dws

It's possible to both get it and still be fooled.

Watch a document get vandalized in realtime. Fun.

Heard Gosper give a talk a decade ago. He was introduced as "The World's Greatest Living 19th Century Mathematician."

Will your feet know the difference if it isn't really the floor they're flat on?

> One of my random question is that what does Google gain by spending resources on developing course like this?

s/Google/someone at Google/

20% time leaves discretionary time for people who're motivated to get something like this started. Official approval may come along the way.

Extracted from working code overnight, which in those days on that equipment was still quite an accomplishment.

I live and commute in Waymo country, and see evidence of quick reactions, though I can't say for sure whether it's an alert human taking over. Mostly, the Waymo vehicles still drive conservatively.

Several friends and I went in on a bulk buy of H19 kits. Every one of us discovered that we'd missed soldering the connections for the space bar.

Wall warts. Most of mine are deployed in places where recharging a Lipo would be a nuisance.

I have the opposite problem. It's finding 1300+ domains that I don't own. The perils of name matching against a common name.

There is, however, a rarer PDP-1

The PDP-10, sadly, isn't on display at the moment (or wasn't as of the night of the talk).

You might find the history of Doug Lennat's Eurisko informative.

"Lenat fed the massive Traveller rulebook into the system and asked it to find the best way of winning. Each night, after several hours of trial and error, Eurisko would spit out a few strategies—some interesting, some impractical, some ridiculous. At one point, Lenat remembers, it suggested he could win the game by changing the rules."

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-intellig...

Eventually, in the stopped-clock sense, if he lives long enough he might be right.

There's some debate about that. Knuth at one point (in Literate Programming) attributes it to Hoare, and Hoare later attributes it to Knuth.

"And you love robotics! Which makes so much sense- we are Olin after all!- over half of you participated in competitive robotics in high school."

The FIRST Robotics Team I helped out with has sent three students to Olin so far, with more interested. So not only are these students who self-select, but Olin is getting students who've already had an aggressive, entrepreneurial Engineering project under the belts. Our team has sent students to lots of other Engineering schools, but my sense is that Olin is particularly dense with motivated students.

A seatmate on a recent long flight had an Asus Chromebook with Linux side-loaded via Crouton, and was doing exploratory data analysis in Jupyter notebooks (mostly using R). Response seemed reasonably snappy. The trade-off for him was long- battery life and a laptop he wouldn't cry over if it didn't survive the trip, vs. being restricted to doing analysis on (relatively, for him) small data samples.

The CPU is no longer the CPU that the CPU designers (often) think it is. A few years back someone who worked on CPUs at Intel related how his group pulling their hair out trying to characterize how a small section of code in a loop could have wildly different performance characteristics depending on the preceding instructions.

Huh? I've been hanging around Metafilter for many years. There have been changes since it ran on a box under Matt's desk, but "used to be amazing" to "going downhill"? Not seeing it. It's still one of the most civil places around.

What's your source for "large fraction"?

SparkFun posted a full tutorial on their machine few months ago.

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/building-a-safe-crackin...

The non-transitivity of Rock-Scissors-Paper is easy to understand, partly because it's so simple, but mostly because you're likely never played outside the usual rules, even if adding Lizard-Spock.

Non-transitive dice screw with the 'nature' of dice that most of us expect. To get to the mathematical intuition, one may have to get past a deeply-ingrained feeling that something about these dice just isn't right. That's a big part of the fun.

I found it fairly easy to turn those off. YMapparentlyV'd.

The explanation is almost correct, but misses a tiny, but interesting detail. Subclasses of Boolean do implement #ifTrue: and #ifFalse:, wich each take a block (a no-argument function) as an argument. But they also implement #ifTrue:ifFalse:, which takes two blocks as arguments. In

    a < b:
        ifTrue: [...]
        ifFalse: [...]

a single message (#ifTrue:ifFalse:) is sent to the boolean that results from evaluating 'a < b'. A true, being the singleton instance of the True subclass of Boolean, evaluations the first argument and ignores the second. False has a singleton instance, false, that does the opposite.

Coming from Pascal and C, seeing that IF/ELSE could be implement without special syntax was a real mind warper.

Calculating the cost of a line of shuttle code, adjusting for present dollars, then comparing that with your own code base can be insightful.

Fun blast from the past. The original version of this shipped with Mark of the Unicorn's Mince/Scribble package for CP/M. (Mince = Mince Is Not Complete Emacs)

Cheap shot. Gibson may not be current, but he's one of the few out there trying to explain issues to a wider audience who are outside of our bubble, and he does a fairly good job at it (though I wish he'd give Leo LaPorte a good slap).

The 32032 instruction set was wonderful to generate code for. There were a few early bugs (if a floating point instruction crossed a page boundary, and a page fault was triggered, hilarity would ensue), but those were ironed out well before the chip was abandoned.

If memory serves, the load average calculation was the only use of floating point in the BSD 4.2 kernel. Reworking the algorithm to get 4.2 running on the National 32016 before the floating point co-processor was available was my first time inside the kernel. Fun times.