eointierney

How fast can hackernewsers do better in the language of their choice?

I feel like this is a question that should be put to almost every submission, just to stimulate the phagocytes as my Da would say.

In this instance probably Python because obviously, but maybe AWK?

Waiting for the APL'ist to do it in 64 characters or less...

Let's play D&D

And let's use our own intelligence to do so

Intelligence is practiced thought, wisdom is practiced intelligence, love is practiced wisdom

This is well put.

Mathematics is our candle in the darkness of our understanding, and the more math we know the brighter our candle flames.

But Mathematics is not a candle, it is the purest analogy we have ever encountered, and it enlightens our minds.

It gives us an appreciation of scale, and measurement thereof, that is unmatched, yielding deep insights into itself and everything else.

I just wish everyone learned number theory and geometry and algebra and physics and and and...

I just wish everyone would read the Road to Reality by Penrose.

Models are little stepping stones that are slippy and unsure, but we must use them to take further steps into the darkness of our ignorance.

You are very kind :)

I reckon desktops have been dying for a long time, and I love me a good desktop.

After many years of enlightenment16 on underpowered (scavenged) computers KDE Plasma became my desktop of choice. It still is.

Nowadays it's a choice between a browser and an editor for all but multimedia editing and gaming. So emacs and firefox work really well. I still use a desktop environnment for convenient interface with system settings such as wifi networks, window placement, power management and the like, but otherwise KDE disappears into the background as it should.

But, as I explore the wonders of NixOS these settings are more and more becoming declaratively controlled by a simple collection of assci files, and it's wonderful. As soon as emacs becomes multithreaded I'm switching to EXWM. And then my desktop enviroment will be fully subsumed.

I reckon this combination will eventually become ubiquitous as everyone will become some kind of a programmer, and Richard Stallman will be proven correct.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft, will suddenly realise there is no lunch and everyone else will eat computation more happily and healthily. Though in the long run Guix will be more nutritious than NixOS.

The desktop metaphor will become a kind of ancient poetry we explore for semiotic curiosities as we forge new pathways for collaborative thinking.

And we will always deploy the lambda calculus on the Von Neumann architecture, even when quantum computing is ubiquitous, because we need metaphors, because computing will always be a kind of poetry.

So long, and thanks for all the shells.

Bollix, professionals do not obsess but continue to explore

I've met a few truly practical experts and they spend more time talking about what they've just learned than children

A tool in their hands is never the same thing twice in a row

Amateurs are more easily distracted and expect reliability

I remember encountering an early draft when he was still doing his masters? Absolutely cracking paper, one for the ages. Thanks Chris :)

Fixed it is! Thanks to all in the nixos community

Yes indeed, and I just tried installing it and got:

error: hash mismatch in fixed-output derivation '/nix/store/7sagfaqcqv5flgvrzs5b30ndfchwvpa4-source.drv': specified: sha256-s//GkCKvppqJ+7x8pNwVEaBsUOCKCGt+wLj9P+3N9hc= got: sha256-LLTbJPxqOQB1v79nzr6GxF+/OE2704UpXmqEfKjQGDo= error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/9i74fl13f7s61lgx794jpp4iq179i45v-kanboard-1.2.24.drv' failed to build error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/vnv9wyc3dzhc4wx3p346cl96646yj6y8-user-environment.drv' failed to build error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/5ini5ll4fdcpaq23m97xlmnvzz2idjx9-etc.drv' failed to build error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/map4y39y8rc24945a8vxvgd573zpdsir-nixos-system-ibanowexultro-22.11.4303.b0671cbf1e5.drv' failed to build

which I'm sure will be fixed soon :)

The problem is not that they want to ban encryption but that they can't. It's like banning poetry

Can we just backronym AI to Approximate Intelligence and carry on?

There are so many dangers and possibilities of AI that are fascinating, and none of them are even remotely as interesting as those of actual animal and human intelligence.

It's as if AI is held up as a mirror to our stupidity, and the Turing Test is how we measure ourselves against our models of computation. I'm really weirded out by the fear and exploitation being demonstrated.

There's more to reality, and intelligence, than mathematical models we currently use and pretend to understand.

“Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don’t understand the digestive processes involved?”

— Oliver Heaviside

Computers cannot lie but there may be unobservable errors in the calculations we use them to assist

All taxes are so simple as to be computational and therefore susceptible to automation

Anyone who says otherwise is corrupt

Oh my gosh, I feel for you. I'm Irish, still in Ireland, a lifelong pacifist, and have nothing but the deepest respect for your duty and honour to and for your country. And from a distance I must agree with you.

