Random thought of the day
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@hungrier said in Random thought of the day:
I think in Canadia the rule about this is stricter, which is why the Tim Hortons biscuits are called "home-style"
Not true. They're called home-style because they resemble brick and/or wood in taste.
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@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Imagine if Disneyland adds animatronic versions of Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom to the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction (assuming that they haven't done so already, I dunno).
Not Orlando Bloom, but there is a Johnny Depp animatronic right at the end.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Random thought of the day:
How am I going to catch a mouse that no longer comes out of the walls?
Put a cat in the walls!
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@tsaukpaetra said in Random thought of the day:
How am I going to catch a mouse that no longer comes out of the walls?
Put a cat in the walls!
It already ate the Cat5 that was in there, what am I supposed to do then ????
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Their organic scrambled egg is in fact made of pasteurised liquid egg that has been made off site. Legally, that’s ok - when a menu says fresh, all it really means is that it's not preserved or frozen.
Wait a minute... isn't pasteurization a method of preservation?
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Now for an entirely different random thought:
There was a Premier League game on the TV in the lunch room at work while I was eating. I don't really care in the least about soccer/football, especially between two teams in a country a third of the way around the world, neither of which I know anything about. However, it's motion, and it caught my eye from time to time. Looking at the names on the jerseys prompted me to wonder, are any English footballers actually English?
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In Rust, code blocks are expressions. So you can use code blocks in place of expressions. For example, as subexpressions of a complex arithmetic expressions. In other words, you can replace all your parentheses with curly braces and it won't change the semantics.
I hope I'll never see code that makes use of it.
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@gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I hope I'll never see code that makes use of it.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
But indefinitely postponed.
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@hardwaregeek said in Random thought of the day:
are any English footballers actually English?
European major leagues recruit players all around the world. Which includes a lot of South American and African, plus a sprinkling of Europeans, but given that they all move between big clubs easily (England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France mostly, I'd say), the number of players of a given nation playing in the top clubs of that nation is rarely more than 2-3. There is, I think, no significant limit on the number of foreign players in any one club (for European players, I remember a controversy that involved the EU and the principle of free circulation of persons, which lead to the removal of such a rule -- maybe there is still one for non-EU players, I don't know).
Smaller clubs (or smaller leagues) have less money to buy big names, and rely more on their own junior teams to provide them with good players, so they tend to have more local ones. Some clubs are even renowned not so much for their top team, but for their ability to train good new players and sell them to other clubs. But those are likely not the ones you'll see on TV on the other side of the world.
Also, professional football players (like most professional sports) statistically tend to be from relatively poor backgrounds, which usually correlates with immigrants (more or less depending on countries, of course), so even a player of a given nationality may have a name that sounds foreign. For example Zinedine Zidane, a well known top French ex-player, has a clearly Algerian-sounding name but was born in a French suburb and is French.
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@zecc said in Random thought of the day:
@gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I hope I'll never see code that makes use of it.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
But indefinitely postponed.
In my IRC bot there's no such thing as a code block, so this is by necessity a thing. Shit gets real when you have dynamic expressions building expressions from strings that need to be escaped...
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@remi said in Random thought of the day:
@hardwaregeek said in Random thought of the day:
are any English footballers actually English?
European major leagues recruit players all around the world. Which includes a lot of South American and African, plus a sprinkling of Europeans, but given that they all move between big clubs easily (England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France mostly, I'd say), the number of players of a given nation playing in the top clubs of that nation is rarely more than 2-3. There is, I think, no significant limit on the number of foreign players in any one club (for European players, I remember a controversy that involved the EU and the principle of free circulation of persons, which lead to the removal of such a rule -- maybe there is still one for non-EU players, I don't know).
Now I wonder if Theseus ever started a football club.
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@zecc said in Random thought of the day:
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
But indefinitely postponed.
If you postpone it for too long, you might get rusty...
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This more of a thought of last Monday, really, as that was when I posted it to a thread I created on the OSdev.org fora, but it occurs to me that I could drag it over here too:
It occurs to me that some of the confusion around Lisp compilers and interpreters vis a vis other types of compilers could be cleared up a bit by explaining that a tagged datum is, in effect, equivalent to a lexical token.
Now, since all of the syntactic elements of a homoiconic language are either tagged data literals, symbols internally represented as tagged data, or delimiters defining a literal for a tagged data form (such as the parentheses around a list in Lisp, or the double quotes around a string literal, or the various ways of representing individual characters), this means that the (read) primitive most Lisps provide is, in fact, a full lexical analyzer for the language.
