rm445

The programmer wrote 'found_value = (0..Float::INFINITY).bsearch do'...

Great point. Most people can create an old-school website with a little effort using few or basic tools, but creating something that can host a community is/was much harder. phpbb was about the limit.

It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.

One can imagine a future where small, solid-state dongles are circulated with software licenses - such as, as discussed in the article, for games, and the software itself is downloaded separately. But for that matter, why not have those licenses be electronic cryptographic tokens, which could be freely transferred between users as gift or sale? (Doesn't need to be blockchain, just centrally-administered infrastructure). Here's why: the software companies are doing just fine selling revokable, non-transferrable electronic software licenses that users can't trade freely.

I'd love to see that change, maybe through legislation. But hardware dongles, while maybe more secure, aren't needed to make it happen.

I have a brother-in-law who is a COBOL programmer. Very much as you describe. I'd like to know more about it, honestly, but he's very much the kind of guy for whom work is just work and not interesting to talk about after hours. In his early fifties he is one of the youngest at his job - and despite having been at one company his whole career, he's one of the least longest-serving. We don't talk money, his lifestyle doesn't seem lavish but maintaining a single-income family in a high cost of living area is a lifestyle not to be sniffed at.

I've had a recruitment consultant suggest I use a gmail e-mail address on my CV, because it looks weird to have an address at a domain (my own, and not anything strange btw) that people haven't heard of. Sounds crazy. But try dictating an e-mail address over the phone to a hotel or whatever and see that if you say 'Fred Bloggs seventy six at gmail dot com' or whatever, you never have to repeat yourself, whereas anything less usual you'll be spelling it out all day.

On the technical side, one hears about individuals' domains being marked (blamelessly) as possible-spammers by the big e-mail services, and finding it hard to get messages through. There is effectively some scarcity in legible, desirable gmail addresses.

At the user's preference, if they don't mind the data use, pre-loading content could improve the user experience.

That kinda supposes it's content the user wants. But what if it's data, like ads, that the user doesn't exactly want but they're going to get anyway? I don't know where the lawsuit will end up, but I can see this ending up as a buried, default-on, setting that most users will never change.

Agreed. Meta-trends would be 'trends will change faster' or similar; most of these are fairly specific predictions.

This isn't a personal accusation, but your post reads exactly like the attackers described in the article - brand other things as nanotech, and attack the original vision. What can anyone else take from it?

True molecular assembly might never happen, but it's not clear that advances in 'room at the bottom' ideas of nanotech wouldn't have happened, had there been a larger research effort. Advances in using silicon lithographic techniques to produce machines on a micro-scale are pretty amazing - I'm fascinated by the idea of the MIT micro gas turbine (apparently the scaling is such that an aircraft skin covered in micro-turbines could be comparably efficient to macro-scale engines) but I don't think the research has progressed since the early 2000s.

I'm sure I've heard the idea that nuclear arsenals can kill us all a hundred times over, or similar. Obviously my half-remembering isn't evidence, but if other people had heard this sort of thing, it would be evidence of a popular idea, however wrong. Even allowing for the larger arsenals at the height of the cold war.

A couple of ideas: (1) Centrism is situational. One might think that the status quo is objectively reasonably close to the ideal, in terms of the general way society is arranged even if there are many imperfections. (2) Centrism is technocratic. If you don't favour a lurch to the left or right, it would make sense to want efficient improvements to how things are run - accepting good ideas regardless of which area of the political compass they come from, bipartisan support for policies on their merits.

Based on the above, centrism (and indeed, being centre-left or centre-right) seems viable as a real belief that people can hold, not some strategy to appear above it all for social benefit, or as a stratagem used by someone actually highly partisan. A centrist's goals could be directly met by encouraging trial of different ideas across the political spectrum, and consistent meta-level rules rather than tribalist thinking. Trying to rise above the bunfighting isn't the benefit of centrist views, it's a necessity to enable the things they want to achieve.

Exeter is a very livable small city (130k people) in a lovely part of the country. I'm not saying you should have uprooted your life to move there, but for many people it would be a great lifestyle move.

