But seriously, it's perfectly sensible when remember that i is just the mathematical representation of "left turn", just like -1 is the mathematical representation of "go backwards"-- and as we know, two left turns sends you backwards. So think about this triangle in the following way:
Imagine you are a snail, starting at the origin. Now imagine that you walk forward 1 step along the horizontal line. Then you turn 90° to the left to start walking along the vertical line, but then, because you need to walk i steps along this line you take another 90° turn to the left, which means that you are now walking backwards and you end up back at the origin. How far away from the origin are you? Zero steps.
I for one like to keep things simple and just express everything directly in units of the number of periods of the radiation emitted by the ground state hyperfine levels of Cesium-133.
Okay, fair enough, you got me: I wrote his name on a piece of paper and was standing on it when I wrote that comment in order to absorb his authority. You win this Internet argument.
On the contrary, quoting is exactly the act of borrowing another's idea, but doing the courtesy of giving credit to the person from whom you borrowed it.
You want to turn my 300 lines of clear, readable and concise logic into 1,000 lines of English paragraphs that break up the functions of my code into yet smaller pieces of code devoid of context?
If a function has 300 lines without a lot of supporting documentation then I doubt that it is "clear, readable and concise" anyway.
Now I have to dig through that book, ignoring all the shit I’ve read hundreds of times because it doesn’t compile into anything, just to debug an off-by-1 error in a loop buried in a paragraph explaining the original developers diatribe on why we’re looping over that range?
I have never found it hard at all to skip past comments that are not relevant because my code editor helpfully colors them differently from the rest of the code, making it easy. Does your editor not do the same?
(Also, by now you should be especially good at skipping past it, given that you have apparently "read [it] hundreds of times" instead of skipping past it, for some reason.)
This is the sort of academic crap that sounds good but in practice is just terrible for anything other than small projects that are intended specifically to teach.
It depends on what you are doing. If you are implementing relatively simple logic like a REST API handler, then it is probably overkill. If you are implementing a relatively advanced algorithm, then having a running narrative of what is going can be extremely helpful.
Ugh, I really hate it when people make comics like this that make it seem like solving our problems would be so simple. In the real world, where things are a lot messier, you need the blade to be at least several times higher for it to work properly!
To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:
"Our intel tells us that... one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it's social suicide."
This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!
It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:
After blocking the street outside Palantir's unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting "quit your jobs!"
This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:
Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.
I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, "There are crazy people outside!" and less along the lines of, "I should really feel guilty about my life decisions."
Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?
Evidence suggests that “consciousness” is the mechanism that allows separate parts of the brain to communicate with other parts of the brain and coordinate activities. The hypothesis is this is done by the frontal cortex which is responsible for reasoning, decision making, and controlling voluntary movements. However, there is still much research required in Neurosciences before we have a solid theory and understanding of consciousness.
So in other words... it exists.
It is worth nothing that the first sentence is exactly my perspective, as I explicitly stated earlier:
I think that consciousness in the brain is just an approach that it uses to aggregate and share information amongst several subcomponents.
Sure! What exactly do you think consciousness is (or is not)? You seem to think that I was motivated to enter this conversation in order to feel smart, but asked my original question because I was genuinely interested in your point of view.
Imagining your death. :P
But seriously, it's perfectly sensible when remember that i is just the mathematical representation of "left turn", just like -1 is the mathematical representation of "go backwards"-- and as we know, two left turns sends you backwards. So think about this triangle in the following way:
Imagine you are a snail, starting at the origin. Now imagine that you walk forward 1 step along the horizontal line. Then you turn 90° to the left to start walking along the vertical line, but then, because you need to walk i steps along this line you take another 90° turn to the left, which means that you are now walking backwards and you end up back at the origin. How far away from the origin are you? Zero steps.