Furthermore, since the program code is in the form of a list literal, the result of tokenizing the REPL or compiler input is an abstract syntax tree of the code. So, lexical analysis of a Lisp program is also parsing of the code.
While most simple implementations use an ad-hoc approach to lexical analysis, since the language is so simple, some more advanced implementations do apply conventional DFSA techniques - but the resulting lederhosen and parser is then exposed as a standard library function.
This is the main reason why discussions of Lisp translators, especially meta-circular ones, generally don't discuss lexical analysis or parsing.
So why am I bringing this up here? Because I intend to (eventually) test the idea of using adaptive state automata in the lexical analyzers for my languages, which would generate new token types for each new symbol or syntactic structure defined by the programs, and use that for handling things like read macros. If it works - and there is no guarantee that it will - it should perform token recognition even faster than a conventional lexer despite the extra overhead. And as with other Lisps and Lisp-like languages, it would expose this ability to the client-programmer - but my intent is to go even further than existing ones.
It is an ambitious, and probably risky, goal. I have no idea if it will work, nor if doing so would have any real benefit. That is why it is experimental.
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@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
It occurs to me that some of the confusion around Lisp compilers and interpreters vis a vis other types of compilers could be cleared up a bit
Yup, sure cleared it up for me.
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@scholrlea OK, but how does that work with monads?
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@scholrlea That's very nice, but you know what I want to try? A language that allows both dynamic and static typing.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
A language that allows both dynamic and static typing
Like C#?
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@scholrlea That's very nice, but you know what I want to try? A language that allows both dynamic and static typing.
Funny you should say that. It's almost as if you kept reading into that thread to to next several posts or something.
Which means I should probably post those here too. But I am short on time right now, so maybe later.
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@jaloopa I somehow wasn't aware that C# had that feature.
@ScholRLEA It's an idea thing that's been in my head for a while. I call it "the principle of best effort". The idea is that the user/programmer should be able to give the computer as little or as much information as they want, and the compiler should be expected to do the best it can with that information. So you should be able to tell the compiler that you want "a variable x", or "a variable x that is an integer", or "a variable x that is an integer between 2 and 15".
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@jaloopa I somehow wasn't aware that C# had that feature.
@ScholRLEA It's an idea thing that's been in my head for a while. I call it "the principle of best effort". The idea is that the user/programmer should be able to give the computer as little or as much information as they want, and the compiler should be expected to do the best it can with that information. So you should be able to tell the compiler that you want "a variable x", or "a variable x that is an integer", or "a variable x that is an integer between 2 and 15".
I personally hate when computers try to "do the right thing." Because it isn't. It's a constant struggle when I teach HTML and CSS--I'd love error messages. Instead, it just does what it thinks is right. Which is dominantly the wrong thing.
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@benjamin-hall
"I'm helping!"
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@hardwaregeek said in Random thought of the day:
@benjamin-hall
"I'm helping!"Like a four-year-old trying to "help" Mommy do the dishes. But much less cute.
Tangent--kids are cute as a defense mechanism. If they weren't so cute (especially when they're sleeping), they wouldn't survive to adulthood.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@jaloopa I somehow wasn't aware that C# had that feature.
@ScholRLEA It's an idea thing that's been in my head for a while. I call it "the principle of best effort". The idea is that the user/programmer should be able to give the computer as little or as much information as they want, and the compiler should be expected to do the best it can with that information. So you should be able to tell the compiler that you want "a variable x", or "a variable x that is an integer", or "a variable x that is an integer between 2 and 15".
Yes! This is exactly the sort of thing I mean. I really need to repost my discussion on that here for more
abusefeedback.@Benjamin-Hall: Aye, there's the rub. The problems with trying to make reasonable defaults include, but are not limited to, the limits of the designers' foresight; the fact that different contexts might have different reasonable expectations; ensuring transparency regarding which 'reasonable defaults' are being applied, and how they can be overridden; and perhaps most of all, ensuring that the system doesn't keep resetting the overrides or trying to force the 'reasonable defaults' down the client-programmers' throats in some other way.
I have some definite thoughts on a possible way to thread that needle, which are part of what I need to repost here.
I will say that IMAO, using predicate dispatch over either strict static typing, or dynamic typing methods such as duck typing (or, pardon the pun, ducking the question of typing entirely, which isn't the same thing), is a promising start.
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@benjamin-hall said in Random thought of the day:
kids are cute as a defense mechanism. If they weren't so cute (especially when they're sleeping), they wouldn't survive to adulthood.
Same goes for puppies.
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@scholrlea I forgot to pothole the Wicked-Pedo page on Predicate Dispatch. Mea culpa.
