards a well standardised binary config format with non-trivial types (i.e a schema). There still has to be a standard text format, but only for the source from which the live configs have to be built. Done right, this has several advantages:

1. Built-time validation (or at least type checking).

2. Built configs can be easy to parse but (potentially) rich enough to avoid confusing templating.

3. Separation of concerns between storing/maintaining configs and applying them. E.g. scoop text configs off a source repo, but send out binary configs over the network.

All this is a fantasy in my head. Right now the closest mainstream thing is protobufs. But they make trade-offs for non-config use cases, and thus don't really cut it in the "... rich enough to avoid confusing templating" department.

But the Night Manager novel really is a story about a stylish British tough-guy who seduces various beautiful women in different countries as he works his way towards the bad guys.

The only reason you can read it without it seeming Bondish is that Le Carre manages to make all that strangely bland, if not outright dull.

It looks good. I'm going to print it.

But does every page have a different retro theme, or is there a unifying pattern to it all that I am not genius enough to detect?

Ever since mouses and GUIs were invented it was common knowledge that "ordinary" users don't bother to learn keyboard shortcuts.

That common knowledge is wrong, but it comes from an important truth: brand new users who are not yet committed to your product will get frustrated if the thing they need to do is hidden away as a key-binding or command-line command.

So successful products optimise for the UX of a user who doesn't yet know how to use the product well. And such users really love touchscreens.

> Touchscreens, which are ideal for representing multiple user unterfaces

I am no expert on this, but from talking to people in the aviation industry I noticed slow a trend away from the cockpit-with-2,000 controls and towards using computer screens which switch between display multiple things. Or rather, there still are 2,000 controls, but thanks to the computer-screens, the number hasn't blown up to 200,000.

So my guess is the touchscreens in these ships replaced some computer screen where input (and mode switching) had been done by physical buttons. And now they are moving it back.

Yes. In fact the tax law as the authorities apply it probably is code in the sense that they probably shove some inputs into some Excel spreadsheet to calculate your tax return.

(I'm exaggerating, they probably have bespoke software which they can use for auto-generating their spreadsheets).

> No. The law is not a virtual machine and legal documents are not programming.

This is true, but I'd think the opposite point is more important.

Much of the grunge work I see the lawyers around me do really is about parsing out and semantically evaluating some clear-cut-but-complicated bit of text. As a result lawyers genuinely value producing (and succeed at) producing logically coherent, unambiguous text.

By contrast, most programmers are as sloppy as their compiler will allow them to be. This is bad enough in code, but it is much worse when we talk to each-other in English. Not only documentation, but internal design discussions etc, are usually some combination vague, meaningless and wrong.

It's out of date, but that's OK when talking historically. And it was no more colonial than saying "Germany" instead of "Deutschland". Personally I prefer the term "Iran" even for historical usage because it is both older and (usually) more accurate.

But "Persian" is not something that foreigners imposed. It was originally the name of a particular Iranian nation that took over the empire thousands and of years ago. Their name then stuck around in some contexts long after that dynasty was gone, which is why the language is called "Farsi" (anglicised to "Persian").

But is it really a convenience, or is it just a way of ratifying our own ignorance after it has been caught out. "Iranian" mathematicians would be just as convenient, and less in inaccurate.

"Arabic Mathematicians" has some justification as (I suppose) most of these guys were publishing in the Arabic language. But to then switch to ethnic designator Arab is plain wrong.

Absolutely.

Einstein is a bit famous for punching well above his weight compared to his own mathematical background. Most of his great work involves beautiful arguments that requiring only maths that a good-but-not-genius high school student could understand.

The GR paper is a bit disappointing in comparison, because after setting out as much as he can of the physics, he just dives into big equations one after another. That probably roughly follows his own trajectory: first he had some intuition for how space-time curvature could cause some gravity-like effects. But to nail it down he just had to buckle-up and learn the mathematics of non-euclidean geometry.

The nice thing about the paper is that it was one of the first applications of such mathematics to physics, so Einstein takes the time to explain it (which also blows out the equation count).

I only just found out about borg and restic, but the sites I looked at both mention "backup" prominently. And that makes sense. If I ever sign up for rsync.net, it will be so I can store long term backups of my stuff, which I might add to incrementally, but never really change.

But Unison is for syncing, which means maintaining eventually consistent replicas of a changing directory tree (up to some pragmatic exceptions and manual tweaks). The whole point of Unison is to turn multiple devices into a single failure domain, which requires a separate system for storing safe backups.

The word "corporation", even in the legal sense includes things like towns. In a slightly broader sense, it includes things like provinces and countries. So why could it not include something like the community of people who live by and or use water from the river?

