There are words like "behoove" that are in trouble. You do hear it every once in a while. "Ruthless" is a word, but "ruth", which used to be a word, isn't. So, that kind of thing, that words catch on and other words die out—I was aware of that. But, your book just opened my eyes in an incredible way. Especially, since I have to confess, I'm a bit of a language snob.
So, too, can 'crypto' be dismembered.
The podcast wasn't my favourite episode. It was a bit too strawman for me, perhaps because I already know this material fairly well.
We just finished watching an older Coen film, A Serious Man. For a quantum physicist who can infallibly fill chalkboards with bra–ket notation without hardly blinking, he sure does gape like a clueless fish when he discovers his wife is capable of forming alternate plans.
Words are like wives. Just when you think you've got it all sorted out... change happens.
It isn't because the Vietnamese are not passionate. Rather, there is no word for "I" or "you" in colloquial Vietnamese.
People address each other according to their relative ages: "anh" for older brother, "chi" for older sister, "em" for younger sibling and so on. This is why Vietnamese quickly ask strangers how old they are so that they can use the appropriate pronoun and treat them with the correct amount of respect.
So a typical declaration of love might be: "Older brother loves younger sister."
From pronouns and proper nouns, quickly one identifies words associated with being a person, and immediately there's an enormous cluster of classifications and modifiers in any language especially dealing with human traits, not the least of which concerns hierarchy (mother, father, sister, brother) and age structure (baby, toddler, child, youth, adult, senior, geriatric).
Pretty soon you're into affect and habit, such as shivering while shovelling the driveway of the white snow, then contentedly taking a long, hot bath.
age is relevant because the concept and theory involved was already studied to exhaustion.
This is even more hilarious than that: Hinton has basically said that his methods from 1986 would have proved out on a practical basis if only the machines and data had been beefier at the time. Some of the recent improvements are nice, but he doesn't view them as essential.
Oracle: Flight has been beaten to death since da Vinci.
Wilbur: You'd be amazed how much wind tunnels have improved since the invention of the steam engine.
Oracle: Wind tunnels have been beaten to death since—uh—J. Random Bernoulli.
Wilbur: I can't keep them straight, either, but I'm pretty sure none of them knew how to scale models using the Reynolds number. In fact, I'm still struggling myself with the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations.
Oracle: You're so lame. Try writing it out in Einstein notation.
Wilbur: Einstein? Why do I suspect that hasn't been invented yet?
Oracle: Oh, right. I guess this isn't so beaten to death after all.
Wilbur: Well, are we going to sit around waiting for some annus mirabilis or are we going to do something?
Oracle: Einstein notation doesn't show up until long after the annus mirabilis.
Wilbur: The annus mirabilis?
Oracle: Absolutely no-one saw it coming.
Wilbur: I guess that rules me out, too. So, you still think flight is tapped out?
I'm sorry, but if you're hitting a paging wall at 16GB for 99% of what's needed as even a developer's machine, you're doing it wrong,
For a mighty small value of "it".
I reserve the first 16 GB just to make my ZFS file system fat and happy. Because I like my jails and sanity snapshots. And then there's the 2 GB per Eclipse instance, and I've been known to have four instances open on different desktops at the same time. And we're not counting my local Jenkins server yet...
or you should stop using Chrome and leaving 100+ web pages open
I try not to hit the century mark more than once per day.
But then my wife buys baby back ribs when I'm not expecting it, and I have to research a rub, a sauce, BBQ methods, hot pot methods, butchering methods (hot tip: paper towel helps to grip that nasty membrane one needs to remove), and then perform a grand synthesis. Plus if I'm feeling extravagant, more of the same for three or four other courses. All of which I clean up again after dinner, while my work sits happily in its organized, original tabs awaiting my return.
I suppose you have at most one tab open to phone out for KFC.
The advantage of the ternary operator is that you only need the LHS part once, which helps if it's a more complex variable.
Any complex expression one retypes for no reason is another potential bug. Especially in C++ where complex lvalue expressions abound.
Furthermore, every nested if statement is another mental simulation, rather than the far more potent algebraic reasoning. However, if you've only got one hammer (mental simulation), then I guess it's right and proper that everything dresses up like a nail.
This wasn't my favourite episode. (I could have done a better job explaining the difficulty of tuning code across SMP, multicore, NUMA, and a many-levelled cache hierarchy. The guest seemed to veer into buzzword bingo.)
But this episode does do a good job of driving home just how much performance one can leave on the table if not using C++, combined with high-performance C++ tooling.
The objective with the Intel compiler is to get 20% from the compiler alone (over clang and GCC), which combined with their performance optimization suite can often obtain a full order of magnitude.
Anything that allows us to reduce errors, increase functional complexity, reduce development time,...
C++ reduces development time when it achieves in one thread what another language requires complex concurrency to handle.
Sometimes not using C++ causes infrastructural scope creep.
When a small team of C++ programmers knocks it out of the park on a mission critical tight loop, that leaves many other machine resources free to run fat VMs with memory safety guarantees (and any manner of other sissy rails), and to run languages that excel in readability for the benefit of larger, less elite teams.
I'm sure it wouldn't add any infrastructure code at all if Google suddenly needed to add 20% more computer nodes to their typical data center because they had eliminated all their C++ out of some misguided obeisance to training wheel purity.
Some of them even desperately try to find even clunkier, hackier ways to support their habit, rather than rolling over for inferior shit.
FTFY.
I've learned that there are three major classes of extensions.
First, those that improve security and privacy. These break nothing, other that badly or obnoxiously coded websites (which in the majority of cases are easily replaced by a different website, less badly or obnoxiously coded).
Second, minor tweaks to the UX. These also break nothing, other than totalitarian design fantasies of desktop + tablet supreme codebase unification. My most important UX tweak is the addition of a right click menu that enhances cut and paste behaviours (Make Link) by auto-formatting URLs in a variety of online formats along with various page metadata elements. I use it 100 times a day.