TL:DR: Predicate dispatch is a generalization of dynamic dispatch that rolls static typing, dynamic typing, type inference (including specific forms such as duck typing), guard clauses, polymorphic methods, generics, and multiple dispatch up in a ball and wraps them up in a nice bow.
Too bad no one seems to have really started using it yet, or figured out a (non-sexpr-based) syntax for it that doesn't look like the love-child of Eiffel and Sather.
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And now the loop is closed. Have fun trying to figure this out.
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@benjamin-hall said in Random thought of the day:
kids are cute as a defense mechanism
Adults cover more area as human shields though.
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The next
POTUSpresident of a country with a sane electoral system may be someone who changes their legal name to Vote McVoteface.
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@zecc said in Random thought of the day:
The next
POTUSpresident of a country with a sane electoral system may be someone who changes their legal name to Vote McVoteface.Remember, Deez Nuts got significant traction in a few states, with about as much percentage as Gary Johnson ended up with.
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I hereby declare that WebAssembly's yet-to-be-specified ABI shall be nicknamed WAsABI.
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@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
a (non-sexpr-based) syntax
a.k.a. actual syntax. S-expressions are not syntactic.
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What color is your soul?
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@tsaukpaetra Octarine.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@tsaukpaetra Octarine.
huh. i would have gone with "That color that flashes in front of your eyes just before you die from having your brain smashed in by running full tilt into a brick wall"
but octarine is a good colour too.
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Physicists, please chime in: it occurs to me that a lot of the problems we have in understanding mechanics, especially quantum mechanics, come from the fact that we are in effect experiencing a projection of a multitude of spacial dimensions onto our 4 dimensional (3 unbiased, one biased in the temporally retarded direction) perceived interactions? We might find it useful to take the kinds of projections of 3D objects onto planes in drawing, painting, and computer graphics as an analog to this.
I know that string theory and its successors kind of touched on this, but I don't really think that the real implications specifically of the projection distortion, have really been exploried.
For example, could a photon we interact with as a particle when seen from one 'angle' (metaphorically, and possibly literally), but a wave from a different angle,actually be a complex, but static and stable, structure in multiple dimensions?
Similarly, can we resolve the apparent breakdown of local realism in Bell's theorem by viewing the two entangled 'particles' as manifestations of a single object which is contiguous in other dimensions?
I expect that this is well trod ground, but I don't know what the concensus on this currently is.
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@scholrlea Quantum physicists eat extra dimensions for breakfast. I'm sure they've explored that idea extensively.
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@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Physicists, please chime in: it occurs to me that a lot of the problems we have in understanding mechanics, especially quantum mechanics, come from the fact that we are in effect experiencing a projection of a multitude of spacial dimensions onto our 4 dimensional (3 unbiased, one biased in the temporally retarded direction) perceived interactions? We might find it useful to take the kinds of projections of 3D objects onto planes in drawing, painting, and computer graphics as an analog to this.
I know that string theory and its successors kind of touched on this, but I don't really think that the real implications specifically of the projection distortion, have really been exploried.
For example, could a photon we interact with as a particle when seen from one 'angle' (metaphorically, and possibly literally), but a wave from a different angle,actually be a complex, but static and stable, structure in multiple dimensions?
Similarly, can we resolve the apparent breakdown of local realism in Bell's theorem by viewing the two entangled 'particles' as manifestations of a single object which is contiguous in other dimensions?
I expect that this is well trod ground, but I don't know what the concensus on this currently is.
Extra dimensions are a core part of M-theory (a sub-set of which is known as string theory). So far, every testable prediction of such theories (and there's lots of them, on order 10^500 permutations) has not been borne out by observation.
The issue is not one of understanding the structure and behavior of particles. That's easy (for a physicist). The issue we have is that the best description we have currently (the Standard Model) has two big flaws:
- It has a bunch of free parameters (mainly masses). These have to be stuck in from observations, not predicted by the theory. That's inelegant and usually a sign we're missing something.
- It badly doesn't coexist with Einsteinian gravity (general relativity). As in "infinite amounts of infinitely hard radiation when anything moves" badly coexists.
So far, every attempt (and there have been many) to fix either of these problems have foundered on the rock of observation. Every time we test a prediction, we get the answer that's predicted by the Standard Model, not the one from the challenging theory. To obscene levels of precision.
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@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Physicists, please chime in: it occurs to me that a lot of the problems we have in understanding mechanics, especially quantum mechanics, come from the fact that we are in effect experiencing a projection of a multitude of spacial dimensions onto our 4 dimensional (3 unbiased, one biased in the temporally retarded direction) perceived interactions? We might find it useful to take the kinds of projections of 3D objects onto planes in drawing, painting, and computer graphics as an analog to this.
