Purchased! Side note: new books on Amazon always seemed to be perfectly priced so that I buy new instead of used. Is this just a market at equilibrium plus my personal bias? It makes me feel like Amazon is driving used book sellers into the ground in some nefarious way, but I don't know enough about economics to come to any conclusions myself.
I think you've implicitly rejected the thesis of the book, which is of course your prerogative as a reader, but the way the comment is worded makes it unclear whether you realize you've rejected the thesis.
The article references Andrea Wulf's the Invention of Nature a number of times, which I'd like to give a hearty, emphatic +1 recommendation to. It's a beautifully written biography and the Vintage Books paperback is also a physically beautiful book.
In my experience it's because of two things mostly. (1) Naming generics is harder than naming other variables for whatever reason. (2) Signatures with generics in them are stupidly long. Signatures with generics tend to be super unaesthetic, and oftentimes unaesthetic code is conflated (correctly or incorrectly) with bad code.
When we industrialized food production we all started eating too much and too shitty and now practically all of us have overweight and unhealthy bodies. Feeds, push notifications, aggregators, to-do apps, notes apps, etc are all artifacts of the exact same process happening to our minds. It is so incredibly easy, so trivially easy, to spend 15 minutes on the internet and locate an effectively infinite amount of high-quality shit to read or watch or listen to. There's really too much for us to handle, so we build tools and services to help us manage all that information streaming towards us. But what we've forgotten is that we don't need to manage all the information out in the world, all we need to manage is however much we can ingest and digest. The bottleneck in our informational lives is absolutely not inventory management, it's the bandwidth between our ears, which is the same is it's always been.
You seem to conflate the fact that we're none of us perfect with the assertion we're all deeply flawed. What does "deeply flawed" mean? Hunter S. Thompson was a severely unhappy man with extreme drug problems who shot himself in the head. Unfortunately, people like him aren't particularly uncommon. You've flattened out the landscape of human experience into this, at best, trivial comment that "we're all deeply flawed".
The idea that nearly all "perfect" people are just charlatans is also quite toxic. Is it true that many people try extremely hard to hide their problems? Sure, sounds plausible. But is it also true that the only way someone might appear perfect is by being a "charlatan"? Of course not. For example, maybe not every person's faults are exposed to the interface between that person and your slice of the universe.
I feel a little bit icky slamming on a comment so hard, but I think this flattening out of the human condition is a major negative thread in our culture/society right now.
DISCLAIMER: I think Trump is essentially diabolical, do not support him nor his behavior, and have a visceral loathing for the man and his (lack of) ideas.
This is a grossly opportunistic instance of moral signaling from Twitter. I believe this independent of whether or not I believe they should ban him. Trump's behavior hasn't changed, his tweets are not more inflammatory than they've been in the past, and his influence is trending towards zero. They banned him as a moral signal at a time when the backlash they'll experience is at a minimum.
Twitter is a shit storm and has been for years. They know it, we know it, the public knows it, everybody knows it. If Twitter actually cared about not being a Platform For Evil, they would just turn off the fucking angry echo chamber push algorithms, take a massive hit in their stock price, and be about their business. The "social utility" would be the same and we wouldn't have to worry about conspiratorial asshats going viral and reaching 50 million souls. But instead they go on burning the public good to fuel their money-printing machine and then crucify the enemy to signal their virtue when the wealth well dries up.
Your comment inspired an interesting (to me at least) thought. I'm imagining a world where mathematics becomes too advanced for even the brightest human being, but progress is preserved by proof-generating programs running in data centers. The data centers churn out exabytes of mathematical proofs, and humanity employs an army of what are effectively philologists/semioticians to dissect, mine, and excavate these proofs for meaning.
Details aside, I think it’s good the point that you can (if you’re lucky) proactively engage with the world on your own terms. Anecdotally, as a new first time home owner I’ve been recently rediscovering this fact and it has been so immensely positive for my psyche. It’s like I was playing a game where the world was 99.9% closed off and now I’m part of reality again.
