puzzledobserver

You are right that most immigrant rags-to-riches stories that immediately come to mind involve them getting off the boat with a handful of dollars to their name. But they seem to forget the value of the college degree that they carry and the lifetime of high-quality education that preceded their arrival in the US. The immigrants you speak of might not be as poor as you make them out to be.

I do not know if many American families can get access to the same resources for early education if they are not already from families that are economically affluent.

I am sorry to hear this. Would freelancing websites like Upwork be able to help? I hope things work out soon!

Ohh, but then the UBI recipient may use it to purchase something that Big Brother doesn't want them to buy... like using SNAP to buy hot food.

On a more serious note, yes. Beyond basic necessities like healthcare and education, that the government would like to micromanage lives of welfare recipients feels demeaning in the extreme.

I think something similar has happened with minimum wages. It appears to me that the natural next step is to make the minimum wage grow with inflation.

Unfortunately, this hasn't happened, so we're stuck with various government-mandated minimum wage levels that are tied to the value of money from several years before.

Companies can now point to the law, and use this obsolete number as a metric by which to set their own salaries. What was intended to protect the laborer is therefore perversely being used to protect their corporate employer.

I concede that people have a tendency to overuse the passive voice, perhaps to appear less assertive, but... I find this injunction against the passive voice simplistic. The active and passive versions of a sentence _mean_ different things, and one cannot blindly substitute one for the other. Compare:

1. There was a cat in the house. She had not been fed by her owner that morning. She meowed loudly at the passing postman.

2. There was a cat in the house. Her owner hadn't fed her that morning. She meowed loudly at the passing postman.

Also, who is the intended audience of style guides such as this? One's style in a romantic letter is necessarily different from the tone used in a scientific paper, both of which are different from how one would tell a story to a friend. Without nuance, a one-size-fits-all approach to linguistic style will destroy much that is beautiful about the world.

Does that mean that the material within those structures is moving at supersonic speeds? The video makes it look almost serene.

I wonder what the speed of sound is in the solar medium, at the ambient temperature and pressure.

I would expect a large fraction of Nvidia's GPU sales to be from customers wanting to do machine learning. What platform do these customers typically use? Windows?

How do the Linux and Windows drivers compare on matters related to CUDA?

I think it depends on the audience.

For a group of prospective CS majors, or people learning programming for its own sake, I think it would be good to start with a high level language, say Python, Scheme or Ocaml, and then progressively deconstruct the layers of abstraction between the language and the physics.

For a group of electrical engineering majors, it might actually tie in better with their other courses if one starts with simple physical constructs like bits, bytes, and gates, and gradually introduce abstraction layers to form more convenient programming models.

That space is three dimensional is one of those propositions drilled into us as schoolchildren, and which most of us accept on faith.

Yet, since it is a statement of the real world, it can only be validated by experiment and not by a mathematical proof. Trying to contort one's fingers or sticks in various mutually perpendicular orientations isn't satisfactory since we could be limited by lack of imagination of the dexterity of our hands.

The existence of physical phenomena satisfying the inverse square laws is one of those observations which constrains the geometry of the world.

I accept that judges sometimes need to refer to dictionaries, but wonder whether this particular essay is someehow related to Scalia's positions on orginalism?

Also, why are the "fowls raised for meat" definitions that they use as an example more explanatory than the "domesticated fowls" definitions?

Is it possible that the authors are confusing greater specificity for being fuller or more explanatory or superior? Given the prevailing dogma that English language dictionaries merely describe popular use rather than prescribe it, it is unclear that the more specific definitions more accurately describe its use by fluent language users.

Neither of the individual facts is surprising. It is the juxtaposition that is. In 20 years of writing C/C++ code, I had never thought of #including files such as /dev/stdin.

Of course, I know how the #include mechanism works, and what the special device files do, so I can anticipate the results of #include </dev/stdin>, but it is unusual enough that I had to write a small test program to see for myself.

As do cars. Which is why people need licenses to drive them. The question being asked is whether it is ethical for a company to market auto-pilot low-awareness chainsaws, designed to give the user only a half-second heads-up, and then disclaim responsibility when accidents happen.

Maybe the solution is for licensing authorities to call these auto-manual chimeras unlicenseable.