Third, major and intrusive tweaks to the UX. Into this category falls most of the tab bar tweaks. These extensions did consistently break, or become deprecated, or change their behaviour to cope with shifting ground under their feet.
Based on what I've been reading over the years, "power users" are the real 'tards here.
Apparently you should curate your reading more carefully, because you've mainlined a biased sample. You've also fallen for the squeaky wheel fallacy, because this power user—who does know the difference between one type of extension and another—has never complained about technical developments to make Firefox more stable, and never abandoned FF in the first place.
I have complained about Mozilla's degenerating principles and priorities. Just on the communications front alone, they've treated their extension developers like shit. And why is that? Because Mozilla's decisions have been less and less technical, and more and more political.
I don't even know what values Mozilla truly holds anymore. I do know that it's not Chrome, and that Chrome is already too big for its britches, so I use Chrome as little as possible, because I value autonomy and self determination.
Self determination. You should try it some day. Sure beats posting as an AC fuckwad.
Because by default it breaks most of the internet and only the most dedicated of geeks are happy to battle with the frustration of managing whitelists to make basic browsing work.
NoScript doesn't even remotely dent my frustration meter. There's a simple reason for this. If I can't fix the site in two guesses, the site is probably shit, anyway. This isn't sour grapes, either. The correlation is strong, and positive.
Quite regularly, I click onto an unfamiliar web site, it doesn't display properly on first load, I right click the NoScript item at the bottom corner of my FF browser window (full screen, portrait mode, 23" monitor), and up comes a menu that occupies 60% of my vertical real estate. We're talking twenty to thirty foreign page elements.
Man, I can not flee those web sites fast enough.
The only time I ever get frustrated is with sites that put Amazon bucket numbers into page element URLs. For those I fire up Chromium (plug-in naked), which I only use for pages where NoScript on Firefox interferes with something I actually want to access. Then I shut Chromium down again. This happens roughly a few times per week.
Still doesn't dent my frustration meter.
And it's not like I'm generally a cool cucumber. I'm easily enraged/outraged by many things I encounter.
We all know what he's talking about. As human beings, we get used to everyday things really fast. As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things, to feel them, and try to improve upon them. For example, see this piece of fruit? See this little sticker? That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. But somewhere as the years passed, someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit. Why? So it could be easier for us to check out at the grocery counter.
Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. But now, there's a new problem. When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. Then rolling up that sticker -- you know what I mean. And then trying to flick it off your fingers. (Applause) It's not fun, not at all.
But something interesting happened. See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings. You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit. You felt upset. You just wanted to dive in. By the 10th time, you started to become less upset and you just started peeling the label off. By the 100th time, at least for me, I became numb to it. I simply picked up the piece of fruit, dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off, and then wondered, "Was there another sticker?"
I've never become numb to removing a fruit sticker. There was never anything to become numb about, in the first place.
Every night lately I've been reading my wife a chapter of Henry Marsh's excellent book Do No Harm. She confessed last night that she's getting a bit tired of cute 12-year-olds with brain cancer and lovely, long red hair bleeding to death on the OR table (this is rare, actually, but there's a chapter on it).
Ten to the fucking power of nine fruit stickers, in every second chapter.
Welcome to real life, all you Tony Fadell bird brains.
For plain-old-text, at a blog post parcel size, the economics of the internet very nearly fall into the bucket known as "too cheap to meter".
[ ] Pay for every website you access [ ] Have websites spy on you and collect as much information on you as they possibly can [ ] Tell the anonymous coward to fuck off, and point out the option missed
The point of the (well written) original article was that Damore had handled things poorly due to his condition, not that his opinions arose due to his condition.
Wow, today's first winner in the reading comprehension test.
I'll do you further honour by not even awarding you a gold star, which you would humbly decline in any case, recognizing that this "amazing" feat of yours was merely degree of difficulty 1.0 (had Slashdot not degenerated into some kind of Special Olympic group hug for the reading impaired).
On 22 April 2005, Harvard University's Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative held a debate on the public discussion that began on January 16th with the public comments by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science....
It's interesting to note that since the controversy surrounding Summers' remarks began, there has been an astonishing absence of discussion of the relevant science... you won't find it in the hundreds of articles in major newspapers; nor will find it in the Harvard faculty meetings where the president of the [smuggest] university in America was indicted for presenting controversial ideas.
This entire debate just seems fated to devolve into Plastafarianism.
Plastafarianism is a religious order that believes that human behaviour is so infinitely malleable, that no observed human behaviour whatsoever can't be adequately (and preferably) explained by environmental cues or conditioning.
Failure to share the perspective that such explanations are universally adequate, complete, satisfactory, and decisively preferable in all discourse dimensions will get your balls cut off.
Plastafarianism believes that whatever evolutionary biology brought to the male/female table has already undergone so many cultural face lifts, it's surpassed the 3.0 emjay* threshold of utterly obscured, obliterated, and eradicated (UOOE).
Earnest discussion of effects above and beyond the 3.0 emjay threshold is either a form of cultural psychosis or culpable gullibility (at which point, the though police arrive in their giant white hats, bearing shrink-wrap David Byrne white suits, and powerful white heat guns).
One of the old tenets of feminism is that once we kick all the old hidebound alpha males out of political office, the world will become a kinder and gentler place—because the women who will slot in to replace these males really are wired differently, biologically. Unfortunately, the XX chromosome test hasn't proved much better at screening out assholes than your mother's tired, old Y chromosome test.
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" [cognitive empathy] than men.
Huh, women might perform better than men in some corporate settings due to a possibly innate biological advantage (though Plastifarianism would deny that any such biological factor—even a relatively strong effect*—could withstand the lawfully established 3.0 emjay UOOE social pertinence filter).
What I find most interesting is that Damore's memo is full of things that your run-of-the-mill, narrative toting, brainwashed SJW should be able to identify with and support.
Project much?
That's just a guess on my part, drawing a hasty and perhaps incorrect inference from your bulging narrative tote bag.