Side note: this experience has also really opened my eyes to the importance and power of affordable home ownership.
This is exactly the kind of implicit coupling that makes software unmaintainable in the long run. You _are not passing the project root_, you are passing the value of a variable which currently should be set to the project root. The constraints on this value are not that it must be the project root, they are other constraints that are satisfied by the project root right now.
It's really not silly. A build script could easily move around inside a project. It could go from the project root, to /root/bin, to /root/bin/build, etc etc. If the inconvenience of arguments troubles you, write a wrapper or alias it or something like that.
I don't think there's much weird about providing a script a path to its dependencies. If it's the case that the path to the dependencies location is the same as the path to the script's location, that's fine. We're asking distinct questions (where is my data, where are my deps, where is my script) here, the unnecessary coupling is precisely the assumption they have the same answer. If they happen to have the same answer, that's not weird, that sort of thing happens all the time.
IMO this solution solves the wrong problem. The “right” problem to solve is the coupling between the script and the directory layout. If the script needs to operate on data in some directory, the path to that directory should be part of the script’s interface and handled accordingly.
This snarky response unfortunately misses my point, and your point is trivial to anybody who has taken even a remedial course in probability. The key detail is that we know the "RNG" in question might be flawed. If I tell you I implemented a RNG and you run it and find that it imediately spits out the ASCII codes for DONTBEADOUCHE in binary, you might rightly assume you've been duped.
Your comment is basically correcet, but not as a refutation of mine. Your point is the same as mine: certain "special" outcomes at certain rates are evidence of implementation flaws in our random number generator even though they're not any more or less likely given an actually perfect RNG.
Of course. In this case I think it's plenty likely that in fact the 5678910 sequence is in fact just a random event. It's not strong evidence, it's just evidence.
The thing is that the lottery is not a truly random number generator. It's a physical process implemented by humans, subject to design flaws. So how can we detect whether or not the random number generator we've built has any flaws? By using sound Bayesian reasoning and experiment. If we run the process and it gives us the same number 100 times in a row in the first 100 results, we should adjust our priors and assume what we've built is not in fact a random number generator.
I think this is an important point. I think someone asked "what's the probability this number is chosen?" and many people respond with 1 in 42 million or something like that. But in fact this is only true under the assumption the lottery is implemented perfectly. But this assumption is what is under scrutiny here. Because the lottery is not some ideal process in the mathematical universe, it's a process in the physical universe implemented by humans. Because it's a real process implemented by humans, there's all sorts of ways we can imagine the results could be skewed by the implementation details, and we can imagine all sorts of outputs that might be more likely given the most likely flaws in the implementation.
I don't think you're correct. Imagine you code a random number generator and run it ten times and get the same number every time. A "completely logical" person would probably assume there's a bug in their program. In fact, this is basic Bayesian reasoning.
Yes, but the outcome 5 6 7 8 9 10 is also evidence that something is amiss. If you can discern some structure in some random sequence of numbers, that's evidence that it's not random.
Contrarily, this is exactly what makes Unix environments so powerful (and wonderful). The "Unix Philosophy" is typically considered unopinionated (in the "let the user choose" sense), but I'd say that it's more like it has a few very strong yet well-chosen opinions that produce a highly integrated universe where all sorts of different tools just work.
I'm curious about the ethics involved in publicly decrying/defending someone who has been indicted but not convicted. I want to be an informed and involved and vigilant citizen but I don't want to be part of a howling mob. It seems like a lot of people in this thread speak as if an indictment equals a conviction. I guess it's not realistic or practical in a forum with so many participants, but I think in these cases we should hold our collective tongues. I donno.
If I stare directly at the center of the screen for a bit, say 10 seconds, then look somewhere else, my field of view appears to be flowing towards wherever I'm looking. I am surprised that this happens after such a short period, and am not sure why my brain "corrects" for the zoom effect. I guess maybe it could be because my vision tells me I'm moving, but my body tells me I'm not.