Science and technology do not have ethical value per se
IMHO, the scientific method does have several elements which can be regarded as ethics:
Sharing your results so that others can learn and verify them
Focus on scientific content, not the the title/gender/color of the person who presented it
Of course, real science doesn't often work in this ideal way. And there's no ethics on how the results of science can be used. But these ideas go a long way when considering the bigger picture -- for example, science progresses better by international collaboration than by blowing each other to bits.
Nope. Terminating lines with a semicolon permits indent to trivially reformat your code if all the line breaks are lost.
I also want a tornado-proof language, in case all the characters in my source code get completely shuffled. But protection against natural disasters does not belong in the language syntax. The kind of redundancy where you always write ";\n" rather than just "\n" belongs in the physical transmission/storage layer, along with checksums and the like.
I recall reading about displays with embedded light-sensing pixels, with some processing they can act like a camera. It helps that Google knows how your lighting is set up.
Scientists don't use it for the language, they use it for the libraries. Numpy is extremely fast (since it is written in C, C++, Fortran or Cython or whatever) and very convenient to use (since it is wrapped in Python).
I wouldn't say it's very convenient, though it works for me. It gets quite verbose because you have to write things like np.complex() and np.array() for simple things all the time. Conversely, some languages like Julia have native complex/matrix/vector types so you can write things as you'd write math. But these are more specialized languages so they don't have all the nice libraries of Python.
As for the syntax, Julia uses significant line breaks (replacing semicolons of C-like languages) but none of the indentation issues of Python. Blocks are closed with the "end" statement, replacing the braces of C-like languages. It's the best of both worlds.
why are you obsessed with the sun being at its high point at noon rather than being at its high point at 2pm which would suit the needs of society better? Noon is just as arbitrary as any other point in time.
I tried to explain this with my 8 o'clock example earlier, so let me elaborate. Here the standard workday is 8 am to 4 pm, symmetric about the clock noon. But people wanted more light time after work, so they came up with DST. Now they still work 8am-4pm, but solar noon happens at 1 pm. My question is, couldn't they have shifted working hours into 7am-3pm instead? Because something has been shifted -- the relation between the Sun's cycle and their working hours. Of course, you get the same relational effect by changing the definition of clock time, but it seems confusing and unnecessary.
As a physicist, I'm somewhat outraged that people are willing to change fundamental measurement systems for some personal benefit. We don't change the definition of 1 metre just because people are getting taller on average, for example. By keeping the fundamental measures fixed, we have some basis of measuring actual growth and change. I know that clock time isn't exactly an SI unit, but the principle is the same. If you want to know about light, you need to know where Sun is relative to actual, physical noon. You are then free to change your schedules depending on these natural phenomena.
Back on the 8-16 workday, it's easy to imagine the following scenarios. As DST forces people to wake up 1 hour earlier relative to the sun, people start working 9-17 instead (8-16 in solar time). So they're back to their old schedules that were symmetric about the solar noon, but now they have a twisted sense of clock time.
In another scenario, the 9-17 is regarded as a sign of laziness, and another hour of DST is introduced. Now 8 o'clock means 6 in solar time. You can imagine this cycle repeating a few times, until 8 o'clock is somewhere like the midnight. Because once you're separated from the natural, physical definitions of time, it's not anchored anywhere so it can end up in any random orientation.
To me, it seems that people are hell-bent on starting their workday at 8am. It's as if there's something sacred about that fixed number 8. But it's not particularly sacred or fixed if they're willing to move the definition of 8am around.
What's this obsession with aligning time so the sun is in the peak at noon rather than extending the usable light at the end of the work day?
You answered your own question. If you're interested in usable light, then it's nice to know where the sun is in its daily cycle. It's easier when the peak sun is an "origin" or "zero point" in the system of measures, not some arbitrary number.
Regular polarizing sunglasses should work for those. Presumably, the polarization direction in most LCDs is chosen so that they remain visible with polarizing sunglasses (whose direction, in turn, is chosen to reduce reflections from horizontal surfaces).
There are different types of LED screens:
LED-backlit LCD
OLED
Giant LED signs
Marketing likes to say "LED screen" when they mean "LED-backlit LCD". That doesn't mean it's true in a technical sense. I think that started because actual LED screens were supposed to be the hip new thing after LCDs, but so far I've only seen OLED displays in small devices like feature phones. I wonder what the marketing term will be when OLED or some other LED tech starts to replace larger LCDs.
Now excuse me while I go back to work with my CCFL screen.