What else have we got? * if you sprinkle some birdseed among the worms, the bird-brains should all be delighted * brainwashed: the new ordinary
Almost every time I see that term—SJW—it leaves behind a yellow stain.
They believe that by not allowing new nuclear plants they are safer, while the truth is that the older plants are just forced to run longer and keep getting band aid fixes.
Your two "they"s aren't even the same group. The first "they" are the Illiterate Hillbilly Collective. The second "they" are people either: A) already living too close to an operating reactor of an old design, or B) potentially living too close to a forthcoming reactor of modern design.
Second, "truth" is never singular. It might so appear from far away, but this illusion never survives a long march.
Third, it's amazing what horrible things people are "just forced" to do until something comes along that properly lines their pockets.
It's not like sites suitable for modern, safe nuclear power plants are a dime a dozen, either. The technology might be newer and better, but the available construction sites might be far inferior. Unless you build right beside the old piece of glowing junk.
Finally, if we did revive the nuclear industry to build 100 spiffy new reactors, who is to say they would stop there? Or that any old reactors would be shut down, even so?
Nothing about the nuclear industry ever screams "just".
Apparently a rationalist screed, yet somehow you managed to pack the daily triple of live wires in a single sentence, nevertheless.
The price of housing never went down... at least, not until people starting to go around endlessly repeating the maxim that the price of housing never goes down.
This issue is just a titch too important to relegate to cartoon physics with a broad wave of a feckless "what, me worry?" ostrich paintbrush.
Some people, perhaps even the vast majority, are frightened sheep who need a shepherd.
I've lately been reading Do No Harm by Henry Marsh.
An overriding theme of the book is how truly, madly, deeply the average person wishes to blindly trust, like, and admire the consulting neurosurgeon the moment a small, dark shadow makes an appearance on an ominous brain scan. He even goes so far as to suggest that neurosurgeons experience a similar emotional response when the same thing happens to them. (This being a population even more cowardly in the face of brain surgery than the general public.)
This tired old sheep/shepherd metaphor is immortal Nietzsche in a wool bathrobe, fumbling with yellow fingernails to loosen his uber-snug sheepskin belt.
So many times, after a triumph, he's knotted his bathrobe belt with a sharp, satisfied, uber-flourish. And every time—to his later regret—too damn tight.
I call it the irresponsible musings of a CRA bureaucrat who's probably being compensated to try to squeeze more money from somewhere.
God: I've got good news and bad news.
You: What's the bad news?
God: You're gonna have to do a long stint in purgatory.
You: What's the good news?
God: I'm giving you a choice of doors.
You: Great. What's behind door number one?
God: Formulate a fair and responsible tax code.
You: Why doesn't door number one have a door handle?
God: Because no matter what I offer up as door number two, I've not yet needed to furnish a handle for door number one.
You: Gosh, I never thought that omniscience would be run on a JIT footing.
God: That's because you've never tried to formulate a fair and responsible tax code.
You: So the thing is, you're just trying to Tom Sawyer this tax reformulation task onto some distracted rube who isn't paying full attention at the time of the initial penitent offer?
The one true benchmark is whether the new FF is faster at behaving in mostly the same way as my highly tweaked FF of yore, which was highly tweaked to make me faster at getting to where I wanted to go.
It's an interesting situation where the new FF is faster only for those users who didn't care enough about their own performance to carefully tweak their work process. So what we have here is performance as an ego good: when your browser is snappy, it makes your dick swell.
It doesn't, however, swell your CV of satisfying life accomplishments, though perhaps—if one views one's life history through the filter of a constantly swollen dick—it might lead you to perceive that your past life totally rocked.
Hence why the divorce papers came as such a shock.
The article points out that nuclear fusion generates four times the energy of nuclear fission.
This is the kind of scientific illiteracy that/. is supposed to take up arms against, rather than promulgate.
Apparently, the dominant unit of concern is obvious, suitable for all purposes, and so dang telepathic, it doesn't even need to be written down. Besides, writing it down would upset the linguistic circuit optimized to process monadic more-than.
There's this Hollywood trope about ripping a soldier's stripes right off his (usually his) uniform. If you violently rip someone's geed cred off their geek uniform on the Internet, does anyone hear it? Probably not. And it's a damn shame.
A friend of mine dragged me to an evangelical church service back when I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s. This was back when televangelism was relatively rare, but this church—in Toronto—had cameras, and consequently often featured A-list itinerant men of the cloth (they were almost all men). One name I now recall was Hal Lindsay.
Whoever it was, the argument went like this: the plot of the number of diseases known to medicine was shaped like a hockey stick, with the heal of the hockey stick representing God getting extra super pissed off (almost certainly the usual homosexual suspects, et. al.) and come to Jesus quickly now, while there's still time. So why are the diagnostic manuals now thick enough to erect a stairway to heaven? Is it because anal intercourse kicked evolution into overdrive? As if crusty peckers haven't been a breeding ground for hundreds of millions of years already? Or is it because we invented the gas chromatograph, the electron microscope, the CAT scan, the MRI, genetic sequencing, and principle component analysis?
No surprise, the climate debate has likewise experienced narrative thickening over the last two decades.
Total annual births were highest in the late 1980s at about 139 million, and are now expected to remain essentially constant at their 2011 level of 135 million, while deaths number 56 million per year and are expected to increase to 80 million per year by 2040.
Note that this is an absolute peak in the early 1980s. We're not even talking a mere relative peak. The earth is still reeling from this major shock to biomass distribution. Seven billion gangling apex predators all crowded together on slender seashores is a whole new ball of wax. Of course, one finds the evidence of this everywhere. Earth has had almost no time to adjust yet. And then we go around using pristine baselines, or prior composition, against which to measure decline.
Even if the earth isn't going to hell in a handbasket—either due to crusty peckers or crusty pecker aftermath—humanity's adolescent population spurt was really going to trash the joint for a couple of generations, any way you slice it. Seriously, if you extrapolate manhood from the age of 16 to 21, the only possible response is to televise REPENT NOW. Around age 21, men stop growing and start thinking (a slow process, with little to show for it in most cases until the late 20s).
