1. a random process can be defined as a maximally complex process for which there is no process less complex that can predict the outcome. So no, "random" does not mean we haven't found the causal explanation for the particulars of the outcome of the process, but that there is no causal explanation of the particulars of the outcome; that is, there is no explanation of the exact outcome of the process that does not involve representing every constituent and every change/transformation in the entire process. There is no short explanation. That's just how complex the process is.
2. order can spontaneously emerge from randomness. In a trivial example, if I drop grains of sand from one hole up above a surface, they scatter randomly on the surface, and scatter randomly on the growing pile of sand, but eventually, I will have a conical pile whose walls are a certain angle that depends only on (the average of) certain local interaction (shape, friction, mass-related) properties of sand grains. If the pile gets steeper, it will fall back over time to the same steepness of cone wall. If it collapses partially, it will build back up to that steepness of wall. An emergent, gross-scale, stable property of a large body of matter, created out of nothing but random motion of particles. A simple case of emergent order, yes, but exemplary of the principle that order can build up, and that random perturbation can actually assist or create its build-up.
There is no god (other than an invented concept), and yet, regardless of their core fictional content, religions have had a social norming function; have served as promulgators and enforcers of moral codes (reciprocity, don't kill, don't covet etc) which have reduced social friction within each adherent group, leading to cultural and economic advancement within the group. While there have no doubt been many wars between religious groups, this is true of human societal groups / tribes / nations in general and is not a special attribute of religious groups.
So how are we to achieve promulgation and strong encouragement of moral codes, without the carrot / stick of religion and its compelling morality tales.
Yeah. As a business in the tech area, you have to stay different (differentiated from your would be competition) or you will be dead.
Lose the "brilliant jerk" and your company will likely start dying, although some I imagine can live on their fat reserves for a long time.
So my advice would be to keep the brilliant jerk in charge, but temper them with another brilliant but also more business minded peer at the very top of the company. I feel the trouble is really going to start happening when you start letting the VCs on the board make the decisions. You are going to get ultr-conservative and technically tone-deaf decisions and senior hires then.
So avoid that. Stay revenue-funded as long as possible.
A tablet has a completely different user interface with swipe gestures and a crappy keyboard.
Why would I want to run legacy windows applications on it that already had in many cases godawful overcomplicated user interfaces with tiny menus and microscopic meaningless icons.
Legacy photoshop on a windows tablet?
Or standard Excel or Word with a monstrosity of control toolbars/ribbons with gazillions of tiny controls?
Organic agriculture is (as originally intended anyway) about things like:
Not using practices or chemicals that are destructive to the local or downstream ecosystems.
- Pesticides - kill birds, cause cancer,
- massive doses of nitrogen fertilizers - require a massive energy-intensive petrochemical industry, destroy downstream ocean life.
- Monocultures - destructive of genetic diversity, more susceptible to massive crop failure if you don't addict yourself to high chemical dosing.
- GMOs - imply monoculture - create specialized and thus adaptively fragile crops which are dependent on industrial-scale inputs, and which threaten natural bio-diversity and in general threaten the operation of the natural selection process of eco-system self-maintenance.
Using practices that maintain (sustain) the ability of the local ecosystem to support the agricultural yield by itself for an extended period of time:
- leave the land in as good productivity as you found it, without massive inputs.
- techniques like rotation, co-planting, use of compost to build soil,etc.
Using practices (fair-trade) that are fair to agricultural workers and small-scale land-holders, that continue to employ them, that give them a stake in their output and in maintaining their land and community, and that don't damage their health through exposure to pesticides etc.
So you're saying Obama is "the worst president we have had since Lincoln"
So let me tease out your logic there a little bit. Lincoln, you must be thinking, was really bad because he won a war against slaveholders and ended slavery, which eventually led to that horror of horrors, in your mind, a black president who instituted universal healthcare.
Yes, I can see the serious problems with that, from the point of view of a confederate redneck who still regrets that he has to go to the trouble of getting married, or paying an illegal, to get his house dusted.
Seriously. There comes a time when a government of a country jumps the shark so egregiously that you just have to say: You forfeited your right to govern. The UN (who's your daddy?) is coming to take the keys away. (On the basis of enforcement of even a lowest-common-denominator version of basic human rights.)
This is such a case.
Another such case was the Taliban denying education to women and also, for example, blowing up priceless ancient giant statues which were part of all of humanity's cultural heritage, allegedly on the basis that the statues were dedicated to another fictitious god-like concept, instead of to the one true fictitious god-like concept.
