🔗 Quick links thread
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Isn’t it beautiful? Instead of the Back button being located in literally the least convenient place on the screen, imagine it right under your thumb, nestled right beside our old friend the Home button.
Welcome to 2011!
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A “good cook” today is expected to be an expert at analyzing the vast panoply of globalized ingredients available on the market today. We are told that good cooking requires specific ingredients, has numerous rules, has to have a salt-rubbed cast-iron skillet, etc
A "good cook" is one that makes a reasonable food, reproducibly. But don't we all seek happiness
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/study-happy-save-money-time.html
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@boomzilla Sensationalized clickbait about a "problem" that only exists for neurotic perfectionists.
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@bb36e said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
What??!!!? You mean Mac isn't instinctively intuitive such that you don't need manuals anymore?
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@boomzilla said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-05/aficionado-culture-is-where-fun-goes-to-die
I couldn't find the word 'artisanal' once in that article...
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@bb36e said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Open source people clubbing together to create documentation?
What could possibly go wrong? Open source is renowned for its quality documentation and warm, opening attitude to less clued up people
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@boner said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Ugh, his english TTS voice is so nasally, and with barely any inflections. 7/10 would avoid it....
I've found that it's often much quicker to do the task at hand on the command line than to use an interface which was primarily designed with mouse users in mind.
Duh, you can't use a mouse, natch.
Also, ffs whitespace!
It's probably just fine on his screenreader, since it's not reading whitespace, but geeze WTF the offset of it is giving me a headache!
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A bunch of tweets from a guy with some interesting perspective on Houston and flood control:
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@boomzilla It starts off interesting, then becomes a chore to read all those tweets.
Just write a blog article, dammit!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziLNeFm1ok
Backstroke of the West is a bootlegged version of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith that contains hilariously poor Chinese-to-English translated subtitles. This bootleg is most well-known for the line "Do not want," a mistranslation of Darth Vader's widely parodied "Noooooo!" I synced the subtitles and the dub to HD video of Revenge of the Sith. I've also added the pre-garbled English subtitles if you wish to compare this masterpiece to the original dialogue from Episode III.
They've dubbed the dialogue based on the bad subtitles too.
The original dialogue is the one below, in case you weren't sure.
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Apparently, g
AI
dar is a thing:
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@boomzilla said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Apparently, g
AI
dar is a thing:It's not fair for a computer to be 91% more accurate than I am.
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@boomzilla I bet your list would include the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/09/14/software-is-a-long-con/
I had a conversation with a bridge engineer one evening not long ago. I said, “Bridges, they are nice, and vital, but they fall down a lot.”
“Ok, I do understand that,” I replied. “But they fall down a lot. Maybe if we stepped back and looked at how we’re building bridges –”
“You can’t build a bridge that doesn’t fall down. That’s just not how bridges work”
I took a deep breath. “What if you could build a bridge that didn’t fall down as often?”
“Not practical — it’s too hard, and besides, people want bridges.” By now, he was starting to look bored with the conversation.
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Just then, a friend of mine, also a writer, also interested in bridges, stopped by.“Hey guys!” he said. “So it looks like there’s a crew of Russian bridge destroyers with hammers and lighters who are running around in the middle of the night setting fires to bridges and knocking off braces with hammers. They started in Ukraine but they’re spreading around the world now, and we don’t know if our bridges are safe. They’ve studied bridges carefully and they seem to be good at finding where they’re most flammable and which braces to knock off with their hammer.”
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@bb36e nice quote from TFA:
Stop asking what the Russians could do to our voting machines, and start asking why our voting machines are so terrible, and often no one can legally review their code.
Stop asking who is behind viruses and ransomware, and ask why corporations and large organizations don’t patch their software.
Don’t ask who took the site down, ask why the site was ever up with a laundry list of known vulnerabilities.
Start asking lawmakers why you have to give up otherwise inalienable consumer rights the second you touch a Turing machine.
Don’t ask who stole troves of personal data or what they can do with it, ask why it was kept in the first place.
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Trigger warning:
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@dkf said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Trigger warning:
One time I was looking to improve performance of a hash table implementation (implemented in an interpreted language). I ended up porting pythong's dictionary.
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I don't watch this thread - has this been here? The whole site is amazing.
https://nonfree.news/2017/09/22/stallman-refuses-to-use-nonfree-microwave
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@blek The blurb in the footer is just such a beauty:
Made with coding and algorithms by these people.
Powered by jekyll, electron, three js frameworks, and a hamster wheel.
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@boomzilla said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
One time I was looking to improve performance of a hash table implementation (implemented in an interpreted language). I ended up porting pythong's dictionary.
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I know the feeling; I sometimes abandon six overly ambitious side projects before breakfast.
https://nonfree.news/2017/09/11/local-developer-abandons-yet-another-project
Filed Under: I wish that were a joke. Instead of, say, the central focus of my life right now.