Jupyter notebooks might be a better target than Latex. One could conceivable verify proofs in the _small_, leaving some big reasoning steps out of the verification process. Then export the development to Latex, where it is automatically typeset.

Just to clarify, are you saying, "I would like the collective to bargain on my behalf, but I just don't want to be part of that collective"?

Isn't mandatory membership a simple corollary of unionization efforts?

Off topic, but I have subscribed to the NY Times. I still have a problem with the newspaper tracking my reading habits, and thus object to having to log in to the paywall. At least I can read the print newspaper without being observed.

Would you extend your reasoning to TAOCP as well? Not trying to put you in a spot: I would, and I agree. I wonder how much of the praise devoted to TAOCP is from people who have actually read the books.

According to https://code.google.com/archive/p/zawgyi/wikis/WhyUnicode.wi..., there appears to be a mismatch between the corresponding code points of Zawgyi and Unicode. So changing the font used for rendering could conceivably result in corrupt text.

I wonder whether there is any work on plausibly deniable public key cryptography.

The sender uses the public key to encrypt the plaintext, and the receiver uses their private key to decipher the ciphertext, as usual. But, on being compelled, the receiver can also choose an arbitrary target plaintext, and efficiently compute a new private key that maps the ciphertext to the chosen target plaintext.

Why is incognito mode so difficult for browsers to implement? If the browser already comes with support for profiles, then isn't switching to incognito mode the same as running from the empty profile?

In particular, why do particular APIs need to be shimmed or disabled? In my empty-profile based proto-proposal, even if a website writes to disk, wouldn't closing the session cause any data written to be rolled back?

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted.

First, none of the software in question was outsourced to the company.

Second, the Bloomberg article does not describe the problems Boeing had with the software engineers from HCL, beyond a cryptic, "it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly." Was it a genuine misunderstanding of ambiguous language? Was it because the programmers did not have a background in the aerospace problem domain? Or was it because the engineers had a poor grasp of the vocabulary? It seems improper to assume the third situation in the absence of any additional evidence.

Finally, I am not sure what part of "software being outsourced" is considered outrageous. Is there evidence that a software engineer employed by Boeing, rather than by company XYZ, is less likely to produce faulty code? Or is more likely to understand the complex downstream effects of their actions and the equally complex upstream design decisions which informed them? Also, countries don't write code. Companies don't write code. People do. That "India doesn't have a deep background in aerospace" doesn't mean much at the level of individual engineers. I am skeptical that the most highly skilled American programmer has a deep background in aerospace either.

Sorry about the rant: something about the Blookmberg article came across as xenophobic innuendo.

Is there an enthusiast or popular science-level treatment of how (human and non-human) immune systems work? I am a computer scientist, years removed from my last biology course, but I am curious. Ideally, I would like to know: What is understood, and what is not? And which parts of this understanding rest on dogma (not as a pejorative)?

The whole array of immune system phenomena is very intriguing. It seems to span everything from physical responses like fever and inflammation to cellular and molecular mechanisms. Acquired immunity and vaccines (which curiously seem to fulfill some of homeopathy's promises, but from more rational guiding principles), viruses, HIV, and cancer somehow also figure in all of this.

Wouldn't such an ability, by virtue of having been tested at least once, run afoul of the DMCA? Of course, it is an Israeli company and not an American one, and we have no proof that they have the ability or have ever exercised it, and IANAL, but I am curious.

I was actually surprised that if all the planets were lined up, the center of mass would be outside the surface of the Sun. I had always assumed that the Sun was so massive that the center of mass was almost fixed and certainly always within its surface. I guess I hadn't factored in the fact that the planets are so far away and the Sun so small that their masses could have such large measurable outcomes on the center of mass of the system.

Is it really wise for design documents to rely on nuances of language? How many of your readers could you reasonably assume have read RFC 2119? How many of your readers could you reasonably assume to be native English speakers? How many native English speakers would be able to comfortably articulate the difference between "shall" and "should"?

And no, not every design document is intended for professionally-licensed engineers, safety-critical applications, or to be used in legal courts. Even when safety is not at stake, writing remains important.

If you find yourself relying on technical and prescriptive descriptions of language use, isn't it perhaps a good idea to think about what exactly you're trying to convey?