There's a wider issue with UK businesses being a bit unambitious, and staying in locations where availability of employees affects their ability to grow. But there are far worse places than Devon.

People who didn't have a PS4 should factor in the 'PS Plus Collection' - it's twenty top-flight PS4 games included for download on the Playstation Plus subscription at time of PS5 release. It seems to be a one-time thing, not a full competitor to Gamepass, but it's a canny move. Anyone who has never played Bloodborne, The Last Guardian, God of War PS4, Uncharted 4, Ratchet and Clank PS4... minds will be blown before they even start on the next-gen exclusives.

'Spot the ball' was a staple of local newspaper competitions - an action shot of a game with the ball removed by presumably pre-digital photographic trickery. Entrants were invited to mark a cross where they thought the ball might have been, and the closest to the original centre co-ordinates won a prize.

So yeah, surprisingly tricky, but you could set up a big training set along similar lines.

No, nuclear thermal rockets could be launched from the ground. That was the plan with NERVA, which was a pretty serious attempt to develop the technology in the early seventies. A nuclear thermal rocket engine 'looks' like a rocket engine, but there's energy from fission in the combustion chamber.

I don't get the impression that it was - it came out later than the NES and was a bit more powerful, but much less so than the 16-bit systems.

There are some (relatively) impressive games for the Master System, but I think that's because it stuck around into the nineties, in regions where there was an installed base i.e. not the USA. Late-generation games often benefit from better optimisation, and things like more cartridge space. The Master System port of Mortal Kombat, for instance, despite being pretty horrible as a game, is miraculous from a technical point of view. Despite being heavily cut-down, of course, it was an attempt to create the same game. That's a port (or demake or whatever else you'd want to call it) of a 1992 arcade cabinet, onto a home console released in 1985.

The polar _atmosphere_ is colder than expected[1]. According to Wikipedia, the coldest point on the surface is 380 degrees C.

https://sci.esa.int/web/venus-express/-/57735-venus-express-...

That's fair enough. It's unfortunate that adding fillets is a big design change in OpenSCAD while it's something you can easily add last-thing in other packages.

Because it's so programmable, most things can be made fairly easy if you think of them in time, by writing procedures, once. I'm interested, actually: I would have thought that long-time users would have developed some sort of tip or trick for this, recognising at the start the kinds of changes that might be difficult to make laters and planning them in at the start. Maybe internal rounded corners are just too much hassle any way you look at it.

I've been using OpenSCAD for personal projects for a couple of months, generally preparing models for 3D FDM printing. I'm a mechanical engineer by profession and a certified Solidworks professional. I'd estimate that designing in OpenSCAD - as in, modelling something up and iterating on the design as my understanding of the application develops and prototypes are trialled - takes me four to fives times as long as using commercial parametric 3D CAD that I'm already familiar with.

That's not a damning critique, but it is something I'd advise a friend or colleague who had a project to get on with. I'm still highly positive about OpenSCAD, because of its openness, its versatility, and the potential for using great programmers' tools (library code, scripting languages and version control) to make it much more powerful.

I've been working with vanilla OpenSCAD, downloading a few functions from people, and building little libraries of helper functions. Getting more familiar all along, figuring out the right way to do things. Some people have got a little further with creating scaffolding for mechanical design - projects like MCAD and OMDL. Of course, OpenSCAD is very versatile and people have many other uses for it. But I think when someone comes along and creates some really great libraries and frameworks on top of OpenSCAD - like LaTeX on top of TeX or Jupyter on top of iPython on top of Python - it would be suitable for any kind of design, competitive with the best GUI-based packages.

It maybe had some validity where there were big social changes post-WW2 and a baby boom. I think of it like a diffusing wave, becoming less relevant over time.

The author tells the story of typical undergraduate instruction for the integrals of tan(x) and sec(x). I would have thought that such a setting would have included that these were improper integrals, because of the infinities in the functions. i.e. if you evaluate the definite integral for any particular interval, it will give you the right answer except if you've gone through the part where the graph goes up to plus infinity and back through minus infinity.

