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A test would possibly have caught that the condition in this trivial function is backwards.

The complexity of Karatsuba's algorithm, because it's a recursive one that gets "wider" at every level, is dominated by the width of that recursion. The top level always has a small number of operations, so we don't explicitly count them there, but the bottom has the truly huge number of operations that contribute to the algorithm's complexity, because each level of recursion dramatically increases the number of operations. Some number of those operations (most of them, in fact) will be single-digit additions.

Memoizing number-by-digit multiplication doesn't make multiplication O(1) because one must still do an N-digit addition (which is O(N)) for each digit.

Do you write things that you intend other people read?

The value in that writing, one would assume, would include your education, culture, and intelligence.

That's at odds with everything I know about manufacturing robotics, having worked with people doing that work. The complexity of the environment is irrelevant because the robot is programmed to make a specific motion and to adjust that motion in predictable ways based on the appearance of specific features. That is by design, not because (or at least not just because) the robot is incapable of planning its own motion. The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.

Sadly, American politics are so absurd now that some people won't recognize you're joking

I am only really confused about this comment. I don't see any shock here, just people discussing the same disappointing state of events you are.

The biggest source of lead exposure in indoor ranges isn't from the chunks of lead shot into targets. It's from the primers. Lead styphnate is still a common ingredient, and the primer is one of those parts of the bullet that ends up mostly in the atmosphere.

I don't understand this comment. The fine article is about a proposed law that would allegedly require the implementation of half-baked censorship systems along the same lines as the DMCA. Are you saying that's not a real issue because the EFF also whines about big tech?

It's also alive and well off the blockchain!

You give a damn about speech. You're publicly criticizing the foundational document of a government, and calling that government a failure. That open criticism is necessary for change to happen and, in the United States, the constitution forbids the government from removing that criticism or punishing you for it.

The constitution is intentionally more difficult to amend than an ordinary law. The entire point is that the government cannot easily remove restrictions on itself. It's not an appropriate place to put, say, housing or employment laws, which should be ordinary laws so they can keep up with a complex and rapidly changing world. It's also not an appropriate place to put a statement that housing is important or that there is a right to housing, because such a statement is unenforceable and would need a separate law designed to enforce that right. There are plenty of countries with a "constitutional right to housing" that still have homelessness because it's such a difficult issue to solve.

Throwing a constitution out and starting over would be even more difficult than amending it and would lose what's already in it. Maybe we need an amendment ending prison labor and private prisons. Maybe we need an amendment extending more rights to immigrants. That doesn't mean that the constitution as it already exists is invalid and worthless.

Eh? More for the rest of us, then!

The U.S. constitution is about the structure of the government and the things it can and cannot do. It's a remarkably short and readable document for what it is and when it was first written. And while it has been amended very slowly, it has been amended all the way up until today.

It seems you have an issue with just one part of it, the bill of rights. Besides property---which doesn't just mean land---that part addresses such other "outdated" concepts as speech, assembly, religion, rights of the individual in criminal investigations and trials, and a number of others. What connects all these ideas together is that they are the rights the people have _against_ government action. Things the government should not do to harm people.

That purpose is really important. The constitution is not, and should not be, a list of good policies or social values. Most of it is a list of specific things the government did in the past---some of them truly heinous things---that it is not allowed to do anymore. There's only one notable exception: the 18th amendment, meant to enforce the social values of the time and which was, ya know, repealed later for being a disaster.

Yes, you are morally responsible for your own actions. But those actions don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in a world that you are able to observe and make predictions about, however imperfect those predictions are. If you don't know that you're enabling the shooter, sure. But if you do know and do it anyway, you are responsible for knowingly enabling the shooter.

This doesn't mean that the shooter doesn't have his own agency and his own responsibility for his actions. It just means that his responsibility for his actions doesn't diminish your responsibility for yours, even if your actions involve him.

It seems to be a common idea that we can just overlook the abuses committed by the other people we deal with, as things "I'm not responsible for", regardless of our actual ability to do something about them. I have no special insight, but I think it's a common idea because it lets us feel better about ourselves while we do nothing. But "feeling good about oneself" isn't a solid way to build or evaluate a moral framework.

Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically anything about it once I've finished reading.

Who should the unimaginative non-liberals read, and why?