It wasn't really a ghost town at all if you knew how to use it. Sure, it was reported as such by reporters (who had um, agendas...) but I didn't find it so at all. What it was was a little selective, and the "you might like to meet" recommendations at the beginning quickly went away. Since it didn't just connect you to every moron on earth - reporters just trying it for the first time, and other idiots, didn't get any messages or contacts, so they thought it was dead. The rest of us laughed at you.
Due to them not doing vidchats peer to peer, we were using tons of their bandwidth and cpu power. Vidchats being kind of hard to really do good snooping on...it didn't fit their business model, and letting things be peer to peer like Skype once was before MS, well, then there's really no data other than who called who, so that wasn't worth it either. The ease of pushing political propaganda on their "page" crap rendered that useless too, no one with a brain went there anymore to be bombarded with that crap.
Mostly the same here. The group I've hung out with for this time have all exchanged email addresses while in vidchat hangouts, and now use other platforms, getting ready for "just in case" when the nice free vidchats go away. At least they gave us some warning. Other than making some real friends worldwide - some of whom have managed to get together in real life too - their attempt at a farcebook-alike did fail, and gratefully so, it became an even worse trash bin even if you were pretty selective on who you "circled" or generally invited. No one I hang with goes to their "page" or "wall" or whatever you call that abomination... .
Glad it existed...some of those friends will be more or less for life. To bad they screwed it up - or the users did...early on it was amazing how people all jumped on "wow, I can reach the world" and pretty much saw it as a way to make money, free advertising themselves or something stupid, and got all bent when that didn't work...I guess there are entitled losers no matter what.
But there are also good folks, and we did manage to find one another, with some persistence and luck. That won't go away.
Yep, a quick reading of one of the popular science sites combined with having done some science leads you straight to the answer - just about 100% of what's published is a press release, boosting the work, either directly begging or implying that more funds would get to something actually useful - "we're almost there!". If, if, if, if. Well, yeah, but no one who reads critically would think that all those other ifs also automatically would come true - a sure thing, right? Further, most of the popular science site press releases don't give enough information for the new "surprise" to even be falsifiable or teach anything if not. Total waste of gee whiz futurism shiny verbiage. Or maybe that was the whole point. .
And a disgustingly large amount of what you see is a rediscovery of somthing that's been known for a long time, but was just too obscure enough that around the 3rd generation of the blind leading the ignorant doesn't know they're covering old ground. A deep and wide knowledge of science would prevent that, but no one takes the time - or can afford to at today's economic conditions, high tuitions for lousy education and so on. As an old guy, I shake my head a lot these days.
It's like back when I also did EE - if you're looking at a spec sheet for say, an op amp - it's the parameters that aren't on page one where the device sucks. Don't mention slew rate? It's slow. Don't mention bias current? It's high. Don't mention linearity? It sucks. It's what they don't say...you have to know how to read critically.
Almost room temperature superconductivity! - all you need is millions of bars in a diamond anvil cell, with other conditions unspecified.
New material makes super faster transistors! But there's no way to make them other than with an AFM putting things down atom by atom - no photolith. Will therefore never be integrated at the level of silicon transistors, or even close....
New Li battery has 10x the capacity. Well, it can have 10x the Li per sq area. It'll weigh more, and be bigger. I can get to 10x with existing tech under those non-constraints. And oh, while many new types are lithium-oxygen - the PR guy immediately makes them sound like they can be lithium-air. Hint, lithium combines with things other than oxygen in the air too and you can't recover from that, so far. You get the idea.
The lies are mostly in what they conveniently leave out. I used to think it was just being sloppy, but with around 100% rate, it can't be.
Any dev doing some computation that blows up like n factorial can easily assume most of the time is spent there, no matter what language it's in. The current "deep learning" fad might apply here, since all the junk being pushed for that is currently using python for the user-stupid layer. So while the C (my favorite language for number crunching) might be much faster per operation, the sheer number of operations...you can work it out. You might write a GUI for say, a Mandelbrot program in some interpreted HLL, but then write the N = z^2 + c part in assembly, for example (as all we old farts did).