I know that string theory and its successors kind of touched on this, but I don't really think that the real implications specifically of the projection distortion, have really been exploried.
For example, could a photon we interact with as a particle when seen from one 'angle' (metaphorically, and possibly literally), but a wave from a different angle,actually be a complex, but static and stable, structure in multiple dimensions?
Similarly, can we resolve the apparent breakdown of local realism in Bell's theorem by viewing the two entangled 'particles' as manifestations of a single object which is contiguous in other dimensions?
I expect that this is well trod ground, but I don't know what the concensus on this currently is.
Sounds like Flatland.
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@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Physicists, please chime in: it occurs to me that a lot of the problems we have in understanding mechanics, especially quantum mechanics, come from the fact that we are in effect experiencing a projection of a multitude of spacial dimensions onto our 4 dimensional (3 unbiased, one biased in the temporally retarded direction) perceived interactions? We might find it useful to take the kinds of projections of 3D objects onto planes in drawing, painting, and computer graphics as an analog to this.
This has been a common idea, including string theory's 11 or 26 or however many spatial dimensions (with all but 3 of them being tiny enough to not be noticeable). More recently, the discovery of AdS/CFT correspondance , in which an N-dimensional spacetime with gravity has an equivalent description as an (N-1)-dimensional spacetime without gravity (aka, the holographic principal). Interestingly, it is the lower-dimensional models that are simpler than the projections into higher-dimensional space. Unfortunately, the universe we live in is not AdS, so it's still a bit academic despite all the excitement.
Also, I need to start using "biased in the temporally retarded direction" instead of just saying I'm running late.
@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
I know that string theory and its successors kind of touched on this, but I don't really think that the real implications specifically of the projection distortion, have really been exploried.
For example, could a photon we interact with as a particle when seen from one 'angle' (metaphorically, and possibly literally), but a wave from a different angle,actually be a complex, but static and stable, structure in multiple dimensions?
Wave-particle duality happens in much more abstract, mathematical spaces in addition to spacetime. To me, it's easier to think of particles as just very localized waves.
@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Similarly, can we resolve the apparent breakdown of local realism in Bell's theorem by viewing the two entangled 'particles' as manifestations of a single object which is contiguous in other dimensions?
I expect that this is well trod ground, but I don't know what the concensus on this currently is.
This is essentially what entanglement is, when two particles cannot be completely described as separate entities. There's one idea which says that there is a single quantum wavefunction describing the entire universe, in which everything is entangled with everything else. This is supported by Quantum Field Theory, which posits a single, universe-spanning field for each type of particle (electron, up quark, etc.) in which all individual instances of particles are mostly separate, mostly stable waves in this field.
@benjamin-hall said in Random thought of the day:
@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
2. It badly doesn't coexist with Einsteinian gravity (general relativity). As in "infinite amounts of infinitely hard radiation when anything moves" badly coexists.Oh, come on. The discrepancy is only 120 orders of magnitude. Hardly infinite.
But, yeah. Experimental results are sticking stupidly close to calculations from General Relativity and the Standard Model. Particle physicists are starting to get annoyed at the lack of unexpected data.
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@mzh Yeah, this is a case of no (new) news is very annoying news. The Standard Model isn't very elegant, and many particle physicists are irritated by that. It's like the universe is toying with us...
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@mzh said in Random thought of the day:
Also, I need to start using "biased in the temporally retarded direction" instead of just saying I'm running late.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
Does the mechanism by which we forget dreams ever malfunction and cause us to forget real memories?
Not exactly an answer to your question, but related: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/trouble-in-mind/201201/hm-the-man-no-memory
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@tsaukpaetra said in Random thought of the day:
What color is your soul?
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but nibbana is specifically said to be colorless.
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@hardwaregeek said in Random thought of the day:
@mzh said in Random thought of the day:
Also, I need to start using "biased in the temporally retarded direction" instead of just saying I'm running late.
I'm sorry, that should be "biased in the temporally developmentally-disabled direction".
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I was thinking when I woke up today: some localities use a full-stop for the thousandths separator and short-stop as the radix.
When working with JSON, are they still kept in that format? If so, do said symbols get swapped in the whole spec to accommodate this?
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@cursorkeys said in 🐝 The synergistic thread of data-driven agile community-based buzzwords leveraged to present a business and personal advantage:
Save bandwidth and just loop this locally for an authentic experience:
someone_from_another_department_having_a_loud_call_by_your_desk.wavSUDDEN IDEA: can you use something like a markov chain, but to generate sound? You know, take a bunch of sound files, analyze them, then be able generate an infinite stream of audio with the same patterns.