Yes, in the supposed Great Game this is simply a mole being whacked, a performative exercise that does nothing to solve any of the problems and shoddily disguises these in puerile emnity.

Yet and all, The US Senate is still and nonetheless one of the most powerful and wayward legislative bodies in our species' history. You have a direct part in your Senate, albeit at the length of another's arm, and so you still have this power.

I'm at risk of rambling, but you are still a citizen of one of the greatest nations, and you should have more than hope. I take your two bucks and give it to a beggar, as their need is greater than either of ours.

Please, if you are willing and brave, and as you have served your country we know you are willing and brave, get into Politics. Good people working together is the best way of making things better

You are awesome and your daughter is awesomer

Never met Don Becker but as it was the Beowulf project that got me interested in GNU/Linux he is synonymous with ethernet drivers

While Brexit is quite comprehensively idiotic there are winners: pretty much everyone now sees how dumb it is to leave the world's largest trading bloc in an bad-mannered huff and wreak yet untold havoc on your own economy just because you chose to agree with the bilious rhetoric of perfidious over-rich clowns.

It also served to provide an excellent stress-test of the EU bureaucracy, helping to increase coordination pretty much everywhere.

It looks like it will further serve to provide yet another stimulus to the subjects of the UK to modernise their systems, which is very long overdue.

As a modifier it's kind of a mollifier

Edit: just looked it up and wikipedia has a difinition I didn't know :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollifier

However in the colloquial usage 'round these parts mollifier means to soften or make gentle

https://www.etymonline.com/word/mollify#etymonline_v_17411

Polymath was always an idea that appealed, mainly due to Leonardo da Vinci (check out his drawings of turbulent water).

I think the problem is career paths, as though a working life must optimise for linearity to achieve success, when instead those individuals who explore breadth and depth and fun are both most productive and creative.

Anyone who can see a problem and potential solution through more than one prism of learning is nearly always better able to communicate their insight and share their joy of thought. They tend to be more patient of failure, happier to be corrected, and fresher when returning to the problem again.

Also, more money demonstrating multi-disciplinary competence when moving jobs is definitely a thing. Good managers are rare

Thank you!

F-Droid is one of those projects that adds so much peace of mind and usability to my computational life. It is a must-have.

Ha! Love this. Bet you're already weird in a wonderful way :)

Did not Galileo grind his own lenses for his telescopes?

Did not Yogi Berra state that in theory there's no theory between theory and practice but that in practice there is?

Is an abacus useful in Computer Science or is it an impediment to purely conceptual algorithmics?

I use Linux precisely because it enables good Computer Science, as telescopes enable good astronomy, as particle accelerators enable the realisation of the prediction of the Higgs Boson.

Spending a few hours a month maintaining GNU/Linux is perhaps the single most effective learning process for Computer Science I know. The entire stack (except binary blobs) is always available and something novel occurs everytime. I love fixing my Linux, I get to read about so many aspects of stuff I didn't know before.

And with NixOS it's more than cummulative it's a multiplier.

Gonna get me a second-hand M1 or M2 soon.....

Great idea but you should include every field of Science

Elite on the BBC Micro as a child, awesome. Still the best game I ever tried to play. Used to play it two-handed with a cousin of the same age, we'd load up his elder brother's saved game from cassette just to play with all the weapons. Now on emacs!

I remember his da, an engineer, talk abour ADA as a new-fangled thing, with Basic being deprecated as childish, in a good way

Anthropomorphisation is a curse, eh?

We've seen this in deities for as long as we've been around, royalties then took the crown, later subsumed by governments, then the daft notion of non-human personalities called companies. Now, aproximate intelligence systems.

We humans are credulous

Apart from an early dalliance with Enlightenment 16 due to scavenging 486 computer components from skips in Cork (I fondly remember the donation of a P90 from my friend Barry) KDE has provided me with an almost ideal desktop environment of unparalled configurability and utility. It is fast, light, and as beautiful as you wish it to be.

And then there are the applications

Our scientists are engineers and our artists are logicians.

The telescopes are always amazing

KDE is _by far_ the most configurable desktop environment available, and it makes it easy. The control panel is amazingly consistent.

"Can visualize what the array operations are doing under the hood"

Either you take the time and trouble to understand what you're actually doing or you're just a lazy wizard with some facility for incantations.