Now we have 15,000 signatures that Animal House is an ecological eyesore. I really don't know what to make of this. It was plainly apparent back in the early 1970s that whatever came next was not going to be pretty, even if you regarded The Late, Great Planet Earth as being full of shit, and The Population Bomb as an alarmist wheeze.
Charles Rubin has written that it was precisely because Ehrlich was largely unoriginal and wrote in a clear emotionally gripping style that it became so popular. He quotes a review from Natural History noting that Ehrlich does not try to "convince intellectually by mind dulling statistics," but rather roars "like an Old Testament Prophet."
Gardner says, "as much as the events and culture of the era, Paul Ehrlich's style explain the enormous audience he attracted." Indeed, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson helped to propel the success of the book, as well as Ehrlich's celebrity.
Desrochers and Hoffbauer go on to conclude that it seems hard to deny that using an alarmist tone and emotional appeal were the main lessons that the present generation of environmentalists learned from Ehrlich's success.
The problems certainly demand attention, and more attention is probably better than less attention (we're still such a shallow, squirrel-obsessed species) and you can certain
I just realized that I've always called the random Slashdot message box an MOTD rather than a fortune, probably because I think psychic gypsies with fat rings are total bullshit.
No shit, this was my actual Slashdot MOTD, tucked just under this article entry on the main page:
There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"
We don't know much yet about our alien aetherlords, but we can now deduce there must be at least one renegade aetherchild who experiences malicious delight in gaslighting sentient fluctuations.
Larger key travel helps to not accidentally type a letter if you scuff an adjoining key. When that happens you can sort of fall off the edge of the scuffed key and manage to get the one you wanted on the side anyway. In the case of a wide-spaced chiclet, you are just hitting the laptop frame.
Also the chiclet tops are not the same as a full size key... full size keys are cupped, and the tactile feedback from the cup/corner shape helps you align better without looking.
It took me years to finally figure this out, in my own context.
On my desktop, long ago, I switched my mouse to my left hand, to bring it closer to my physical centerline (and reduce shoulder strain). My mouse is centered on its pad in the same relation to home position as the '4' key on my numeric keypad.
A very common work process is to text select with my mouse (80% of my text selects are double-click to word select—which requires less precise targetting—followed by word-extent drag) after which I need to change window focus (via the mouse), then paste, then type. Since I need to type, for the paste I almost always use CTRL-V instead of mouse-menu paste. (My right hand is loitering at home position, and I've been typing capital letters using both hands since the seventies, but I never employ the right CTRL keys because the right CTRL key is a full two keywidths further away from home position than the left CTRL key—so much further away that my right pinky can't press this key without first leaving home position, despite having a digit reach and Vulcan flexibility that Trump can only dream about.)
When I'm feeling hasty—I'm always feeling hasty—my mouse hand needs to abruptly move from mouse to keyboard to begin typing, starting with CTRL-V. Yet several times on any given day, I end up typing CTRL-B instead. This causes my web browser to open the bookmark screen, an annoying surprise which takes me entirely out of the flow of the moment.
I don't normally have this kind of mistake after moving mouse hand to keyboard for other purposes.
Finally, just a few weeks ago, I figured this out: the left CTRL key has a key top about twice the width of an alphabetic key. This is an old COMPAQ keyboard with properly scalloped key tops. The feedback loop in perfecting my hand motion when orienting initially to CTRL-V is therefore a little bit less precise than for typing a regular:alnum:
Coupled with a small variation in left hand spread, the very short interval between the CTRL and the V key presses (too small for the second phase of subconscious adjustment), and a small amount of chair movement (rotation is the worst), all these minor errors add up to a persistent typing error that annoys the heck out me.
I have many typing errors, but few others identified errors that persist. Most of the rest are purely statistical.
When I type on my wife's iMac, for the entire time, while the characters spill rapidly onto the screen, there's part of my brain going "it's a miracle" or "this can't last". My hands are in a constant state of "I'm lost down here" and "would someone please throw me a bone?" I've never gotten past the gut reaction of marvelling that those keyboards work at all.
My other keyboard is an old ThinkPad T500. I don't mind it at all for regular typing, but I'm never going to become fully automatic and subconscious with the special keys roughly crammed around the periphery. The right edge of the left control key is aligned with the left edge of 'Z', a full keywidth inset from my regular desktop. Unless I slow down to impulse power, my left pinky is constantly double mashing the surrounding Fn or squashy Windows key.
Mobile is like never sleeping in your own bed or being issued a regulation bedroll by the staff Sergeant rather than carefully selecting your own.
Some people like this. Others don't. Some people adapt willingly. Others don't.
C is perfectly fine for most of what it is used for, and there is a huge amount of legacy code (plus toolchains, IDEs, and much much more) that exist in the C domain.
C persists because its designers decided to invent a language to express how the world actually is, rather than how faddish humans would like that world to be (in particular, even LISP doesn't entirely pass this test, because—like it or lump it—real computers are state machines).
C is not perfectly fine, though it's perhaps the adequate and (mostly) comfortable marriage we've long had, warts and all.
ESR, I've slowly learned, is generally full of shit. Long ago I was fooled by his giant, noisy he's-one-of-us hat. But over time I came to perceive that he is primarily a noisy propagandist, who almost always wades into a debate to noisily send it down the river in the wrong initial direction.
Here he builds his entire case around the dangerous word "replacement", invoking the metaphorical reasoning processes associated with small, painstakingly divisible pies. What he is simultaneously hiding behind his back is the glove metaphor: that every language has a natural application domain where it excels for some people, at least some of the time (or it will soon wither and die).
What's he's trying to argue is that some other languages now exist that don't instantly disqualify themselves (due to stupid, faddish design decisions) from potentially becoming the next hegemonic ecosystem for all things systems programming-ish (C would remain the size of India for decades to come, even if China ultimately asserts itself as the new, "uncontested" superpower).
[*] Hegemonic thinking and the human predilection for fads are fused together at the hip bone.
