TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML)
-
@hungrier said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
they thought that the 3D modeled unicycles from the game were too similar to their 3D modeled unicycle.
How many ways are there to model a unicycle? If you want to model one that is fairly realistic, it's going to look a lot like, and obey pretty much the same physics rules, as any other fairly realistic unicycle.
-
@HardwareGeek The makers of Uniracers tried to make a similar argument, but the judge didn't go for it.
The wiki page said:
DMA Design developer Robbie Graham recalled, "They took footage from Red's Dream and compared it to Unirally and the unicycles were virtually the same; this isn't a big surprise as there’s not a lot of ways you can bring life to a unicycle without looking like the one Pixar did. The judge - being the moron that he was - agreed."
-
@MrL said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@JBert said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
So ridiculous you can't make it up:
It was a new type of war in so many ways.
I don't think throwing shit at officers was a new invention.
-
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@MrL said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@JBert said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
So ridiculous you can't make it up:
It was a new type of war in so many ways.
I don't think throwing shit at officers was a new invention.
Oh, it goes way back.
-
-
The researchers used detailed satellite imagery from NASA, and deep learning—an advanced artificial intelligence method. Normal satellite imagery is unable to identify individual trees, they remain literally invisible. Moreover, a limited interest in counting trees outside of forested areas led to the prevailing view that this particular region had almost no trees. This is the first time that anyone counted trees across a large dryland region.
Has anyone field-checked that the trees identified by the AI actually exist?
-
@HardwareGeek said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
The researchers used detailed satellite imagery from NASA, and deep learning—an advanced artificial intelligence method. Normal satellite imagery is unable to identify individual trees, they remain literally invisible. Moreover, a limited interest in counting trees outside of forested areas led to the prevailing view that this particular region had almost no trees. This is the first time that anyone counted trees across a large dryland region.
Has anyone field-checked that the trees identified by the AI actually exist?
That sounds like work...
-
@HardwareGeek said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
The researchers used detailed satellite imagery from NASA, and deep learning—an advanced artificial intelligence method. Normal satellite imagery is unable to identify individual trees, they remain literally invisible. Moreover, a limited interest in counting trees outside of forested areas led to the prevailing view that this particular region had almost no trees. This is the first time that anyone counted trees across a large dryland region.
Has anyone field-checked that the trees identified by the AI actually exist?
-
-
@HardwareGeek said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Has anyone field-checked that the trees identified by the AI actually exist?
“Desert” doesn't mean “no large plants”. Also, that's a count over a rather large area.
-
@dkf said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
“Desert” doesn't mean “no large plants”
Cooking thread is...
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
But how many stones are there in Wales?
And how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? Can this thing tell us the answer once and for all?
-
@Zerosquare 42
-
So THAT was the ultimate question?!
I'm a bit disappointed.
-
@Zerosquare said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Applied-Mediocrity said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
But how many stones are there in Wales?
And how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? Can this thing tell us the answer once and for all?
Googled that question and found this article:
Note how horribly precise the author was in their Fermi estimates. None of the numbers were rounded to a power of 10, they use them as is. And they even corrected the final result by 15% to account for travel time! It's such a simple idea, and they completely missed the point. In an article that was specifically written to teach others!
-
TIL about this background gag that spans multiple seasons of Community:
-
You know that meme with two men angrily yelling at each other across a room? TIL the older guy is not Hulk Hogan. Sure looks like him though!
-
@Mason_Wheeler I'm having a "how the hell you don't know this show, everybody knows this show" moment.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
You know that meme with two men angrily yelling at each other across a room? TIL the older guy is not Hulk Hogan. Sure looks like him though!
Aren't they from some motorcycle building show on discovery?
-
@Gąska Literally never heard of it until I read about the origins of the meme.
-
@Mason_Wheeler it was running on Discovery Channel at about the same time as Mythbusters, and from what I can tell, it was about as popular as Mythbusters. But then, the other day I learned there are programmers who don't know what FPGA is...
-
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
the other day I learned there are programmers who don't know what FPGA is...
I wouldn't expect them to, really. Unless they work with some kind of custom hardware, in most cases they'll never have to deal with one in their career.
(and I like it better that way. FPGAs are one of the things that have not yet been infected with the Node.JS mindset.)
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
You know that meme with two men angrily yelling at each other across a room? TIL the older guy is not Hulk Hogan. Sure looks like him though!
Hulk Hogan looks like my FIL. People will stop him and say so.
-
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
FPGA
Without googling, I have no idea. Googling didn't change that much because .
-
@Karla said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
You know that meme with two men angrily yelling at each other across a room? TIL the older guy is not Hulk Hogan. Sure looks like him though!
Hulk Hogan looks like my FIL. People will stop him and say so.
A few years back I was at a restaurant, and the guy at the table next to me really looked familiar. Finally I look over at the guy and say, "anyone ever tell you you look just like Chris Hemsworth?"
He starts laughing, and the woman with him is all "yeah, he gets that all the time."
-
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
I learned there are programmers who don't know what FPGA is...
Those who doesn't get into the more hardware side of things usually don't need to know...
