rustybolt

I remember bombing a biology exam because I spent like 60% of the available time on a single question: "Is it good or bad for digestion to drink water with dinner?"

I mentally went over all the course notes, and was sure this was never covered directly. So, I thought, something must have been covered from which I can deduce this. Again I went over all the course notes mentally, and decided that was certainly not the case. I could made up an argument why it would be good for digestion, and why it would be bad for digestion.

Since no explanation was asked, I decided to approach it as a multiple choice question. Since I could recall more evidence for it being bad for digestion, I simply wrote that down.

I got 0 points. According to the teacher's key, could be either, as long as it included an argument (it was along the lines of "water makes food soft" which was not covered in the course because it's common sense).

Still get frustrated about it. Something can't be both bad and good. The question states "X is bad or good, which is it?", not "think of an argument why X could be bad or why X could be good". It basically rewards bullshitting and punishes answering the question faithfully.

I went into STEM after that.

Half-agree. It's like having a very agreeable, inexperienced intern who googles everything.

BUT (s)he also works tireless, googles 100 pages a second and has infallible memory.

Mandatory link to a 3blue1brown video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuXjwB4LzSA

For me, the way to understanding convolutions was to to put sample rand(0, 1) a bunch of times and bucket the samples, then plot the number of samples in a bucket. You get a more-or-less flat graph. Now if you add or multiply two variables, you get different shapes. Once you spent enough effort on trying to understand why, you derive convolutions.

The built-in documentation of QBASIC.

> Let us now assume that we hide the function definitions:

    extern void construct(), 
    destruct();

> The generated code in that case becomes noticeably longer

This was hard for me to follow, but I think that when the function definitions are removed, the compiler no longer knows that the constructor can't throw an exception, so now it has to add exception handling code?

How I understand the parent post: Twitter has cost Musk a lot of money. Musk will now have to get a lot of value from twitter, and that will probably be bad news for the user.

Wow, that looks pretty much exactly like VS code!

What do you mean by 'debouncing' here? I only know it as ignoring keypresses of the same key/button that happen too fast after each other (because they are likely a mechanical or electrical glitch rather than the user actually meaning to press the button/key multiple times).

If you mean that, I don't know how it relates to the comment/article since I never needed to do debouncing in a desktop context (only for embedded stuff with actual push button circuitry attached).

How can people watch this? After 4 minutes of video I've seen 8(!) ads already.

Kind of simple/shallow compared to what some other people are posting here, but I'm working on a Python library to compute numerical expressions with arbitrary precision: https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/reals

Even for text-centric sites fitting everything in 14kB is not always feasible if you use custom fonts. My site is text- and math-centric, but it uses some fonts (Crimson + bold and italic variants, plus the KaTeX fonts used for math). Each font is about 30kB big for a total of 180kB.

I would like to improve, but I feel like the fonts are essential for the look and feel, so I'm not willing to give up the fonts, so I guess the ~200kB is the lower limit for me.

(Of course, the fonts are cached on the next page load, so my site does load very fast after opening the first article. Only thing that bothers me is the layout jump-around due to font

It sounds more like they say "We're wrong and your account remains banned."

> “We follow US law in defining what constitutes CSAM and use a combination of hash matching technology and artificial intelligence to identify it and remove it from our platforms,” said Christa Muldoon, a Google spokesperson.

> Muldoon added that Google staffers who review CSAM were trained by medical experts to look for rashes or other issues. They themselves, however, were not medical experts and medical experts were not consulted when reviewing each case, she said.

Which is a nice way of saying: "AI flagged the pictures, we can't really judge if they are medical pictures or not. Enjoy your permaban!"

Besides, permabanning someone because of a single flagged picture seems like a dumb policy anyway. Even if there was no rash or inflammation in the picture, the child could have had a pain in the groin, so wanting to visually examine it could make sense for a doctor.

When I did the course in Utrecht they did actually switch to the shader approach.

Understandable, thanks for the fast reply!

Looks really polished and very easy to sign up. On the other hand, deleting your account is a terrible experience.

I also remember changing the makefile, mindlessly running 'make' without looking at the output, then running the program and wondering why the program isn't behaving differently.

I was hoping this would turn out to be more of a 'developers looking to collaborate' instead of a 'looking for developers to work on my idea' thread.

I will post my profile and hope that somebody can suggest a nice project to contribute to.

Anyway, I'm reasonably experienced in C, have some experience in C++, C++, SQL, VHDL, Python, some HTML and Javascript as well. I have a good mathematical basis and some basis in low-level programming (e.g. assembly, mostly x86). I work mostly on Linux and occassionally on windows.

I'm very interested in mathematics and want to learn: APIs for graphics and sound (e.g. win32, x11, OpenGL, ALSA, waveout), digital signal processing. Also very interested in optimization and computational topics such as interval arithmetic, fast approximation/computation of various functions, arbitrary precision arithmetic.

Looking to exchange experience with other developers, both more and less experienced.

I might be missing something but don't see your point.

If you want every interrupt to act as a memory barrier you can just insert a memory barrier in the interrupt handler. A reason not to do this is the overhead. Also, if you know the interrupt handler will not interact with memory from the thing it interrupted or migrate the task it interrupted between cores, it isn't necessary to have a memory barrier.

> The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses.

So what does create real progress to the masses?

> slept for only 4 hours a day

I've only really seen this mentioned in comments. All references I could find state that he often slept until late (for example, he liked to sleep until after 10AM).

I would be wary of glorifying extremely short sleep patterns, they are unhealthy for 90% of the population.

> Most anecdotes about von Neumann abide by this three-act structure: a question that baffles the best minds; their sweaty, pointless deliberations; von Neumann’s swift, soaring leap to the solution. (Sometimes, as in the Rand Corporation tale, the question itself goes undescribed. Its sole attribute of importance is its impenetrability.)

This type of storytelling reinforces the tale of mental ability being an innate talent that doesn't need work or practice that American media loves to tell. In practice, it is much more interesting to (try to) work out how people were able to work out difficult questions on the spot.

Famous examples: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te#Adria... (I imagine trigonometric identities were kind of Viète's thing) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number (Ramanujan had worked on 'taxicab numbers' before)

True, but you can make the same case for the addition operator which might have a type annotation somewhere, but it's certainly not visible to most programmers.

Simply put, in many languages there is no addition operator which does mathematically correct addition and that is a sad state of affairs.

Yes, this is essentially the case I'm making: if this implementation of binary search is buggy, then so is the addition operator in C (and many related languages).

Very true! Which is also why I used a C-like syntax in the snippet ;)

I agree that binary search is prone to errors, but the overflow error is just calculating the midpoint as

    (low + high) / 2

I mean, that's technically true because it might crash for huge arrays, but if this is a bug then the follow implementation of a function that adds to integers is also buggy, since it will overflow when x + y doesn't fit in an int:

    int add(int x, int y) { return x + y; }

Well, that's a good goal, but even the government expects you to install their apps nowadays. It's impossible to live without a recent smartphone with enough free space.

Shameless self-plug since I recently made a small header-only C testing "framework":

https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/c_unit_tests

Feels a bit more in line with the spirit of C (small language, few dependencies).

I don't know, I never thought about them before the AirTags were widely used, so I never really formed an opinion on them.

It just seems strangle that a safety measures is only made available for iPhone users.

> All these people received warnings on their iPhones, a feature Apple had built into the AirTag system to help prevent unwanted tracking.

So if you don't have an iPhone, enjoy being stalked!