It's still a good strategy.
Of course. For things that really don't have to do much, scripting languages are fine, and newer or more extendable ones tend to be a little quicker than the older ones, maybe.
But some people are trying to use scripting languages to do *REAL WORK*, not serving web pages, but say, number crunching....and then, the ability to profile and know when to call out to something more efficient does matter, no matter which fractal of bad design you're using for scripting.
Yep, they are, and "reading comprehension required" - I'm not asking them to eval code at runtime, either. They are already well-defined and do what they do. My plotting tool needs the ability for the researcher to ask for things - axis mappings from one or more data sources - the programmer could not anticipate, and whatever the language, Glade, Gnuplot, and perl itself are all written in C - but, and this is important - I didn't have to do it.
This is for parameter sweeping a fusion reactor I'm working with, and for example, fusions/second is a cool thing to know vs all the other parameters, but so is "output vs input" for both scientific and real world breakthrough Q calculations. Since I'm also doing ion trap kinds of things, the RF frequencies, levels, DC biases, you name it, all might want to be plotted vs "how well did that work" so I can run all day, then interpret data all night. Without having to drop back into programming at all, other than to select presets and once in awhile set up a new one.
If you care, you can see an example of the resulting GUI and some data here: http://www.coultersmithing.com...
With even weirder syntax, just for the new kidz...and a whole new way to mess up your namespace
And no Inline:C (or dozen other languages) that I know of. I'm no python wizard, I learned other languages that get 'er done for me.
As the AC didn't quite manage to point out, all interpreted languages are always going to be slower than something that compiles to native machine code except for very special cases of misuse. But you gain things that might be worth it to save programmer time that can't be done - or are really difficult - in a compiled language...
For my own lab, I have a nice thing (in mostly-perl) that runs gnuplot for 4d scatter plots (X,Y,Z,color), from a SQL database. The GUI I wrote, in perl using GladeXML, allows one to type in code that maps from database columns to plot axes, and do any kind of mapping you'd want, while allowing for presets for such "determined by the user at runtime" eval code. And a huge fraction of the work was supplied by perl, Glade, gnuplot authors, and people on CPAN. I
It's really nice to have most of the obscure options for gnuplot also rendered in a GUI so I don't have to either remember them all, or do that AND edit code to change, say, a color map - or to discover which of many do the best for this plot.
While that's no doubt possible in C/C++...not on my dime or my time. The right tool for the job and all that.
I think the idea here was to find out how much time you spent in slow python vs the more-native compiled libraries you call from it? I know I do that with perl, and with the right division of work, it flies.
Because then you can get the best of both worlds - the glue can be quick to write - faster programmer, and the hard number crunching can be fast to run - those compiled libraries. You don't thunk out to them for silly stuff like adding two numbers, but when things get hairy, the price of the thunk (interface layer for you kids) is way worth it, and the time doing user-fiddly stuff in the higher level interpreted language is relatively nil anyway.
And yeah, slashvertisement, but we can have a discussion anyway.
And someone needed a PC excuse to cut and run. Good business acumen. Laughs about it over drinks later. Amazing how many here don't have a clue how the world works for real. Downvoting begins now.
I don't think it's a matter of not knowing how...I think other forces are at play in making some of these mistakes. Just IMO, but I've done my time in this game. And it's not so simple a function as to be a short drop-down list unless you just want to put an entry on it like "human nature" or "I've got kids to feed" or "it looks good for the next quarter" - which explain little other than that humans do dumb technical things for dumb human motivations that prioritize other than getting it really right technically.
So creates all these false flags to whip up fear so the public won't object too hard.
H.L. Mencken said:
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
Looking more and more prophetic and correct by the day.