-
@Karla said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
You know that meme with two men angrily yelling at each other across a room? TIL the older guy is not Hulk Hogan. Sure looks like him though!
Hulk Hogan looks like my FIL. People will stop him and say so.
They have some balls to stop Hulk Hogan on his way.
-
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler it was running on Discovery Channel at about the same time as Mythbusters, and from what I can tell, it was about as popular as Mythbusters. But then, the other day I learned there are programmers who don't know what FPGA is...
I've met a lot of programmers that don't even know what a recursive function is.
-
@Carnage said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler it was running on Discovery Channel at about the same time as Mythbusters, and from what I can tell, it was about as popular as Mythbusters. But then, the other day I learned there are programmers who don't know what FPGA is...
I've met a lot of programmers that don't even know what a recursive function is.
That's not a programmer, that's a programmer .
-
@topspin said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Carnage said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler it was running on Discovery Channel at about the same time as Mythbusters, and from what I can tell, it was about as popular as Mythbusters. But then, the other day I learned there are programmers who don't know what FPGA is...
I've met a lot of programmers that don't even know what a recursive function is.
That's not a programmer, that's a programmer .
While I agree, hiring managers doesn't seem to.
-
A big part of the problem is that a lot of people suck at explaining recursion. Everyone talks about recursion as "a function that calls itself," and when someone who doesn't understand it gets an explanation like that, they get all confuzzled because that alone doesn't make any sense and sounds like a bunch of weird black magic.
Once you explain the concept of a base case, that recursion is all about defining a base case and calling yourself to iteratively work towards the base case, then the light goes on. But most explanations of recursion over-emphasize the "calling yourself" part at the expense of the concept of the base case, which is why it's so hard for so many people to grasp.
-
@Mason_Wheeler yeah, whatever. "Recursion/pointers/math is hard, let's go shopping." People also get confused about why programming is so weird in the first place and the computer can't just "do what I mean," while they don't know what they mean themselves.
We're talking about "programmers", not high-schoolers. There's no excuse for not understanding simple basic concepts.Filed under: if (going_to_crash()) dont();
-
@Mason_Wheeler I call it the
divida et impera
approach
-
@Rhywden said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler I call it the
divida et impera
approach"Divide and conquer" is actually an approach that only some recursive functions use. Your usual recursive sort functions like quicksort employ a divide and conquer strategy to get their n log n complexity, but something like a recursive factorial has nothing to do with it, or at best is a pathological version of it.
-
@topspin I think my only recursive function is used to order a set of objects based on inter-dependencies or, failing that, return a list of objects which form a circular dependency.
Also one of the few times I really facepalmed and thought "I should have thought of that myself" after I found a solution online.
-
@topspin said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Rhywden said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler I call it the
divida et impera
approach"Divide and conquer" is actually an approach that only some recursive functions use. Your usual recursive sort functions like quicksort emply a divide and conquer strategy to get their n log n complexity, but something like a recursive factorial has nothing to do with it, or at best is a pathological version of it.
Yes, and (in practice, not as an example,) recursive factorial is a pathological version of recursion. Recursion is a very bad way to solve purely iterative linear problems. It works very well on divide-and-conquer things like Quicksort or tree algorithms, but on linear problems you're better off using a loop. (That's the other thing that makes recursion confusing: ideologues who insist on using it everywhere simply because they can. Because then you need to further complicate matters by introducing the concept of tail recursion, a mathematically pointless concept that throws a big mass of complexity into it for no particularly good reason, other than as a hack to provide a compiler with a way to refactor pathological recursion into proper loops.)
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
on linear problems you're better off using a loop
There's an equivalence between loops and some types of recursion (usually the tail recursive functions). Loops tend to be preferred by people used to operational semantics, whereas recursion tends to be favoured by those who would rather use denotational semantics.
-
@dkf Yeah, that's exactly what I said: in order to take advantage of that equivalence with recursion, you need to introduce a bunch of additional complexity to turn an intuitively recursive function into a tail-recursive function. This is generally 1) not written the same way as an intuitively recursive function, and 2) demonstrably more complex in its code than either the intuitively recursive version (which can't be used for non-trivial cases or you'll end up breaking the stack) or the loop version.
Which is why you're better off just writing linear algorithms as loops rather than with recursion.
-
@Mason_Wheeler You just wait until you come across the reverse transformation, changing an intuitively recursive function into an iterative one…
-
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Karla said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
You know that meme with two men angrily yelling at each other across a room? TIL the older guy is not Hulk Hogan. Sure looks like him though!
Hulk Hogan looks like my FIL. People will stop him and say so.
They have some balls to stop Hulk Hogan on his way.
He's chilled out with age.
-
TIL about mstsc.exe (aka "Remote Desktop Connection")'s "Smart sizing" option and I'm smacking my one head for not having noticed it already.
In my defense, why is this tucked away in the window menu and not made visible in the connection options?
-
@Zecc IIRC it wasn't even in a menu before Windows 8, and required being set in an .RDP file.
-
@topspin said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler yeah, whatever. "Recursion/pointers/math is hard, let's go shopping." People also get confused about why programming is so weird in the first place and the computer can't just "do what I mean," while they don't know what they mean themselves.