I'm sorry, you've lost the program. You are so fired.
I too would have seen a move from C to C++ as progress...
in 1989.
It took me til about 1990 to realize that C++ was a fundamentally broken and overcomplicated attempt at an object oriented programming language. By attempting too much (OO + C backward compatibility) it achieved, to be kind, something other than safety and elegance.
C++ seems to me like the space shuttle of programming languages; includes a kitchen sink, a tool on board for every purpose, lightning fast, and dangerous as hell.
So tell me, has 22 years more development managed to fix it?
That patent would have expired by now, and allowed everyone to code whatever algorithm they want on a general purpose computer.
I took compsci. I learned about ifs, loops, subroutines, how to string them together (and a few other odds and ends), and I consider myself free to string them together however I damn well please.
I love vim for: - fast file creation and fairly complex repetitive changes within a single file. - its guaranteed availability on any linux/unix/macosx box around.
I find vim a little tiresome for find and replace, or working on 8 files at once or whatever, once the project becomes a tree of 30, 50,... files in multiple directories.
I would rather have someone with good ability to create a well-factored domain model and description of solution requirements, given a client with a vague idea of what they want.
I would rather have someone who can first come up with all the important design constraints and trade-offs in a domain and problem, then creatively suggest alternative solutions, then they can methodically explore and compare how well each solution meets the constraints, and can methodically explore the pro-con decision tree on the trade-offs, to perhaps come up with a least bad solution (from this perspective), then a least bad solution (from that other perspective/priority weighting).
And I would rather have someone with great debugging skills; a great designer of experiments, a methodical fact gatherer, who knows what they don't know, and also one who occasionally gets, after pondering or exploring, deep creative insights into the probable or possible cause of the bug; someone who can debug well on their own or in a dialectic conversation with another programmer.
Unfortunately the business method of fixing a power grid by rebooting has been patented. But wait, if no one can access the patent database because the power is off, does a patent on computerized obviousness still make a sound?
Firstly, I hope you are not equating wind and solar with small-scale. Very large wind and solar projects are possible with today's technology. See European offshore wind development. See various Sahara solar project plans.
Secondly, the potential for large, grid scale storage has not even begun to be tapped. e.g. Underwater airbags, molten salt storage, etc etc etc not to mention the flexibility of small-scale Lithium-chemistry batteries or sodium-chemistry batteries added to the local electricity distribution system.
Thirdly, low-loss high-voltage DC transmission, and probably in the near future long-distance superconducting transmission lines, have the potential to completely change the use cases for non-dispatchable intermittent renewable generation, allowing power to be switched around an entire continent from where the generation is high to where the load is high.
Fourthly, we have not started to take advantage of "negawatt" generators; large scale pooled demand response technology.
All these things together, with bi-directional power flow the norm, and energy hubs instead of conventional substations, will lead to a much higher potential use for distributed and intermittent renewable energy sources. The technology building blocks are either here already, or within a decade of production usability, so it would be best to start right now changing the plans and assumptions, and, with carbon taxes, the economic incentives, to accommodate these new green and more stochastically reliable power technologies.
Start with posters in the coffee room" "At , respect means having an environment free of harassment or discrimination."
That set's the expectation.
Also, send around a policy statement that mentions that dismissal and possible legal action are the consequences of harassing behavior. Doesn't your state have laws about this, that could be mentioned in the policy? Of course, you have to mean it. If not, that's your issue, not your employees'.
Slashdot Mirror
No I'm not Dawkins, but let me point out that
1. a random process can be defined as a maximally complex process for which there is no process less complex that can predict the outcome.
So no, "random" does not mean we haven't found the causal explanation for the particulars of the outcome of the process, but that there is no causal explanation of the particulars of the outcome; that is, there is no explanation of the exact outcome of the process that does not involve representing every constituent and every change/transformation in the entire process. There is no short explanation. That's just how complex the process is.
2. order can spontaneously emerge from randomness. In a trivial example, if I drop grains of sand from one hole up above a surface, they scatter randomly on the surface, and scatter randomly on the growing pile of sand, but eventually, I will have a conical pile whose walls are a certain angle that depends only on (the average of) certain local interaction (shape, friction, mass-related) properties of sand grains. If the pile gets steeper, it will fall back over time to the same steepness of cone wall. If it collapses partially, it will build back up to that steepness of wall. An emergent, gross-scale, stable property of a large body of matter, created out of nothing but random motion of particles. A simple case of emergent order, yes, but exemplary of the principle that order can build up, and that random perturbation can actually assist or create its build-up.