He also means that within the next five to ten years, C might develop and increasingly strong legacy body odor (as if your grandfather's shaving cream didn't already have such a smell).
The legacy smell of C is that of a hearty pioneer, after many decades of a life well lived, who ain't dead yet, not by a long shot.
The Christmas mail order catalog people know what my age group wants (I'm 69). We want to give a child wooden blocks, Monopoly or Clue, a Lionel train. We want to give ourselves a bomber jacket, a fancy leather belt, a fine cotton shirt. We study the Restoration Hardware catalog. My own Whole Earth Catalog, back when, pushed no end of retro stuff in a back-to-basics agenda.
Well, I bought a sequence of wooden sailboats. Their gaff rigs couldn't sail to windward. Their leaky wood hulls and decks were a maintenance nightmare. I learned that the fiberglass hulls we'd all sneered at were superior in every way to wood.
Remodeling an old farmhouse two years ago and replacing its sash windows, I discovered the current state of window technology. A standard Andersen window, factory-made exactly to the dimensions you want, has superb insulation qualities; superb hinges, crank, and lock; a flick-in, flick-out screen; and it looks great. The same goes for the new kinds of doors, kitchen cabinetry, and even furniture feet that are available — all drastically improved.
Brand is a kinder, gentler, less rhetorically clueless ESR, and here he gives us a third metaphor: C as wood. Many an aspiring bullshitter has announced to the world this or that "wood replacement". For a long time, most of those wood "replacements" sucked. That was Brand's middle phase.
Now for many purposes (e.g. window frames, etc. etc. etc.) we have wood replacements that don't suck.
Roll the presses! Wood considered passe.
The thing is, humanity has never really needed a wood replacement. Wood is pretty good at many things. We've been using wood for a long time. I mean—crikey!—Jesus once listed carpentry on his brief CV. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to pursue other materials or not find other great ways to build stuff.
It does mean, however, that wood considered passe is typical ESR weak sauce.
Slashdot Mirror
John discusses his recent book, Words on the Move, in the following podcast: John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language — August 2017
So, too, can 'crypto' be dismembered.
The podcast wasn't my favourite episode. It was a bit too strawman for me, perhaps because I already know this material fairly well.
We just finished watching an older Coen film, A Serious Man. For a quantum physicist who can infallibly fill chalkboards with bra–ket notation without hardly blinking, he sure does gape like a clueless fish when he discovers his wife is capable of forming alternate plans.
Words are like wives. Just when you think you've got it all sorted out ... change happens.
Anyone who understands that there was a lot more to Bletchley Park than rotor combinatorics can't honestly say they find this result surprising.
Especially when the languages chosen have a shocked degree of family resemblence.
No word for "I" or "me" or "mine"
From pronouns and proper nouns, quickly one identifies words associated with being a person, and immediately there's an enormous cluster of classifications and modifiers in any language especially dealing with human traits, not the least of which concerns hierarchy (mother, father, sister, brother) and age structure (baby, toddler, child, youth, adult, senior, geriatric).
Pretty soon you're into affect and habit, such as shivering while shovelling the driveway of the white snow, then contentedly taking a long, hot bath.
Simple thermodynamics.
This is even more hilarious than that: Hinton has basically said that his methods from 1986 would have proved out on a practical basis if only the machines and data had been beefier at the time. Some of the recent improvements are nice, but he doesn't view them as essential.
Oracle: Flight has been beaten to death since da Vinci.
Wilbur: You'd be amazed how much wind tunnels have improved since the invention of the steam engine.
Oracle: Wind tunnels have been beaten to death since—uh—J. Random Bernoulli.
Wilbur: I can't keep them straight, either, but I'm pretty sure none of them knew how to scale models using the Reynolds number. In fact, I'm still struggling myself with the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations.
Oracle: You're so lame. Try writing it out in Einstein notation.
Wilbur: Einstein? Why do I suspect that hasn't been invented yet?
Oracle: Oh, right. I guess this isn't so beaten to death after all.
Wilbur: Well, are we going to sit around waiting for some annus mirabilis or are we going to do something?
Oracle: Einstein notation doesn't show up until long after the annus mirabilis.
Wilbur: The annus mirabilis?
Oracle: Absolutely no-one saw it coming.
Wilbur: I guess that rules me out, too. So, you still think flight is tapped out?
Oracle: Oh fuck it, you've convinced me. Let's build something.
Wilbur: As you know, I've always said that another effort just might fly.
Oracle: Nope. I'll pitch in, but I'm not telling.
Finally, you got me. Never seen Mylar punch tape. I can stop skimming the thread now.
For a mighty small value of "it".
I reserve the first 16 GB just to make my ZFS file system fat and happy. Because I like my jails and sanity snapshots. And then there's the 2 GB per Eclipse instance, and I've been known to have four instances open on different desktops at the same time. And we're not counting my local Jenkins server yet ...
I try not to hit the century mark more than once per day.
But then my wife buys baby back ribs when I'm not expecting it, and I have to research a rub, a sauce, BBQ methods, hot pot methods, butchering methods (hot tip: paper towel helps to grip that nasty membrane one needs to remove), and then perform a grand synthesis. Plus if I'm feeling extravagant, more of the same for three or four other courses. All of which I clean up again after dinner, while my work sits happily in its organized, original tabs awaiting my return.
I suppose you have at most one tab open to phone out for KFC.
Different strokes ...
Any complex expression one retypes for no reason is another potential bug. Especially in C++ where complex lvalue expressions abound.
Furthermore, every nested if statement is another mental simulation, rather than the far more potent algebraic reasoning. However, if you've only got one hammer (mental simulation), then I guess it's right and proper that everything dresses up like a nail.
Concerning my previous comment, just this weekend I listened to the following podcast:
Intel C++ Compiler with Udit Patidar and Anoop Prabha — 27 April 2017
This wasn't my favourite episode. (I could have done a better job explaining the difficulty of tuning code across SMP, multicore, NUMA, and a many-levelled cache hierarchy. The guest seemed to veer into buzzword bingo.)