Daylight 'saving' time is a bug in any sensible timekeeping system.
This is a timely (ahem) topic in the EU, as we have recently decided to ditch the biannual idiocy for fixed timezones. The remaining problem is that member countries can decide on which timezone to use, which might not be the solar one. So proponents of DST are campaigning for year-round DST (solar + 1). To me that sounds even sillier than current DST changes -- if you're going to make it permanent, you might as well fix your working schedule instead of redefining time itself. ("I want to go to work 1 hour earlier, but I still want it to be 8 o'clock, so I'll just move the definition of 8 around until I'm satisfied.")
Meanwhile, several European countries are already on a non-solar timezone in favour of Central European Time. It's an interestingly rational alternative to solar time, but for us Finns it would be the "solar - 1" zone, in direct opposition to the DST camp. So one can hope that we'll compromise on the solar zone.
It is easy to load a script into a subtitling system and hit "ego" at the start of the play, he said, but problems would then arise if actors spoke quicker or slower than expected.
The software used by the theater follows live speech and recognizes certain stage directions, like lighting changes
Meanwhile, the software used by/. follows text on a webpage, translating "go" into "ego".
Seriously, though, it shouldn't be news to anyone that live theatre doesn't work like a pre-recorded movie. Theatre techs need to follow cues on the stage for controlling light and sound, and this involves timing at fractions of a second. I wonder if their speech recognition system could be used to automate those too; I guess it's not perfect if they need the lighting cues as well.
Also, subtitles in theatres aren't exactly a new thing, though I mostly recall seeing them in operas. There it makes more sense, given they are less commonly translated into local languages, and timing precision is less important.
Math aside, in what discipline is "Wireless Fidelity" considered a rational term to describe digital data transfer? Is it because the 0s are soft and round while the 1s are sharp and upright? Or is it "fiction" rather than "fidelity"?
You can find pretty capable FPGAs today, in fact you've been able to put various RISC processors on a single FPGA for years. Unfortunately, they won't be fundamentally secure. The compilers are generally closed source, and who knows what the chips themselves are hiding.
In Python, the pass statement helps with these. You can always convert a single if-without-else construct into an if-else one, where one of the cases has the non-inverted condition.
You can play soccer with any vague spheroid, at least when you're a beginner. Even at the highest levels, there are multiple vendors for the necessary equipment. In essence, traditional sports are open source. I will accept e-sports as sports when the games and the requisite operating systems are Free software.
I've been reading/. since 2000 or so, and used Linux since 1999. Using Linux and bashing Microsoft has been the/. mantra all the time -- more so in the early years, I think. There have always been more obscure niches of geeks here, starting with the BSD crowd, for instance, but Linux has seemed like the norm. So I might as well say "baaaa" as a member of the GNU herd.
What I don't understand is the ongoing presence of Microsoft news here. You'd think that after all the bashing of the early noughties we'd be past that, happily using our Free software and just ignoring all the drooling idiots who keep using Windows. I understand the occasional funny bits related to MS and their quest to reimplement Unix poorly a few decades late. But most of the news don't seem relevant to the crowd who is supposedly smart enough to use at least Ubuntu.
He is insulting and demeaning to *EVERYONE*. Not just men, not just women. Everyone.
IOW, from the article:
“He is an equal-opportunity abuser,” she said. Squire added, though, that for non-male programmers the hostility and public humiliation is more isolating.
From what I've seen, it's OK to tell a white male programmer "your code is crap". But if you want to criticize the code of someone from a minority, you need to be extra careful, because you never know when they take it as an insult against their minority group. It's pretty sad, because it used to be that "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog", and code was good because it was good code, not because it was written by a nice guy.
Still, there's an older and more general idea that if you want to play in the big leagues, you need to grow a thick skin. Linux kernel development isn't some neighbourhood hobby group where anyone can play. I just hope it continues be the big league in terms of code quality rather than political correctness. On that, Linus has a nice quote from 2013 in the same article:
“The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what ‘acting professionally’ results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.”
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Science and technology do not have ethical value per se
IMHO, the scientific method does have several elements which can be regarded as ethics:
Of course, real science doesn't often work in this ideal way. And there's no ethics on how the results of science can be used. But these ideas go a long way when considering the bigger picture -- for example, science progresses better by international collaboration than by blowing each other to bits.
Nope. Terminating lines with a semicolon permits indent to trivially reformat your code if all the line breaks are lost.