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@bb36e said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Don’t ask who stole troves of personal data or what they can do with it, ask why it was kept in the first place.
Ooh... I came....
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@scholrlea said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
@boomzilla said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
One time I was looking to improve performance of a hash table implementation (implemented in an interpreted language). I ended up porting pythong's dictionary.
No, just an old typo turned inside joke that I choose to propagate:
https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/204269
And, wow! That post actually was about pythong dictionaries!
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@boomzilla said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
One time I was looking to improve performance of a hash table implementation (implemented in an interpreted language). I ended up porting pythong's dictionary.
There are a few really fast ones, but this is an area where there's a truly enormous amount of BS. In particular, the only tests that matter worth a damn are those that involve running against a realistic corpus of hash keys and measuring the actual performance in production. Python's hashing is pretty reasonable; not quite the best but not at all shabby.
I once did a lot of work studying hashing for simple hash tables. It turned out that there was a best algorithm, but it was so complicated that I went with something that consistently came within about 0.1% of it but used trivial code. I then wrote up what I discovered in comments in the code, and the ratio there is now somewhere in the region of 10 or 20:1; it's tiny code that happens to work extremely well, and yet which has several pages of comments beforehand to act as a “don't screw with this even if you're very smart; we really mean it!” marker.
So long as nobody ever uses the first character of the string or the length of the string as hash code (naming no names) it'll be OK.
That said, it's useful to occasionally switch around hashing algorithms in development though. Lets you check where you've got code that makes unsafe assumptions about hash table iteration order…
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@dkf said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
There are a few really fast ones, but this is an area where there's a truly enormous amount of BS. In particular, the only tests that matter worth a damn are those that involve running against a realistic corpus of hash keys and measuring the actual performance in production. Python's hashing is pretty reasonable; not quite the best but not at all shabby.
Yeah, I basically just decided, fuck it, these guys probably have a clue or whatever and the result was a lot faster than what I had and didn't require a ton of research and testing. And the code itself was relatively simple.
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@zecc said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Ooh... I came....
Dude. TMI.
No. TMI would be: ooh, system functions 61 and 9 repeatedly activated upon successful interpretation of this statement, resulting in activation of function 4 with parameter b code 006be.
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@tsaukpaetra said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
TMI would be: ooh, system functions 61 and 9 repeatedly activated upon successful interpretation of this statement, resulting in activation of function 4 with parameter b code 006be.
That's merely useless: we've not got your symbol table as you were shipped stripped.
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@dkf said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
TMI would be: ooh, system functions 61 and 9 repeatedly activated upon successful interpretation of this statement, resulting in activation of function 4 with parameter b code 006be.
That's merely useless: we've not got your symbol table as you were shipped stripped.
yeah, it would be hella useful if I had that. Or, source templates! But let's not be too hasty...
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This is just so deliciously typical of our industry:
mkdir ~/messages chmod 0442 ~/messages
echo "🍕?\n" >> /Users/zack/messages
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http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/11/allergan-pulls-a-fast-one
One of Allergan’s products is Restasis, used for dry eyes, which is an opthalmic formulation of cyclosporine. It’s a valuable part of their portfolio (net revenues of more than a billion dollars per year), but it’s under threat from a patent challenge. Mylan and Teva are both trying to force the drug off patent before its appointed time (which is about 2024). Last December, the US Patent Office granted an inter partes review of the relevant patents, a decision that did not go down well with Allergan or its investors. That form of patent review has been around since 2011 and the America Invents Act, and its purpose is specifically for prior art objections to a granted patent.
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Generic challenges to lucrative patented drugs are a regular feature of life in the business, but what happened next wasn’t (or not yet). Allergan announced that they had transferred the patent rights for Restasis to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Nation, for an up-front payment and continuing annual payments to the tribe. Why would one do such a thing? Well, it turns out that whatever patented IP owned by the tribe is protected from inter partes review challenges by their sovereign immunity. The Mohawks are, then, immediately moving to dismiss the PTO’s actions.
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When CNBC asked the tribe’s lawyer if they were open to doing more deals like this, he asked them to be sure to print his phone number.
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Interesting to me as I'm in that field too. The power reduction calculations involved are probably accurate, but I'm betting that they're massively oversimplifying things; the problem is that you can scale things up very easily with the simplest models of neurons, but the brain really isn't very convenient that way and it appears that we'll need more complex neuron implementations to really crack key parts like the neocortex. Our experience is that using actual CPUs, even if rather weird ones, has some real advantages over hard-coding the whole thing.
I do wish we had access to that yummy 14nm process technology though. We're having to make do with 22nm for our second generation chips, but we'll make up for it with scaling tricks elsewhere that already let us get a lot more simulated neurons overall…
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Usborne have released a bunch of 80s computing books as free pdf. At the bottom of this page:
https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-books/
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Epicycles, bitches!