There is a functor called ‘primitive recursion’ in the partially recursive functions formalism and it does not involve anything calling itself, but rather is just a loop. But even though that was part of theoretical informatics program, nobody ever really explained the relationship between that and the usual definition of function calling itself. I also didn't have lambda calculus lecture (and I don't think there was one) with it's fixed point combinators that are yet another way to look at recursion.
-
@Bulb said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@topspin said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler yeah, whatever. "Recursion/pointers/math is hard, let's go shopping." People also get confused about why programming is so weird in the first place and the computer can't just "do what I mean," while they don't know what they mean themselves.
There is a functor called ‘primitive recursion’ in the partially recursive functions formalism and it does not involve anything calling itself, but rather is just a loop. But even though that was part of theoretical informatics program, nobody ever really explained the relationship between that and the usual definition of function calling itself. I also didn't have lambda calculus lecture (and I don't think there was one) with it's fixed point combinators that are yet another way to look at recursion.
As defined by Wikipedia here it does use primitive recursion just as one would expect, i.e. from the current argument down to 0: h(y+1, x_i) = g(y, h(y, x_i), x_i)
With a base case defined as usual: h(0, x_i) = f(x_i)Due to the equivalences mentioned above, you can of course define it with a loop instead.
-
@topspin Basically, with primitive recursion there's a metric of some sort that you can apply to measure how much work there is left to do, and with each recursive call the amount of work remaining (below the current point) gets strictly less. Given that, it's pretty trivial to show termination. Primitive recursion is provably not turing-complete; it can only express (a subset of) terminating algorithms.
There's also general recursion, which doesn't require such a metric and which has full computational power including all the non-termination you might shake a stick at.
-
@topspin said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Bulb said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@topspin said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Mason_Wheeler yeah, whatever. "Recursion/pointers/math is hard, let's go shopping." People also get confused about why programming is so weird in the first place and the computer can't just "do what I mean," while they don't know what they mean themselves.
There is a functor called ‘primitive recursion’ in the partially recursive functions formalism and it does not involve anything calling itself, but rather is just a loop. But even though that was part of theoretical informatics program, nobody ever really explained the relationship between that and the usual definition of function calling itself. I also didn't have lambda calculus lecture (and I don't think there was one) with it's fixed point combinators that are yet another way to look at recursion.
As defined by Wikipedia here it does use primitive recursion just as one would expect, i.e. from the current argument down to 0: h(y+1, x_i) = g(y, h(y, x_i), x_i)
With a base case defined as usual: h(0, x_i) = f(x_i)Due to the equivalences mentioned above, you can of course define it with a loop instead.
This definition is recursive, but you don't get to put anything in front of that call. It simply uses the result of previous step in the next, so it is quite trivially a loop and we were basically always talking about it as a loop.
@dkf said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
There's also general recursion, which doesn't require such a metric and which has full computational power including all the non-termination you might shake a stick at.
Which, strangely enough, isn't called that, but instead simply “minimization”. And you don't get to place the recursive call yourself either, so it is trivially equivalent to a loop as well, just instead of count it has a stopping condition, so it may be an endless one.
-
@Bulb said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Which, strangely enough, isn't called that, but instead simply “minimization”. And you don't get to place the recursive call yourself either, so it is trivially equivalent to a loop as well, just instead of count it has a stopping condition, so it may be an endless one.
Basically, some algorithms are more simply expressed in recursive form and others are clearer written iteratively.
-
@dkf said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@Bulb said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Which, strangely enough, isn't called that, but instead simply “minimization”. And you don't get to place the recursive call yourself either, so it is trivially equivalent to a loop as well, just instead of count it has a stopping condition, so it may be an endless one.
Basically, some algorithms are more simply expressed in recursive form and others are clearer written iteratively.
It's almost like there's a formal equivalence between models of computation.
-
@Watson said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
It's almost like there's a formal equivalence between models of computation.
Well yes, but that doesn't tell you which way of expressing things is the clearest in a particular case. (Formal equivalences tend to be useless for that, as they often rely on quite large construction methods to establish the equivalence.)
-
TIL about the Nintendo Switch's button remap functionality. TLDR: it lets you remap buttons to other buttons. It's a pretty cool feature but it could be improved in a couple ways:
- Make it settable and auto-loading per game. In my case, I want to use the (unused) Y button for select in the NES app, because having to move my thumb from the directional buttons, over the left analog stick, to the - button, is not a good time. But I only want that in the NES app, not everywhere. I can manually dig into the settings whenever I launch the NES and set it from there, but that also is not my idea of a good time.
- Add a quick change option somewhere. It already lets you reset it to normal quickly enough: it pops up a message saying "Hey buddy, your shit's remapped. Want to reset it?" when you turn it back on from sleep mode, but to activate a remapping profile you have to go into the settings, scroll to the bottom, navigate a couple submenus, and sacrifice a live chicken. Why not have it as an option in the quick-settings menu, or let you do it from the Switch icon in the corner of the home screen that indicates if it's normal or reset?