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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • [...] a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80 percent correct to 100 percent.

    In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all.

    Yeah, it's well known, e.g. people say "the last 20% takes 80% of the effort". All the most tedious and difficult stuff gets postponed to the end, which is why so many side projects never get completed.

  • I watched that one last night and had the same thought - she's been the face of nonacceptance towards Data and although Bruce Maddox is far more extreme in his views it seemed like a waste of her character building.

    That said, they'd already shoehorned in a Guinan scene so I don't know where they'd find the time.

  • Picard gets pegged? I clearly missed the TNG After Dark episodes.

  • I love fungi facts.

  • Lisp variants like Clojure are being used for new projects (e.g. Logseq) but I'd be surprised to hear of anyone choosing COBOL for a greenfield project.

  • I wasn't saying that unit tests replaces readability, I was saying that back in the 60s they'd reason and debug using their brains (and maybe pen and paper), with more use of things like formal proofs for correctness. Now that we write more complicated programs in more powerful environments, it's rare to do this (we'd use breakpoints, unit tests, fuzzing, etc).

  • Well good news then, since they were joking (I guess) - it's a mod to improve Grim Fandango Remastered's graphics.

  • For such an influential letter, I don't find his arguement all that compelling. I agree that not using go to will often lead to better structured (and more maintainable) programs, but I don't find his metric of "indexable process progress" to satisfyingly explain why that is.

    Perhaps it's because at that time people would be running the programs in their heads before submitting them for processing, so they tended to use more of a computer scientist mindset - whereas now we're more likely to use test cases to convince ourselves that code is correct.

  • This was my face when I foolishly asked my maths teacher what pi was - he spoke for a long time, I understand nothing and I was late to my next class.

    I'm not a teacher, but I'm so ready for a kid (or anyone) to ask me this so I can do a better job. Ideally somewhere I can get hold of coins because who carries those any more?

  • In Foobar2000, Shpeck allows you to run those old Winamp vis plugins - I have Milkdrop 2.2 with all those old classics. They still look great on modern tech!

  • I've been building my music collection since I was ripping CDs by hitting play, recording in Win95 Sound Recorder and running the .wav through LAME (nowadays EAC to flac, of course). I see no need to pay a subscription to listen to my music, when I can just use that same money to buy and own the albums* and not worry about them disappearing.

    also means more money goes to the artist

    Also Navidrome + Symfonium means I can still stream to my phone so the only benefit Spotify etc has is new music, but YouTube (+ uBlock) gives me that.

  • Beans

    Jump
  • Also mixing crops (or non-farmable plants) has big benefits, but it's currently cheaper to use chemically-derived fertilisers and go the monoculture route.

  • Beans

    Jump
  • What's that quote - something like "science progresses one funeral at a time"? Even scientists have their favourite theories that they'll defend in the face of logic and evidence.

  • Is your point that this source doesn't back up the Mary Somerville etymology or just an FYI?

    Either way, the quote taught me about the word sciolist - a person who pretends to be knowledgeable and well informed so thanks.

  • I used to have some with e-ink displays that showed how full they were, but I always wished I could use them to show a label instead.

  • Do you also attack dictionaries for explaining offensive words? The person I'm talking to never used the term, they merely explained the meaning behind the number.

    What you are doing is shooting the messenger. Please target your outrage more carefully in future.

  • Yeah, it's probably shooting the messenger. Reminds me of once on Reddit where someone had asked a similar question and I'd replied with a sourced quote from the dictionary and got complaining replies and downvotes.

  • Thanks for explaining it, not sure why you've collected those downvotes.