But this episode does do a good job of driving home just how much performance one can leave on the table if not using C++, combined with high-performance C++ tooling.
The objective with the Intel compiler is to get 20% from the compiler alone (over clang and GCC), which combined with their performance optimization suite can often obtain a full order of magnitude.
But don't feel bad. ESR is equally clueless.
C++ reduces development time when it achieves in one thread what another language requires complex concurrency to handle.
Sometimes not using C++ causes infrastructural scope creep.
When a small team of C++ programmers knocks it out of the park on a mission critical tight loop, that leaves many other machine resources free to run fat VMs with memory safety guarantees (and any manner of other sissy rails), and to run languages that excel in readability for the benefit of larger, less elite teams.
I'm sure it wouldn't add any infrastructure code at all if Google suddenly needed to add 20% more computer nodes to their typical data center because they had eliminated all their C++ out of some misguided obeisance to training wheel purity.
FTFY.
I've learned that there are three major classes of extensions.
First, those that improve security and privacy. These break nothing, other that badly or obnoxiously coded websites (which in the majority of cases are easily replaced by a different website, less badly or obnoxiously coded).
Second, minor tweaks to the UX. These also break nothing, other than totalitarian design fantasies of desktop + tablet supreme codebase unification. My most important UX tweak is the addition of a right click menu that enhances cut and paste behaviours (Make Link) by auto-formatting URLs in a variety of online formats along with various page metadata elements. I use it 100 times a day.
Third, major and intrusive tweaks to the UX. Into this category falls most of the tab bar tweaks. These extensions did consistently break, or become deprecated, or change their behaviour to cope with shifting ground under their feet.
Apparently you should curate your reading more carefully, because you've mainlined a biased sample. You've also fallen for the squeaky wheel fallacy, because this power user—who does know the difference between one type of extension and another—has never complained about technical developments to make Firefox more stable, and never abandoned FF in the first place.
I have complained about Mozilla's degenerating principles and priorities. Just on the communications front alone, they've treated their extension developers like shit. And why is that? Because Mozilla's decisions have been less and less technical, and more and more political.
I don't even know what values Mozilla truly holds anymore. I do know that it's not Chrome, and that Chrome is already too big for its britches, so I use Chrome as little as possible, because I value autonomy and self determination.
Self determination. You should try it some day. Sure beats posting as an AC fuckwad.
NoScript doesn't even remotely dent my frustration meter. There's a simple reason for this. If I can't fix the site in two guesses, the site is probably shit, anyway. This isn't sour grapes, either. The correlation is strong, and positive.
Quite regularly, I click onto an unfamiliar web site, it doesn't display properly on first load, I right click the NoScript item at the bottom corner of my FF browser window (full screen, portrait mode, 23" monitor), and up comes a menu that occupies 60% of my vertical real estate. We're talking twenty to thirty foreign page elements.
Man, I can not flee those web sites fast enough.
The only time I ever get frustrated is with sites that put Amazon bucket numbers into page element URLs. For those I fire up Chromium (plug-in naked), which I only use for pages where NoScript on Firefox interferes with something I actually want to access. Then I shut Chromium down again. This happens roughly a few times per week.
Still doesn't dent my frustration meter.
And it's not like I'm generally a cool cucumber. I'm easily enraged/outraged by many things I encounter.
This TED talk had me hitting the fucking ceiling.
The first secret of design is ... noticing — March 2015
I've never become numb to removing a fruit sticker. There was never anything to become numb about, in the first place.
Every night lately I've been reading my wife a chapter of Henry Marsh's excellent book Do No Harm. She confessed last night that she's getting a bit tired of cute 12-year-olds with brain cancer and lovely, long red hair bleeding to death on the OR table (this is rare, actually, but there's a chapter on it).
Ten to the fucking power of nine fruit stickers, in every second chapter.
Welcome to real life, all you Tony Fadell bird brains.
For plain-old-text, at a blog post parcel size, the economics of the internet very nearly fall into the bucket known as "too cheap to meter".
[ ] Pay for every website you access
[ ] Have websites spy on you and collect as much information on you as they possibly can
[ ] Tell the anonymous coward to fuck off, and point out the option missed
So there. FTFY.
Wow, today's first winner in the reading comprehension test.
I'll do you further honour by not even awarding you a gold star, which you would humbly decline in any case, recognizing that this "amazing" feat of yours was merely degree of difficulty 1.0 (had Slashdot not degenerated into some kind of Special Olympic group hug for the reading impaired).
Pinker vs. Spelke — 2005
This entire debate just seems fated to devolve into Plastafarianism.
Plastafarianism is a religious order that believes that human behaviour is so infinitely malleable, that no observed human behaviour whatsoever can't be adequately (and preferably) explained by environmental cues or conditioning.
Failure to share the perspective that such explanations are universally adequate, complete, satisfactory, and decisively preferable in all discourse dimensions will get your balls cut off.
Plastafarianism believes that whatever evolutionary biology brought to the male/female table has already undergone so many cultural face lifts, it's surpassed the 3.0 emjay* threshold of utterly obscured, obliterated, and eradicated (UOOE).
[*] An exponential scale where 0.5 emjays is defined as precisely fifty M.J. years (The Evolution Of Michael Jackson's Face 1958 FROM 2009).
Earnest discussion of effects above and beyond the 3.0 emjay threshold is either a form of cultural psychosis or culpable gullibility (at which point, the though police arrive in their giant white hats, bearing shrink-wrap David Byrne white suits, and powerful white heat guns).
One of the old tenets of feminism is that once we kick all the old hidebound alpha males out of political office, the world will become a kinder and gentler place—because the women who will slot in to replace these males really are wired differently, biologically. Unfortunately, the XX chromosome test hasn't proved much better at screening out assholes than your mother's tired, old Y chromosome test.
Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others — 18 January 2015
Huh, women might perform better than men in some corporate settings due to a possibly innate biological advantage (though Plastifarianism would deny that any such biological factor—even a relatively strong effect*—could withstand the lawfully established 3.0 emjay UOOE social pertinence filter).