The scaling laws probably have something to say as well: twice the size means 8 times the mass, so adults are, on average, more delicate than children. There might be a similar undiscovered principle for cognitive function, but that's speculation on my part.

On the whole, though, I completely agree: there's a lot of ageism and resignation among adults about what is and is not within the abilities of the determined adult. Everything include language acquisition, learning to play musical instruments, mathematical creativity, and making scientific discoveries.

As a person transitioning into "unambiguous adulthood", but with plenty of youth left (I am only 30, for reference, and as creative as I ever was), this is super frustrating.

Would something like "cat a.out > b.out" bypass Gatekeeper? I am always puzzled by apps which know the origins of files that they open.

Aside: Is it just me, or do others find animated charts annoying? It takes me time to understand what's being shown, and before the realization has sunk in, the graphic restarts causing the whole mental process to restart. Rather like a strobe light.

This comment feels heartless.

The act of growing up is fundamentally one of rebellion, of doing things one is not supposed to do, of running away from the nest and being pushed away from it. While the expectation of privacy is something that varies dramatically across the world, I am doubtful that there is any culture where parents know everything their children are up to. The internet has amplified the availability of this privacy. As a closeted transwoman, I am grateful for the opportunities this has given me, of being able to find solidarity, but still keep it as one of my deepest secrets. But... I am also thankful for having grown up just before the internet turned into a vast, self-amplifying panopticon.

In the pre-internet world, there was more human mediation in information consumption: one consulted libraries which were staffed by human librarians, who could distinguish access to books about self-harm from books about self-help, one read magazines delivered home by mail, which would presumably have been easier for parents to monitor, or one would socialize with friends, in the physical world, who presumably had a greater interest in your well-being, so that empathy and other human judgments could best help people in need.

In today's world, with ready access to information, anonymously to one's physical circle of family and friends, but entirely publicly to the vast tracking network of automatic recommendation systems, there is no such ready access to help. The systems serving information are essentially paperclip maximizers, providing access to articles and links that maximize their narrow-minded objective functions. Which leads to sub-optimal social outcomes.

Of course the algorithm is doing exactly what it was designed to do. But what it was designed to do is not what we really want it to do, as a human species, with complex, empathetic, and altruistic objectives. On a final sidenote, conveying emotions online is very tricky, but we are talking about a family who has just lost their daughter. Her parents are almost certainly devastated, questioning every little act of theirs. It would be nice to exercise restraint and temper one's comments.

Precisely. The actual structure of working LaTeX documents contains plenty of code to just make stuff look right. The "separating formatting from content" crowd is, in my opinion, actually inexperienced in the language, or being intellectually lazy.

The article also seems to focus on the distinction between TeX and LaTeX, which is kind of pointless. Apart from extensions such as ConTeXt, nobody advocates for the use of raw TeX. Just use LaTeX (unless you have a reason not to).

The actual reason to use LaTeX, in the professional scientific research community, is that it is more of a lingua-franca, just the way things are done, similar to how lawyers hold the Blue Book dear, and researchers in the social sciences swear by APA.

There are some clear advantages to using LaTeX: (1) It gracefully integrates with version control (similar to Markdown and LyX, but unlike, Word docx). (2) Entering mathematics is, after the learning period, painless, even more so that Markdown, and only somewhat less than writing material by hand. (3) Large library of classes and styles on CTAN. Everything from bibliographies to figure drawing to colour to typesetting presentations. (4) The core is mostly stable. TeX certainly, and the LaTeX macros almost. In any case, if the system explodes, the original sources are not usually corrupted.

Of course, just like the Blue Book and APA, the system has its warts: TeX-the-language is hideous, and the multi-pass build system archaic, even if the markup is mostly unobtrusive after one gets used to it.

I will also agree that LaTeX is often fetishized, though not in the manner the author describes. I have in mind college professors who mandate that homework assignments be typeset in LaTeX. This is a waste of time. Let the students use whatever system they find most convenient, as long as it is submitted as a legible PDF: Word, LaTeX, scanned handwritten pages.

After you enter the fold as a professional researcher though, the convention of using LaTeX is the easiest way to progress. It's not as bad as you initially think it to be.

Oops, missed that sentence: my bad!