Now I can see all sorts of detailed problems with this (for example people upstream might have opposite interests from downstream, so the collective is not a coherent person-like entity). But I don't see a fundamental difference between this kind of corporation and that of the existing kinds.

> The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed

I don't object to the condensed part so much. When I was a physicist, people had a similarly dim view of Nature. But Physical Review Letters also published four-page papers. And PRL was definitely a bigger prize than the long form PR(xyz) papers.

Now if you happened to want to drill in and do work based on someone else's, then you would no doubt prefer the long-form. But if you are keeping up with the field, then the 4-pager is much preferred.

You should be able to lay down what the actual science is in a small space. And if it's a theory paper, that space is enough to have a few equations that the reader could then puzzle out justifications for herself.

Yah, sorry about that. I replied before checking my memory of what I had written.

I thought I caught the error and deleted the erroneous response in time. But I didn't.

You don't have to drill tunnels. The North Shore line isn't on tunnels for the most part, but it also never goes anywhere near the shore.

I guess it's true that now you might need tunnels (especially for the eastern suburbs). But these lines could have been built many decades ago.

> The author instead seems to think they are approximately the same because the lower order terms are small compared to the highest one.

In fairness, this is actually why we care in practice about asymptotic issues. The fact that there is a rigorous mathematical viewpoint that makes them strictly comparable is helpful for being confident about the non-trivial results -- but the reason we care about it is because we want to know roughly how expensive our code is (or will be).

While I generally thing that looking for practical applications of research is nonsense, this one seems to be in an obviously useful area.

It's all about different ways of measuring how good a function is at scrambling the input data. I'm guessing if you want to break (or make) a hash or cryptosystem you will use these measures over various aspects of it to look for weaknesses or some such.

This particular proof seems to be saying that the measure called sensitivity will give you similar answer to a bunch of other measures.

On the one hand, that's disappointing (a measure that gave totally different results might enlighten whole new ways of attacking/strengthening you crypto). On the other hand it is encouraging because if a whole bunch of very different measures agree, then that's a sign that they are on to something real.

You are amused that the Web has worse typography than TeX???

Well, maybe the aliens will keep returning to earth and at unpredictable intervals demanding money in exchange for keeping the hostage alive.

> Buses can also have dedicated lanes with right-of-way.

Yes, the busways in parts of Brisbane are really excellent, better than any tram line I have seen. But they are also huge pieces of infrastructure that take up even more space (and I suspect money) than the a tram line would have.

Which is probably why they only extend in one direction from the city.

It's hard to get to some Sydney suburbs for the same reason. Though interestingly this includes rich areas like the Eastern Suburbs and Northern Beaches. I suspect fat-cat NIMBYs have been keeping the trains out for generations now.

I meant that UEFI doesn't have a BASIC interpreter (though probably someone has written one).

I did not know that bootOS had one, but it does not surprise me given everything else I read on this thread.

Yes, BootOS very much in the same space as MS-DOS, although leaning even further on the "less-is-more" axis. It does the same basic things (though I suppose it doesn't do the BASIC thing).

Interestingly, there is modern OS in the same space. That's UEFI. Unti I played with it a few months ago, I thought it was some mysterious firmware-adjacent black-box. But actually it's just an OS, very similar to DOS (though it runs in protected mode).

It has a shell and some basic built-in commands including text editors and such. And most importantly it lets you run executables that a stored on a FAT (well, FAT32) filesystem.

The name BootOS could very well describe UEFI. And equally, a slightly more capable version of BootOS could serve as (very underpowered) UEFI replacement.

But a lot of the web is in fact serving documents, and using complicated apps to do it.

It's not surprising, as the two categories do really merge into one another. A web store is certainly an app -- but it's also the modern equivalent of an store catalogue, which is a document.

> The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet,

Well that and, Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Perl, Awk, Sed, ....

I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if command lines hadn't stopped evolving in the '90s.

> “I was forced to take risks with my money because treasury bonds barely pay anything!”

... is the system working as intended, because the policy rationale behind issuing lots of government bonds is precisely to make investors seek higher risks.

When downturns (like 2008) happen, this is investors fleeing to safe, money-like assets and and so wonks recommend that governments flood the markets with bonds, printed money, whatever to make that unprofitable.

The problem is with trying to fix the economy with policy levers. You can force people towards riskier investments (especially if they can be disguised as safe ones). But investment that is actually productive on average requires conditions where people on the ground can actually build useful stuff at a profit.

But that's an anathema to macro-economists (who want to advise on how use those levers) and also to politicians (who want to be seen to be "doing something").