[*] Plastifarians are presently hard at work reha
Project much?
That's just a guess on my part, drawing a hasty and perhaps incorrect inference from your bulging narrative tote bag.
What else have we got?
* if you sprinkle some birdseed among the worms, the bird-brains should all be delighted
* brainwashed: the new ordinary
Almost every time I see that term—SJW—it leaves behind a yellow stain.
Your two "they"s aren't even the same group. The first "they" are the Illiterate Hillbilly Collective. The second "they" are people either: A) already living too close to an operating reactor of an old design, or B) potentially living too close to a forthcoming reactor of modern design.
Second, "truth" is never singular. It might so appear from far away, but this illusion never survives a long march.
Third, it's amazing what horrible things people are "just forced" to do until something comes along that properly lines their pockets.
It's not like sites suitable for modern, safe nuclear power plants are a dime a dozen, either. The technology might be newer and better, but the available construction sites might be far inferior. Unless you build right beside the old piece of glowing junk.
Finally, if we did revive the nuclear industry to build 100 spiffy new reactors, who is to say they would stop there? Or that any old reactors would be shut down, even so?
Nothing about the nuclear industry ever screams "just".
Apparently a rationalist screed, yet somehow you managed to pack the daily triple of live wires in a single sentence, nevertheless.
Colour me impressed and disgusted.
The price of housing never went down ... at least, not until people starting to go around endlessly repeating the maxim that the price of housing never goes down.
This issue is just a titch too important to relegate to cartoon physics with a broad wave of a feckless "what, me worry?" ostrich paintbrush.
I've lately been reading Do No Harm by Henry Marsh.
An overriding theme of the book is how truly, madly, deeply the average person wishes to blindly trust, like, and admire the consulting neurosurgeon the moment a small, dark shadow makes an appearance on an ominous brain scan. He even goes so far as to suggest that neurosurgeons experience a similar emotional response when the same thing happens to them. (This being a population even more cowardly in the face of brain surgery than the general public.)
This tired old sheep/shepherd metaphor is immortal Nietzsche in a wool bathrobe, fumbling with yellow fingernails to loosen his uber-snug sheepskin belt.
So many times, after a triumph, he's knotted his bathrobe belt with a sharp, satisfied, uber-flourish. And every time—to his later regret—too damn tight.
Slow learner.
God: I've got good news and bad news.
You: What's the bad news?
God: You're gonna have to do a long stint in purgatory.
You: What's the good news?
God: I'm giving you a choice of doors.
You: Great. What's behind door number one?
God: Formulate a fair and responsible tax code.
You: Why doesn't door number one have a door handle?
God: Because no matter what I offer up as door number two, I've not yet needed to furnish a handle for door number one.
You: Gosh, I never thought that omniscience would be run on a JIT footing.
God: That's because you've never tried to formulate a fair and responsible tax code.
You: So the thing is, you're just trying to Tom Sawyer this tax reformulation task onto some distracted rube who isn't paying full attention at the time of the initial penitent offer?
God: Ouch! I'm so busted.
The one true benchmark is whether the new FF is faster at behaving in mostly the same way as my highly tweaked FF of yore, which was highly tweaked to make me faster at getting to where I wanted to go.
It's an interesting situation where the new FF is faster only for those users who didn't care enough about their own performance to carefully tweak their work process. So what we have here is performance as an ego good: when your browser is snappy, it makes your dick swell.
It doesn't, however, swell your CV of satisfying life accomplishments, though perhaps—if one views one's life history through the filter of a constantly swollen dick—it might lead you to perceive that your past life totally rocked.
Hence why the divorce papers came as such a shock.
This is the kind of scientific illiteracy that /. is supposed to take up arms against, rather than promulgate.
Apparently, the dominant unit of concern is obvious, suitable for all purposes, and so dang telepathic, it doesn't even need to be written down. Besides, writing it down would upset the linguistic circuit optimized to process monadic more-than.
There's this Hollywood trope about ripping a soldier's stripes right off his (usually his) uniform. If you violently rip someone's geed cred off their geek uniform on the Internet, does anyone hear it? Probably not. And it's a damn shame.
By coincidence, I just watched this a couple of days ago:
Feynman: 'Greek' versus 'Babylonian' mathematics
This excerpt is possibly from the 1964 Messenger Lecture series at Cornell University, collectively titled The Character of Physical Law.
"The method of starting with the axioms is not efficient."
AKA "axioms are overrated".
A friend of mine dragged me to an evangelical church service back when I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s. This was back when televangelism was relatively rare, but this church—in Toronto—had cameras, and consequently often featured A-list itinerant men of the cloth (they were almost all men). One name I now recall was Hal Lindsay.
Whoever it was, the argument went like this: the plot of the number of diseases known to medicine was shaped like a hockey stick, with the heal of the hockey stick representing God getting extra super pissed off (almost certainly the usual homosexual suspects, et. al.) and come to Jesus quickly now, while there's still time. So why are the diagnostic manuals now thick enough to erect a stairway to heaven? Is it because anal intercourse kicked evolution into overdrive? As if crusty peckers haven't been a breeding ground for hundreds of millions of years already? Or is it because we invented the gas chromatograph, the electron microscope, the CAT scan, the MRI, genetic sequencing, and principle component analysis?
No surprise, the climate debate has likewise experienced narrative thickening over the last two decades.
Note that this is an absolute peak in the early 1980s. We're not even talking a mere relative peak. The earth is still reeling from this major shock to biomass distribution. Seven billion gangling apex predators all crowded together on slender seashores is a whole new ball of wax. Of course, one finds the evidence of this everywhere. Earth has had almost no time to adjust yet. And then we go around using pristine baselines, or prior composition, against which to measure decline.