I also want a tornado-proof language, in case all the characters in my source code get completely shuffled. But protection against natural disasters does not belong in the language syntax. The kind of redundancy where you always write ";\n" rather than just "\n" belongs in the physical transmission/storage layer, along with checksums and the like.
I recall reading about displays with embedded light-sensing pixels, with some processing they can act like a camera. It helps that Google knows how your lighting is set up.
Errr you clearly haven't been to an consumer electronics store in the past 2 years.
I have, but I couldn't distinguish between the "LED TVs" and the "LED TVs".
Scientists don't use it for the language, they use it for the libraries. Numpy is extremely fast (since it is written in C, C++, Fortran or Cython or whatever) and very convenient to use (since it is wrapped in Python).
I wouldn't say it's very convenient, though it works for me. It gets quite verbose because you have to write things like np.complex() and np.array() for simple things all the time. Conversely, some languages like Julia have native complex/matrix/vector types so you can write things as you'd write math. But these are more specialized languages so they don't have all the nice libraries of Python.
Try Julia. Nearly as fast as C. Feels like writing in Python, only better.
FTFY. https://julialang.org/benchmar...
As for the syntax, Julia uses significant line breaks (replacing semicolons of C-like languages) but none of the indentation issues of Python. Blocks are closed with the "end" statement, replacing the braces of C-like languages. It's the best of both worlds.
why are you obsessed with the sun being at its high point at noon rather than being at its high point at 2pm which would suit the needs of society better? Noon is just as arbitrary as any other point in time.
I tried to explain this with my 8 o'clock example earlier, so let me elaborate. Here the standard workday is 8 am to 4 pm, symmetric about the clock noon. But people wanted more light time after work, so they came up with DST. Now they still work 8am-4pm, but solar noon happens at 1 pm. My question is, couldn't they have shifted working hours into 7am-3pm instead? Because something has been shifted -- the relation between the Sun's cycle and their working hours. Of course, you get the same relational effect by changing the definition of clock time, but it seems confusing and unnecessary.
As a physicist, I'm somewhat outraged that people are willing to change fundamental measurement systems for some personal benefit. We don't change the definition of 1 metre just because people are getting taller on average, for example. By keeping the fundamental measures fixed, we have some basis of measuring actual growth and change. I know that clock time isn't exactly an SI unit, but the principle is the same. If you want to know about light, you need to know where Sun is relative to actual, physical noon. You are then free to change your schedules depending on these natural phenomena.
Back on the 8-16 workday, it's easy to imagine the following scenarios. As DST forces people to wake up 1 hour earlier relative to the sun, people start working 9-17 instead (8-16 in solar time). So they're back to their old schedules that were symmetric about the solar noon, but now they have a twisted sense of clock time.
In another scenario, the 9-17 is regarded as a sign of laziness, and another hour of DST is introduced. Now 8 o'clock means 6 in solar time. You can imagine this cycle repeating a few times, until 8 o'clock is somewhere like the midnight. Because once you're separated from the natural, physical definitions of time, it's not anchored anywhere so it can end up in any random orientation.
To me, it seems that people are hell-bent on starting their workday at 8am. It's as if there's something sacred about that fixed number 8. But it's not particularly sacred or fixed if they're willing to move the definition of 8am around.
What's this obsession with aligning time so the sun is in the peak at noon rather than extending the usable light at the end of the work day?
You answered your own question. If you're interested in usable light, then it's nice to know where the sun is in its daily cycle. It's easier when the peak sun is an "origin" or "zero point" in the system of measures, not some arbitrary number.
Regular polarizing sunglasses should work for those. Presumably, the polarization direction in most LCDs is chosen so that they remain visible with polarizing sunglasses (whose direction, in turn, is chosen to reduce reflections from horizontal surfaces).
There are different types of LED screens:
LED-backlit LCD
OLED
Giant LED signs
Marketing likes to say "LED screen" when they mean "LED-backlit LCD". That doesn't mean it's true in a technical sense. I think that started because actual LED screens were supposed to be the hip new thing after LCDs, but so far I've only seen OLED displays in small devices like feature phones. I wonder what the marketing term will be when OLED or some other LED tech starts to replace larger LCDs.
Now excuse me while I go back to work with my CCFL screen.
Daylight 'saving' time is a bug in any sensible timekeeping system.
