Recent submissions

Comment · 18 days ago
The halting problem applies when you are trying to check the properties of arbitrary programs. However, we are not writing arbitrary programs, we are writing very specific (hopefully useful) programs. The two are very different.

Pop-sci explanations of the halting problem have probably done incredible damage to formal verification as a whole. Mostly because it makes people with only the most cursory understanding of it go "why bother, it won't work anyway."

Comment · 1 month ago
Man I can't believe mathematicians were just about to solve dozens of significant problems all in the same year, and that's exactly the year LLMs come around to steal their solutions.

Talk about bad luck!

Comment · 3 months ago
Those graphs look nothing alike, except for "going up and then vaguely going down."
Comment · 5 months ago
The continuum hypothesis was proven independent of ZFC over sixty years ago, I think even GPT2 could have told you that much.
Comment · 7 months ago
Calling visual novels a "traditionally feminine" genre is rather hilarious.
Comment · 9 months ago
USB license dongles are still very common in industrial automation, I work for a company that uses it. You don't want an internet outage (or an AWS outage) to take down a production line for a day. You also expect to set up a system once and then have it just work for a decade or so.

In our case, the copy protection would still be as easy to bypass as the one in the article.

Comment · 10 months ago
Lots of (most?) Steam games don't have real DRM and you can run them just fine without the Steam client. So if you want to, you can usually download the game and then back up the files yourself.

GOG giving you a standalone installer saves you some effort compared to that, but in neither case do you really "own" the game.

Comment · 10 months ago
I've never found anything to back this up, but my impression was that both the Python / Numpy and Fortran 90 slicing operations were directly inspired by MATLAB (although most of the ideas go back to at least Algol 68).

It also helps that Fortran compatibility is a must for pretty much anything that expects to use BLAS.

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