Hotels keep staff on hand to notice and call police. Cuts down the budget requirement quite a bit. They also generally get plastic collateral...before you even get in.
"Wasn't this obvious to anyone who has studied neural networks and deep learning?" Marketing and CFOs don't study.
You don't think the actual coders and builders wrote all that bogus marketing hype, do you?
Yep, you get it. Too bad we couldn't make a drinking game out of this while watching almost any media where pols or other marketers are speaking. We'd all die of alcohol poisoning. Me, I just got to the point of mostly ignoring it and being cynical, kind of knowing about the sad realities, but not especially wanting to be constantly reminded (chickenshit, I know, but damn...you gotta be able to smile a little sometimes).
Like from Henry Rollins hates dating - funny, so I'll leave it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I am heartened to see how many readers are here - even this small amount is encouraging after seeing all the grammar and spelling errors usually here and obviously made by people who came along after dead tree media was cool...or maybe after seeming to know your own language became passe. For me, demonstrating ignorance and illiteracy pretty much means I won't hear your argument. Yes, I cut plenty of slack for people for whom English is not a first language, especially when the errors they make are natural constructs in their mother tongue.
"Doing God's work" is how Lloyd Blankfein described Goldman Sachs as they accepted huge bailouts from the taxpayers they claimed they didn't even need (under oath in congress which I watched) - because AIG was bailed and paid them - they double dipped on "God's work". These days you gotta be careful you're not quoting a villian.
Not if it reminds people how they are constantly lied to via fancy language and assumption manipulation...
BLS numbers on the economy? Every politician ever? Parse them carefully and many take this to high art - not actually lying but saying things in a way that you thought you heard what you wanted to hear. All marketing? Man, I tried all that aftershave, toothpaste, hair gel and treament, still didn't "get the girl"...(you're supposed to know that's a joke).
I ge this too, but in reverse. Fedex always knocks here, UPS leaves stuff. USPS also leaves stuff, but we are friends and they know *where* to leave it out of the rain and out of sight. I often feel sorry for the USPS people (rural route here, it's either the guy or his wife) because I sometimes order bulk items from Amazon that are heavy, and they carry that stuff 1/8th mile to a covered porch if I don't intercept them to help.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't really a ghost town at all if you knew how to use it. Sure, it was reported as such by reporters (who had um, agendas...) but I didn't find it so at all. What it was was a little selective, and the "you might like to meet" recommendations at the beginning quickly went away. Since it didn't just connect you to every moron on earth - reporters just trying it for the first time, and other idiots, didn't get any messages or contacts, so they thought it was dead. The rest of us laughed at you.
Due to them not doing vidchats peer to peer, we were using tons of their bandwidth and cpu power. Vidchats being kind of hard to really do good snooping on...it didn't fit their business model, and letting things be peer to peer like Skype once was before MS, well, then there's really no data other than who called who, so that wasn't worth it either. The ease of pushing political propaganda on their "page" crap rendered that useless too, no one with a brain went there anymore to be bombarded with that crap.
.
Glad it existed...some of those friends will be more or less for life. To bad they screwed it up - or the users did...early on it was amazing how people all jumped on "wow, I can reach the world" and pretty much saw it as a way to make money, free advertising themselves or something stupid, and got all bent when that didn't work...I guess there are entitled losers no matter what.
But there are also good folks, and we did manage to find one another, with some persistence and luck. That won't go away.
Further, most of the popular science site press releases don't give enough information for the new "surprise" to even be falsifiable or teach anything if not. Total waste of gee whiz futurism shiny verbiage.
Or maybe that was the whole point.
.
And a disgustingly large amount of what you see is a rediscovery of somthing that's been known for a long time, but was just too obscure enough that around the 3rd generation of the blind leading the ignorant doesn't know they're covering old ground. A deep and wide knowledge of science would prevent that, but no one takes the time - or can afford to at today's economic conditions, high tuitions for lousy education and so on. As an old guy, I shake my head a lot these days.