This is a timely (ahem) topic in the EU, as we have recently decided to ditch the biannual idiocy for fixed timezones. The remaining problem is that member countries can decide on which timezone to use, which might not be the solar one. So proponents of DST are campaigning for year-round DST (solar + 1). To me that sounds even sillier than current DST changes -- if you're going to make it permanent, you might as well fix your working schedule instead of redefining time itself. ("I want to go to work 1 hour earlier, but I still want it to be 8 o'clock, so I'll just move the definition of 8 around until I'm satisfied.")
Meanwhile, several European countries are already on a non-solar timezone in favour of Central European Time. It's an interestingly rational alternative to solar time, but for us Finns it would be the "solar - 1" zone, in direct opposition to the DST camp. So one can hope that we'll compromise on the solar zone.
It is easy to load a script into a subtitling system and hit "ego" at the start of the play, he said, but problems would then arise if actors spoke quicker or slower than expected.
The software used by the theater follows live speech and recognizes certain stage directions, like lighting changes
Meanwhile, the software used by /. follows text on a webpage, translating "go" into "ego".
Seriously, though, it shouldn't be news to anyone that live theatre doesn't work like a pre-recorded movie. Theatre techs need to follow cues on the stage for controlling light and sound, and this involves timing at fractions of a second. I wonder if their speech recognition system could be used to automate those too; I guess it's not perfect if they need the lighting cues as well.
Also, subtitles in theatres aren't exactly a new thing, though I mostly recall seeing them in operas. There it makes more sense, given they are less commonly translated into local languages, and timing precision is less important.
In the end, we need to create an energy matrix
Is that like a farm of humans producing energy for the post-singularity planetwide supercomputer?
Fortunately, the area of coverage will henceforth be called the Wireless Zune.
Math aside, in what discipline is "Wireless Fidelity" considered a rational term to describe digital data transfer? Is it because the 0s are soft and round while the 1s are sharp and upright? Or is it "fiction" rather than "fidelity"?
RISC-V, or make an 8088 out of FPGAs.
You can find pretty capable FPGAs today, in fact you've been able to put various RISC processors on a single FPGA for years. Unfortunately, they won't be fundamentally secure. The compilers are generally closed source, and who knows what the chips themselves are hiding.
In Python, the pass statement helps with these. You can always convert a single if-without-else construct into an if-else one, where one of the cases has the non-inverted condition.
You can play soccer with any vague spheroid, at least when you're a beginner. Even at the highest levels, there are multiple vendors for the necessary equipment. In essence, traditional sports are open source. I will accept e-sports as sports when the games and the requisite operating systems are Free software.
I've been reading /. since 2000 or so, and used Linux since 1999. Using Linux and bashing Microsoft has been the /. mantra all the time -- more so in the early years, I think. There have always been more obscure niches of geeks here, starting with the BSD crowd, for instance, but Linux has seemed like the norm. So I might as well say "baaaa" as a member of the GNU herd.
What I don't understand is the ongoing presence of Microsoft news here. You'd think that after all the bashing of the early noughties we'd be past that, happily using our Free software and just ignoring all the drooling idiots who keep using Windows. I understand the occasional funny bits related to MS and their quest to reimplement Unix poorly a few decades late. But most of the news don't seem relevant to the crowd who is supposedly smart enough to use at least Ubuntu.
More to the point: alcohol is a solvent.
The ABC theorum is a bit hard to explain.
Not as hard as it is to spell "theorem". *rimshot*
He is insulting and demeaning to *EVERYONE*. Not just men, not just women. Everyone.
IOW, from the article:
“He is an equal-opportunity abuser,” she said. Squire added, though, that for non-male programmers the hostility and public humiliation is more isolating.
From what I've seen, it's OK to tell a white male programmer "your code is crap". But if you want to criticize the code of someone from a minority, you need to be extra careful, because you never know when they take it as an insult against their minority group. It's pretty sad, because it used to be that "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog", and code was good because it was good code, not because it was written by a nice guy.
Still, there's an older and more general idea that if you want to play in the big leagues, you need to grow a thick skin. Linux kernel development isn't some neighbourhood hobby group where anyone can play. I just hope it continues be the big league in terms of code quality rather than political correctness. On that, Linus has a nice quote from 2013 in the same article:
“The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what ‘acting professionally’ results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.”
he asked why we don't just leave 8min early and it appears it took someone to say it out aloud for everyone to realise how dumb the original idea was.
Maybe he should be talking to governments about DST.
Damn, burni2 beat me to it.
Thus solving the problem once and for all!
It's like flying cars. It sounds like a cool idea
I imagine flying cars would actually get quite hot, with sufficiently powerful engines on such small craft. But icebergs, now that's cool.