There is no god (other than an invented concept), and yet, regardless of their core fictional content, religions have had a social norming function; have served as promulgators and enforcers of moral codes (reciprocity, don't kill, don't covet etc) which have reduced social friction within each adherent group, leading to cultural and economic advancement within the group. While there have no doubt been many wars between religious groups, this is true of human societal groups / tribes / nations in general and is not a special attribute of religious groups.
So how are we to achieve promulgation and strong encouragement of moral codes, without the carrot / stick of religion and its compelling morality tales.
and that if you believe that a god does exist you are deluded, and your skills at using your brain properly are in question.
is that classified as religious hatred?
In other words, can speaking the truth be rightfully equated with religious hatred ?
I am not so much hating you if you are in that believing position as saying why don't you wake up from your crazy dream.
It is information which my personal, copyrighted property, that I am storing in a rented storage facility, and am letting you see.
I am intending only to let certain people in to the storage container to see the property. Anyone else is trespassing and also
in copyright violation.
So what do laws say about the warrantless search of personal property?
(Lest you say that cloud storage is not rented, remember that you are paying Google the value of yourself as an ad-target.)
Yeah. As a business in the tech area, you have to stay different (differentiated from your would be competition)
or you will be dead.
Lose the "brilliant jerk" and your company will likely start dying, although some I imagine can live on their fat reserves for a long time.
So my advice would be to keep the brilliant jerk in charge, but temper them with another brilliant but also more business minded
peer at the very top of the company. I feel the trouble is really going to start happening when you start letting the VCs on the board
make the decisions. You are going to get ultr-conservative and technically tone-deaf decisions and senior hires then.
So avoid that. Stay revenue-funded as long as possible.
A tablet has a completely different user interface with swipe gestures and a crappy keyboard.
Why would I want to run legacy windows applications on it that already had in many cases godawful overcomplicated user interfaces with tiny menus and microscopic meaningless icons.
Legacy photoshop on a windows tablet?
Or standard Excel or Word with a monstrosity of control toolbars/ribbons with gazillions of tiny controls?
Not going to happen.
Absolutely:
Organic agriculture is (as originally intended anyway) about things like:
Not using practices or chemicals that are destructive to the local or downstream ecosystems.
- Pesticides - kill birds, cause cancer,
- massive doses of nitrogen fertilizers - require a massive energy-intensive petrochemical industry, destroy downstream ocean life.
- Monocultures - destructive of genetic diversity, more susceptible to massive crop failure if you don't addict yourself to high chemical dosing.
- GMOs - imply monoculture - create specialized and thus adaptively fragile crops which are dependent on industrial-scale inputs, and which threaten natural bio-diversity and in general threaten the operation of the natural selection process of eco-system self-maintenance.
Using practices that maintain (sustain) the ability of the local ecosystem to support the agricultural yield by itself for an extended period of time:
- leave the land in as good productivity as you found it, without massive inputs.
- techniques like rotation, co-planting, use of compost to build soil,etc.
Using practices (fair-trade) that are fair to agricultural workers and small-scale land-holders, that continue to employ them, that give them a stake in their output and in maintaining their land and community, and that don't damage their health through exposure to pesticides etc.
Someone who understands things like "less is more", "restriction leads to freedom", "one shall rule them all", and "human factors design matters".
So you're saying Obama is "the worst president we have had since Lincoln"
So let me tease out your logic there a little bit.
Lincoln, you must be thinking, was really bad because he won a war against slaveholders and ended slavery,
which eventually led to that horror of horrors, in your mind, a black president who instituted universal healthcare.
Yes, I can see the serious problems with that, from the point of view of a confederate redneck who still
regrets that he has to go to the trouble of getting married, or paying an illegal, to get his house dusted.
"Democrat president and Republican congress."
or vice versa, of course. Doesn't really matter. Impotence is what you get either way.
That's what happens when you elect a Democrat president and Republican congress.
You get a government that can't actually do anything. i.e. that acts exactly as if it's not sure of anything.
And thus the libertarians actually win a lot of the time, since there are so many castrated governments in the US.
Seriously.
There comes a time when a government of a country jumps the shark so egregiously that you just have to say: You forfeited your right to govern. The UN (who's your daddy?) is coming to take the keys away. (On the basis of enforcement of even a lowest-common-denominator version of basic human rights.)
This is such a case.