It's like back when I also did EE - if you're looking at a spec sheet for say, an op amp - it's the parameters that aren't on page one where the device sucks. Don't mention slew rate? It's slow. Don't mention bias current? It's high. Don't mention linearity? It sucks. It's what they don't say...you have to know how to read critically.
Almost room temperature superconductivity! - all you need is millions of bars in a diamond anvil cell, with other conditions unspecified.
New material makes super faster transistors! But there's no way to make them other than with an AFM putting things down atom by atom - no photolith. Will therefore never be integrated at the level of silicon transistors, or even close....
New Li battery has 10x the capacity. Well, it can have 10x the Li per sq area. It'll weigh more, and be bigger. I can get to 10x with existing tech under those non-constraints. And oh, while many new types are lithium-oxygen - the PR guy immediately makes them sound like they can be lithium-air. Hint, lithium combines with things other than oxygen in the air too and you can't recover from that, so far. You get the idea.
The lies are mostly in what they conveniently leave out. I used to think it was just being sloppy, but with around 100% rate, it can't be.
Can't mod you up as I've posted here....sorry.
Any dev doing some computation that blows up like n factorial can easily assume most of the time is spent there, no matter what language it's in. The current "deep learning" fad might apply here, since all the junk being pushed for that is currently using python for the user-stupid layer. So while the C (my favorite language for number crunching) might be much faster per operation, the sheer number of operations...you can work it out. You might write a GUI for say, a Mandelbrot program in some interpreted HLL, but then write the N = z^2 + c part in assembly, for example (as all we old farts did).
It's still a good strategy.
Of course. For things that really don't have to do much, scripting languages are fine, and newer or more extendable ones tend to be a little quicker than the older ones, maybe.
But some people are trying to use scripting languages to do *REAL WORK*, not serving web pages, but say, number crunching....and then, the ability to profile and know when to call out to something more efficient does matter, no matter which fractal of bad design you're using for scripting.
Yep, they are, and "reading comprehension required" - I'm not asking them to eval code at runtime, either. They are already well-defined and do what they do. My plotting tool needs the ability for the researcher to ask for things - axis mappings from one or more data sources - the programmer could not anticipate, and whatever the language, Glade, Gnuplot, and perl itself are all written in C - but, and this is important - I didn't have to do it.
This is for parameter sweeping a fusion reactor I'm working with, and for example, fusions/second is a cool thing to know vs all the other parameters, but so is "output vs input" for both scientific and real world breakthrough Q calculations. Since I'm also doing ion trap kinds of things, the RF frequencies, levels, DC biases, you name it, all might want to be plotted vs "how well did that work" so I can run all day, then interpret data all night. Without having to drop back into programming at all, other than to select presets and once in awhile set up a new one. If you care, you can see an example of the resulting GUI and some data here: http://www.coultersmithing.com...
With even weirder syntax, just for the new kidz...and a whole new way to mess up your namespace
And no Inline:C (or dozen other languages) that I know of. I'm no python wizard, I learned other languages that get 'er done for me.
As the AC didn't quite manage to point out, all interpreted languages are always going to be slower than something that compiles to native machine code except for very special cases of misuse. But you gain things that might be worth it to save programmer time that can't be done - or are really difficult - in a compiled language...
For my own lab, I have a nice thing (in mostly-perl) that runs gnuplot for 4d scatter plots (X,Y,Z,color), from a SQL database. The GUI I wrote, in perl using GladeXML, allows one to type in code that maps from database columns to plot axes, and do any kind of mapping you'd want, while allowing for presets for such "determined by the user at runtime" eval code. And a huge fraction of the work was supplied by perl, Glade, gnuplot authors, and people on CPAN.
I It's really nice to have most of the obscure options for gnuplot also rendered in a GUI so I don't have to either remember them all, or do that AND edit code to change, say, a color map - or to discover which of many do the best for this plot.
