queuebert

I've always wondered -- is lambda calculus really supposed to be written with periods '.'? Or is everyone too lazy to use \cdot?

Normally PhD programs have a timeline of progress. If you don't make regular progress toward those very generous deadlines, you are kicked out.

Neil did not make sufficient progress at Texas. Then he did something weird, where he wasn't ready to defend yet got a postdoc at (iirc) Princeton. Princeton had to rescind the offer because you (ahem) need a doctorate to be post doctorate. Then he got into Columbia's program and finally finished.

He had a lot of hobbies and interests other than astronomy, and he is actually a very smart guy, but it took him a bit longer to get his shit together. I think he's found his calling and is quite good at he does.

Using the OEIS, you can usually find a reason why every single answer to those IQ questions about what number comes next in the series is correct.

The hero we don't deserve.

No, I did not RTFA. Hangs head in shame.

As an American, I did not expect my government to talk about relativity in a press release.

NTP has several methods for dealing with large latency that could possibly be adapted.

Whatever time standard we settle on will need to be re-synchronized periodically, since, according to general relativity, time measured in Earth's gravity well will be running slightly slower than clocks on the moon with its lower gravity.

GPS satellites already correct for this.

More accurate subtitle: "Choosing the Right Tech Stack for a Lightweight Web App".

There are way more use cases out there than a simple web or mobile app.

Doesn't that translate to "spy house" in Mandarin? (Depending on tones, of course. I'm assuming 家探.)

Even more, why can't information like this be passed up the call chain as integer return codes? That scheme has been a perfectly functional for decades, all the way back to at least BSD's rc scripts, maybe before.

Maybe I'm weird, but I feel like that style of GUI design with OS 8 and 9 were the pinnacle of GUI styling. Well, maybe BeOS deserves mention as well. But you could put young children in front of a Mac at school, and they'd figure out how to do everything they needed to do without much help and with no distraction.

He posted two weeks ago. And the post from the link above is two years old. Your comment makes no sense.

https://fsturmat.net/blog/

And even if heap allocated, there might be a static pointer array tracking them.

In the DOS days, dynamic memory allocation was to be avoided if possible. Machines did not handle running out of memory gracefully. Often we'd unnecessarily fix the size of things to avoid run-time uncertainty.

A scientific Fortran code I once saw allocated all of the memory it would need at the beginning of the code in an array called 'a'. Then from there it would dole out portions to other parts of the program using common blocks.

From a software perspective, yes, but give me the old serial and parallel cables any day over that damn USB-A connector that never fits in either orientation.

This comment below the article from the author cracked me up:

"Part of why this paper took so long to write is that the file was called boring.tex."

Except if you're an active person. Blazers don't give you full range of arm motion unless they are laughable baggy or made of some weird stretch material that looks cheap. Loafers are sub-optimal for running up stairs, catching the train/bus that's about to leave, or moving heavy things.

Like hackers, I wonder if he'll be restricted from using a computer.

Propaganda or hired PR team influencing the discourse?

So it's better to not have any data and live in continued ignorance?

Perhaps vapid, pseudo-intellectuals are overrepresented in the text of the internet because of their excess blogging, tweeting, etc. Thus the LLMs are biased toward that way of speaking.

Precisely. The continued hyperspecialization of science shrinks the potential pool of qualified reviewers to zero. I rarely get knowledgeable reviews these days. Instead of disputing my methods, they complain about the font or figure styles, or raise questions that weren't answered in the paper because they are common knowledge in the field.

Synapses might be akin to transistor count, which is only roughly correlated with FLOPs on modern architectures.

I've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla walking through the people passing around a basketball, then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain. This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in theory be fairly low bandwidth.

There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.

My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs running an LLM.

And they still have one of the worst apps (and website) in the game. Seems like that would be some low-hanging fruit.

How many people enjoy their jobs?

But aren't they meant to be rebuilt every 10k miles or so?

The 10R80 in the F-150 has known problems, while the ZF8 is one of the best transmissions currently made. It's also used in BMWs, the Toyota Supra, and the new Ineos Grenadier. Having driven it, my only issue was that it was slow to switch from deceleration/engine braking mode to acceleration mode. That programming allows it to feel more like a manual when you let off the gas, but it takes a good fraction of a second to switch between them.

PhDs are earned through master-apprentice structures. So even outside of blue-collar trades it can be successful.

Pro tip: If you are near a university, the free public wifi may give you access to its journal subscriptions.

Most of us physicists would probably prefer a theory without a mathematical singularity in the middle of it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Technically, "missing gravity". The mass is inferred, but not absolutely required. (Though it is by far the simplest explanation.)