variaga

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

***

Just because you don't know how it is aligned, that doesn't mean it has no alignment.

The about page says Valen is a successor to the Vale programming language, so I doubt it.

Indeed. Some of the worst software interfaces I've ever dealt with were fully "dogfooded" and that was the cause; the people writing the software did use it every day but (a) in a very idiosyncratic way and (b) in a specific, very constrained environment.

The devs did use the software, but used it in such a different way from everyone else that when the devs optimized for their own case, it made the software actively worse for everyone else.

A tiny thing about Asimov's laws of robotics is, most of his stories involve cases where they don't actually work.

Spoilers for a 73 year old novel, but for instance the plot of Caves of Steel is centered on a robot with a perfectly functional 1st law abetting a murder.

"Runaround" (spoilers, 86 years) involved a robot getting stuck in a loop bouncing between the 2nd and 3rd laws, and a human having to risk their life to unstick the robot.

Et cetera.

What is harm? What is an order? How do you trade off between different kinds of harm, or deal with conflicting orders? The 3 laws are simple to state, but hard to apply consistently in real life.

It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.

Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.

Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.

Directly telling someone that you have a problem with something they did and why you think it's a problem is not "passive aggressive" by any stretch of the definition.

For the uninitiated

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YgDPrhV8z5s

"God was knocking, and he wanted in bad"

I did the same (4-bit cpu, 11 instructions) in my Microprocessors class, out of 74-series logic, one GAL20V8 to handle the SLE instruction and an EPROM (not an EEPROM - one with the clear window you exposed to UV light to erase.

That was also where I learned about ground-bounce & dynamic IR-drop effects due to those long looping wires between breadboards.

That was a fun class.

One hypothetical outcome if FTX had not been shut down when it was might have been "there was never a mass withdrawl of funds from FTX that would trigger an FTX liquidity crisis and Alemeda switched its strategy to 100% HODL, waited until exactly now before selling, thus making all the Alameda investors rich and covering the funds 'invested' by FTX so no harm, no foul".

Amother hypothetical outcome might have been "Alameda continued to make risky, over-leveraged investments, immediately rolling any gains into other over-leversged investments and using FTX's customer's money to cover losses until disaster struck".

I find the second hypothetical a bit more plausible than the first, but I probably just don't understand finance.

Ugh. Sudden flashbacks to having to switch analog output between Japanese NTSC (no pedestal) and US NTSC (with pedestal) without getting weird noise in the black regions.

But IIRC the MPEG-2 standard had luma==235 -> 100IRE for all of the analog formats (pal/ntsc-j/ntsc/secam) so I'm not sure why you say that would violate the broadcast limits?

Nit: a gourmand is the opposite of a gourmet

Permanently block this number? [yes] [no]

Companies with poor quality mobile websites also usually have poor quality apps.

The website can be objectively bad, but still better than the app experience.

>Why doesn’t someone fork systemd

Why don't you? It's open source. No one is stopping you. Your ideas on how init systems should work are obviously superior, so you'll easily win over a majority of developers, right?

I read the page and went through the "verify the cycles for yourself" sequence and I still have no earthly idea when defining the cycles, what is the rule that says "if you're currently on hexagram X, you can calculate the next hexagram Y by doing..."

Unless you say it as "a fak"

"Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. You come, you smoke the butt you eat the cookie you go to sleep wake up and go back to f---ing work the next morning, THAT'S IT! End of f---ing list!"

-Dennis Leary

I am a native English speaker, and it's not just you.

This is the correct analysis.

Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.

Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?

Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.

How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?

How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?

If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.

I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead

"Just shift back" is really underestimating how much effort it takes to port a design to a different foundry. Sure, you can target a new stdcell library and recompile your RTL (and re-floorplan, and re-do a bunch of other stuff) but you also have to swap out all your memories and interfaces, not all of which may have exact equivalents... it can easily take 1+ years of work for a competent team, and if you have to shift back all that time and effort was wasted.

Some of us are old enough to remember the last time Intel was definitely, 100%, for-sure committed to offering foundry services, and then changed their mind and canceled the whole thing (it was in 2018) and want to see (a) someone else have success with 18A first and (b) intel show an actual long-term commitment to using their foundry for outside customers before we risk our companies' future on them.

There are risks with TSMC, but "TSMC just decides it's not interested in making chips for other people, and cancels the whole business" isn't one of them. The same cannot be said for Intel.

Big-endian matches the way we commonly write numbers, but if you have to deal with multiple word widths or greater than word-width math I find little-endian much more straightforward because LE has the invariant that bit value = 2^bit_index and byte value = 2^(8byte_index).

E.g. a 1 in bit 7 on a LE system always represnts 2^7 for 8/16/32/64/ whatever bit word widths.

This is emphatically not true in BE systems and as evidence I offer that IBM (natively BE), MIPS natively BE) and ARM (natively LE but with a BE mode) all have different mappings of bit and byte indices/lanes in larger word widths* while all LE systems assign the bit/byte lanes the same way.

Using the bit 7 example

- IBM 8-bit: bit 7 is in byte 0 and equal to 2^0

- IBM 16-bit: bit 7 is in byte o and equal to 2^8

- IBM 32-bit: bit 7 is in byte 0 and equal to 2^25

‐ MIPS 16-bit: bit 7 is in byte 1 and equal to 2^7

- MIPS 32-bit: bit 7 is in byte 3 and is equal to 2^7

- ARM 32-bit BE: bit 7 is in byte 0 and is equal to 2^31

Vs. every single LE system, regardless of word width

- bit N is in byte (N//8) and is equal to 2^N

(And of course none of these match how ethernet orders bits/bytes, but that's a different topic)

>Do you just mean that we must assume something to get the ball rolling

They're called "axioms"

On my phone keyboard (android) "×" is a long-press on "w"

That's correct, the Romans had March as the first month of the year, so leap day was the last day of the year and September, October, November and December were the 7th (sept), 8th (oct), ninth (nov) and 10th (dec) months.

Not one mention of the material's dialectric constant

You can isolate your ethernet over coax from your neighbor with a MoCA POE "point of entry" filter which blocks the frequencies used by MoCA.

You can buy them online for around $10 and they install without tools,

Besides neighbors, you may also need a POE filter if you have certain types of cable modem.

Smurfette isn't an actual Smurf, she's a construct made by Gargamel (yes, this is actual Smurf canon), so presumably her hair is also some sort of construct.