While that's no doubt possible in C/C++...not on my dime or my time. The right tool for the job and all that.
I think the idea here was to find out how much time you spent in slow python vs the more-native compiled libraries you call from it? I know I do that with perl, and with the right division of work, it flies. Because then you can get the best of both worlds - the glue can be quick to write - faster programmer, and the hard number crunching can be fast to run - those compiled libraries. You don't thunk out to them for silly stuff like adding two numbers, but when things get hairy, the price of the thunk (interface layer for you kids) is way worth it, and the time doing user-fiddly stuff in the higher level interpreted language is relatively nil anyway.
And yeah, slashvertisement, but we can have a discussion anyway.
And someone needed a PC excuse to cut and run. Good business acumen. Laughs about it over drinks later. Amazing how many here don't have a clue how the world works for real. Downvoting begins now.
I don't think it's a matter of not knowing how...I think other forces are at play in making some of these mistakes. Just IMO, but I've done my time in this game. And it's not so simple a function as to be a short drop-down list unless you just want to put an entry on it like "human nature" or "I've got kids to feed" or "it looks good for the next quarter" - which explain little other than that humans do dumb technical things for dumb human motivations that prioritize other than getting it really right technically.
So creates all these false flags to whip up fear so the public won't object too hard. H.L. Mencken said:
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
Looking more and more prophetic and correct by the day.
Followed by extend and then extinguish?
Hotels keep staff on hand to notice and call police. Cuts down the budget requirement quite a bit. They also generally get plastic collateral...before you even get in.
"Wasn't this obvious to anyone who has studied neural networks and deep learning?" Marketing and CFOs don't study.
You don't think the actual coders and builders wrote all that bogus marketing hype, do you?
Yep, you get it. Too bad we couldn't make a drinking game out of this while watching almost any media where pols or other marketers are speaking. We'd all die of alcohol poisoning. Me, I just got to the point of mostly ignoring it and being cynical, kind of knowing about the sad realities, but not especially wanting to be constantly reminded (chickenshit, I know, but damn...you gotta be able to smile a little sometimes).
Yeah, oops ;~)
Like from Henry Rollins hates dating - funny, so I'll leave it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I am heartened to see how many readers are here - even this small amount is encouraging after seeing all the grammar and spelling errors usually here and obviously made by people who came along after dead tree media was cool...or maybe after seeming to know your own language became passe. For me, demonstrating ignorance and illiteracy pretty much means I won't hear your argument. Yes, I cut plenty of slack for people for whom English is not a first language, especially when the errors they make are natural constructs in their mother tongue.
"Intellectual but Idiot" IbI - which I'd thought of it, but Nassim Taleb did.
"Doing God's work" is how Lloyd Blankfein described Goldman Sachs as they accepted huge bailouts from the taxpayers they claimed they didn't even need (under oath in congress which I watched) - because AIG was bailed and paid them - they double dipped on "God's work". These days you gotta be careful you're not quoting a villian.
Not if it reminds people how they are constantly lied to via fancy language and assumption manipulation...
BLS numbers on the economy? Every politician ever? Parse them carefully and many take this to high art - not actually lying but saying things in a way that you thought you heard what you wanted to hear. All marketing? Man, I tried all that aftershave, toothpaste, hair gel and treament, still didn't "get the girl"...(you're supposed to know that's a joke).
And all real scientists live to hear, or better, speak just that phrase. It's the payoff for all that work.
You obviously have never been glitter bombed. It's forever. Glitter is the herpes of the crafting world.
I ge this too, but in reverse. Fedex always knocks here, UPS leaves stuff. USPS also leaves stuff, but we are friends and they know *where* to leave it out of the rain and out of sight. I often feel sorry for the USPS people (rural route here, it's either the guy or his wife) because I sometimes order bulk items from Amazon that are heavy, and they carry that stuff 1/8th mile to a covered porch if I don't intercept them to help.