Even if the earth isn't going to hell in a handbasket—either due to crusty peckers or crusty pecker aftermath—humanity's adolescent population spurt was really going to trash the joint for a couple of generations, any way you slice it. Seriously, if you extrapolate manhood from the age of 16 to 21, the only possible response is to televise REPENT NOW. Around age 21, men stop growing and start thinking (a slow process, with little to show for it in most cases until the late 20s).
Now we have 15,000 signatures that Animal House is an ecological eyesore. I really don't know what to make of this. It was plainly apparent back in the early 1970s that whatever came next was not going to be pretty, even if you regarded The Late, Great Planet Earth as being full of shit, and The Population Bomb as an alarmist wheeze.
The problems certainly demand attention, and more attention is probably better than less attention (we're still such a shallow, squirrel-obsessed species) and you can certain
I just realized that I've always called the random Slashdot message box an MOTD rather than a fortune, probably because I think psychic gypsies with fat rings are total bullshit.
No shit, this was my actual Slashdot MOTD, tucked just under this article entry on the main page:
We don't know much yet about our alien aetherlords, but we can now deduce there must be at least one renegade aetherchild who experiences malicious delight in gaslighting sentient fluctuations.
It took me years to finally figure this out, in my own context.
On my desktop, long ago, I switched my mouse to my left hand, to bring it closer to my physical centerline (and reduce shoulder strain). My mouse is centered on its pad in the same relation to home position as the '4' key on my numeric keypad.
A very common work process is to text select with my mouse (80% of my text selects are double-click to word select—which requires less precise targetting—followed by word-extent drag) after which I need to change window focus (via the mouse), then paste, then type. Since I need to type, for the paste I almost always use CTRL-V instead of mouse-menu paste. (My right hand is loitering at home position, and I've been typing capital letters using both hands since the seventies, but I never employ the right CTRL keys because the right CTRL key is a full two keywidths further away from home position than the left CTRL key—so much further away that my right pinky can't press this key without first leaving home position, despite having a digit reach and Vulcan flexibility that Trump can only dream about.)
When I'm feeling hasty—I'm always feeling hasty—my mouse hand needs to abruptly move from mouse to keyboard to begin typing, starting with CTRL-V. Yet several times on any given day, I end up typing CTRL-B instead. This causes my web browser to open the bookmark screen, an annoying surprise which takes me entirely out of the flow of the moment.
I don't normally have this kind of mistake after moving mouse hand to keyboard for other purposes.
Finally, just a few weeks ago, I figured this out: the left CTRL key has a key top about twice the width of an alphabetic key. This is an old COMPAQ keyboard with properly scalloped key tops. The feedback loop in perfecting my hand motion when orienting initially to CTRL-V is therefore a little bit less precise than for typing a regular :alnum:
Coupled with a small variation in left hand spread, the very short interval between the CTRL and the V key presses (too small for the second phase of subconscious adjustment), and a small amount of chair movement (rotation is the worst), all these minor errors add up to a persistent typing error that annoys the heck out me.
I have many typing errors, but few others identified errors that persist. Most of the rest are purely statistical.
When I type on my wife's iMac, for the entire time, while the characters spill rapidly onto the screen, there's part of my brain going "it's a miracle" or "this can't last". My hands are in a constant state of "I'm lost down here" and "would someone please throw me a bone?" I've never gotten past the gut reaction of marvelling that those keyboards work at all.
My other keyboard is an old ThinkPad T500. I don't mind it at all for regular typing, but I'm never going to become fully automatic and subconscious with the special keys roughly crammed around the periphery. The right edge of the left control key is aligned with the left edge of 'Z', a full keywidth inset from my regular desktop. Unless I slow down to impulse power, my left pinky is constantly double mashing the surrounding Fn or squashy Windows key.
Mobile is like never sleeping in your own bed or being issued a regulation bedroll by the staff Sergeant rather than carefully selecting your own.
Some people like this. Others don't. Some people adapt willingly. Others don't.
C persists because its designers decided to invent a language to express how the world actually is, rather than how faddish humans would like that world to be (in particular, even LISP doesn't entirely pass this test, because—like it or lump it—real computers are state machines).
C is not perfectly fine, though it's perhaps the adequate and (mostly) comfortable marriage we've long had, warts and all.
ESR, I've slowly learned, is generally full of shit. Long ago I was fooled by his giant, noisy he's-one-of-us hat. But over time I came to perceive that he is primarily a noisy propagandist, who almost always wades into a debate to noisily send it down the river in the wrong initial direction.
Here he builds his entire case around the dangerous word "replacement", invoking the metaphorical reasoning processes associated with small, painstakingly divisible pies. What he is simultaneously hiding behind his back is the glove metaphor: that every language has a natural application domain where it excels for some people, at least some of the time (or it will soon wither and die).
What's he's trying to argue is that some other languages now exist that don't instantly disqualify themselves (due to stupid, faddish design decisions) from potentially becoming the next hegemonic ecosystem for all things systems programming-ish (C would remain the size of India for decades to come, even if China ultimately asserts itself as the new, "uncontested" superpower).
[*] Hegemonic thinking and the human predilection for fads are fused together at the hip bone.
He also means that within the next five to ten years, C might develop and increasingly strong legacy body odor (as if your grandfather's shaving cream didn't already have such a smell).
The legacy smell of C is that of a hearty pioneer, after many decades of a life well lived, who ain't dead yet, not by a long shot.
Stewart Brand: Good Old Stuff Sucks (2008)
Brand is a kinder, gentler, less rhetorically clueless ESR, and here he gives us a third metaphor: C as wood. Many an aspiring bullshitter has announced to the world this or that "wood replacement". For a long time, most of those wood "replacements" sucked. That was Brand's middle phase.
Now for many purposes (e.g. window frames, etc. etc. etc.) we have wood replacements that don't suck.
Roll the presses! Wood considered passe.
The thing is, humanity has never really needed a wood replacement. Wood is pretty good at many things. We've been using wood for a long time. I mean—crikey!—Jesus once listed carpentry on his brief CV. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to pursue other materials or not find other great ways to build stuff.
It does mean, however, that wood considered passe is typical ESR weak sauce.