Another such case was the Taliban denying education to women and also, for example, blowing up priceless ancient giant statues which were part of all of humanity's cultural heritage, allegedly on the basis that the statues were dedicated to another fictitious god-like concept, instead of to the one true fictitious god-like concept.
I'm sorry, you've lost the program. You are so fired.
I too would have seen a move from C to C++ as progress...
in 1989.
It took me til about 1990 to realize that C++ was a fundamentally broken and overcomplicated attempt at an object oriented programming language. By attempting too much (OO + C backward compatibility) it achieved, to be kind, something other than safety and elegance.
C++ seems to me like the space shuttle of programming languages; includes a kitchen sink, a tool on board for every purpose, lightning fast, and dangerous as hell.
So tell me, has 22 years more development managed to fix it?
Why have the freaking semicolons in the language in those positions anyway? Clearly they add no information.
Violation of minimalism.
That patent would have expired by now, and allowed everyone to code whatever algorithm they want on a general purpose computer.
I took compsci. I learned about ifs, loops, subroutines, how to string them together (and a few other odds and ends), and I consider myself free to string them together however I damn well please.
I love vim for:
- fast file creation and fairly complex repetitive changes within a single file.
- its guaranteed availability on any linux/unix/macosx box around.
I find vim a little tiresome for find and replace, or working on 8 files at once or whatever, once the project becomes a tree of 30, 50, ... files in multiple directories.
I would rather have someone with good ability to create a well-factored domain model and description of solution requirements, given a client with a vague idea of what they want.
I would rather have someone who can first come up with all the important design constraints and trade-offs in a domain and problem, then creatively suggest alternative solutions, then they can methodically explore and compare how well each solution meets the constraints, and can methodically explore the pro-con decision tree on the trade-offs, to perhaps come up with a least bad solution (from this perspective), then a least bad solution (from that other perspective/priority weighting).
And I would rather have someone with great debugging skills; a great designer of experiments, a methodical fact gatherer, who knows what they don't know, and also one who occasionally gets, after pondering or exploring, deep creative insights into the probable or possible cause of the bug; someone who can debug well on their own or in a dialectic conversation with another programmer.
They appreciate quality food that takes time to prepare.
So do I. I don't give a rat's tail what you can come up with in 2 hours. What are you wise enough to come up with in two years?
Suggested earlier.
Unfortunately the business method of fixing a power grid by rebooting has been patented.
But wait, if no one can access the patent database because the power is off, does a patent on computerized obviousness still make a sound?
I worry a lot more about the irresponsible rich, because they have the resources to do a lot more damage with their mindless attitude.
Not trying to offend anyone, but how well is that nuclear going for supllying baseload power in Japan, or Ukraine for that matter?
Firstly, I hope you are not equating wind and solar with small-scale. Very large wind and solar projects are possible with today's technology. See European offshore wind development. See various Sahara solar project plans.
Secondly, the potential for large, grid scale storage has not even begun to be tapped. e.g. Underwater airbags, molten salt storage, etc etc etc not to mention the flexibility of small-scale Lithium-chemistry batteries or sodium-chemistry batteries added to the local electricity distribution system.
Thirdly, low-loss high-voltage DC transmission, and probably in the near future long-distance superconducting transmission lines, have the potential to completely change the use cases for non-dispatchable intermittent renewable generation, allowing power to be switched around an entire continent from where the generation is high to where the load is high.
Fourthly, we have not started to take advantage of "negawatt" generators; large scale pooled demand response technology.
All these things together, with bi-directional power flow the norm, and energy hubs instead of conventional substations, will lead to a much higher potential use for distributed and intermittent renewable energy sources. The technology building blocks are either here already, or within a decade of production usability, so it would be best to start right now changing the plans and assumptions, and, with carbon taxes, the economic incentives, to accommodate these new green and more stochastically reliable power technologies.
Just retreat into your own little world making up new words to talk to your fellow reality refugees, words like warmists.
Your religion of greed and denial and suppressed guilt is so strong it has overthrown your reason, and you mumble nonsense in your fever.
So let me get this straight, you would avoid hiring the most qualified candidate on the basis of their gender?
Now that, my friend, is clearly illegal. Good luck with "handling" things.
Start with posters in the coffee room"
"At , respect means having an environment free of harassment or discrimination."
That set's the expectation.
Also, send around a policy statement that mentions that dismissal and possible legal action are the consequences of harassing behavior.
Doesn't your state have laws about this, that could be mentioned in the policy?
Of course, you have to mean it. If not, that's your issue, not your employees'.