Can someone more mathematically literate than me shed any light on whether it matters? I guess it's still useful even if the integral is undefined at certain points off the edges of the map.

I've seen people mocked for it before. I think the people doing the mocking were small-minded idiots who couldn't understand that a forum with one top-level poster is isomorphic to a blog with comments.

But I must admit, the initial impression of a 'forum' where all the topics are from one person looks a little bit like it might be a crazy person debating with themselves. (In this particular case, it looks like people other than Agner also create topics). Ideally you'd maybe re-skin the forum?

With a supposedly 10x improvement in an important metric (fuel consumption, together with reasonable speed and carrying enough fuel for range), there must surely be a big idea driving the change. Something that stands out.

I can't quite follow what specifically makes this aircraft special. I mean, it's an odd shape, and it has a piston engine. But what's driving the huge improvements? Improvements in CFD software driving aerodynamic design? Automotive technology bringing engine efficiencies? Some trade-off of stability that has previously been avoided but new avionics have overcome? The comparisons are all against business jets - is it in some way a well-designed propeller aircraft sitting in the space where the utility of jets versus propeller craft starts to cross over and small jets become inefficient?

I suppose it's not impossible that it sits in an unexplored area of the design space - a clever designer starting from a clean sheet of paper and ending up with something that works really well. But it would be extremely unusual after a century-plus of innovation. I don't like that breathless articles are written about this plane without any attempt to describe what the special sauce may be.

I love Tom Lehrer, but I was a little taken aback when I learnt that Lobachevsky was a real mathematician and not as far as anyone knows a plagiarist. Seems harsh to skewer a (long-dead) guy's reputation with such a catchy song.

Those numbers are great though! My take-away from those numbers is that this candidate is superb at applications, and merely way-above-average at phone screens.

The company already offloaded the cost of travelling to and from work. My choice to live with a (reasonable) commute, but savings in petrol since March have more than offset other costs.

As an engineer, not a mathematician, I'm glad that good mathematicians care about good notation. The relatively-elementary maths that I learnt didn't always have good notation, the tradition seems suited to chalk and pen i.e. complex glyphs are easy, but perhaps because with hand writing the size and position of elements can be ambiguous, too much notation is overloaded and re-used. Even simple stuff like an exponent of -1 meaning inverse function, it's hardly unusual for it to be mixed up with numerical exponents.

One bugbear is that mathematical writing leaks into engineering science. I wouldn't ask professional mathematicians to start caring about units or change their style while communicating amongst themselves, but in my view textbooks ought to define notation before they use it, and clearly define the units used in all expressions.

Not people. Dinosaurs, intelligent crocodiles, industrialised trilobites, whatever it might be. So many millions of years ago that there may be no such thing as permanent marks.

You possibly could be thinking about an Atlantis type of scenario, the idea that relatively advanced prehistoric human civilisations could have risen say 100,000 years ago and fallen without a trace (especially if they literally fell into the sea). Which does have some level of possibility, but indeed there isn't much chance they could have developed advanced sciences.

The thing is, though it seems far wackier, it's interesting to think that there literally could have been populations of millions of intelligent lizards (or whatever) for hundreds of thousands of years, and for the fossil record not to reflect it. It would be amazing if one day a cliff collapsed and we found an intact fossilised dinosaur airliner or whatever, but this article is about whether less direct evidence of such a civilisation, if it ever existed, would persist.

This is a step in the right direction, though, isn't it? It's not about whether the AI mimicks a person's pauses and errors, but about whether the AI can keep track of two pencils or distinguish between the present and future.

An AI that in some way demonstrated what we might call basic common sense, together with computer-like levels of recall, would be tremendously useful for all sorts of things. And a Turing test like this would probably demonstrate it fine.

I think a photo with the phone 'disappeared' would actually be a valuable addition to the article.

Good work by the way, and I hope you change the trouserial (?) world.

Cargo pants really look bad with anything in them though, except flattish items like paper money. These trousers look like an improvement.

I think the next step is to reinvent the bum bag in a slightly more sartorially-elegant form.