dxbydt

Ha ha! I worked in one of these matchbox factories as a kid. My dad had dropped me off at my grandpa's for summer vacation in the village. I was not a particularly good kid. So my grandpa took me to the match factory in the morning and told me to make myself useful. You sit around in a circle on the floor. There is a small hill of matchsticks piled in front of you. You count 50 sticks and stuff them into a matchbox, push that matchbox into the center of the pile. If you stuff 100 matchboxes you get 10 paisa or some such...was in the 1970s, I don't recollect exact amount. I do remember I came out in the evening with enough money to buy a stick ice-cream.

usaco explicitly nudges you towards C++ on the first page itself. problems are graded on running time, even with moderately large datasets, Python simply doesn’t make the cut. So most high schoolers end up using C++ for usaco, and Java for AP Comp Science.

its been a long time, but when i was taught this material, i was told there are only 3 cases -

x+y=1, x+y=2 clearly has no solution since two numbers can’t simultaneously add to both one and two.

x+y=1,2x+2y=2 clearly has infinitely many solutions. There’s only one equation here after canceling the 2, so you can plug in x’s and y’s all day long, no end to it.

x+y=1, 2x+y=1 clearly has exactly one solution (0,1) after elimination.

This example stuck with me so I use it even now. The author/Claude/Gemini/whatever could have just used this simple example instead of “trichotomy of curves through space conjoin through the realm of …” math, not Shakespeare.

just to clarify - I have nothing to do with this book. I was just forwarded a copy and I thought its relevant to the topic at hand. from the wild swings in karma, looks like people are annoyed with the message and shooting down the messenger.

Author has computed BBMI (baby baby money index) but mistakenly calls it BMI. If he divides the BBMI by the TFR, one B goes away and you get the true BMI which is a different ranking altogether. For bonus points you can compute which country has the same ranking whether BBMI or BMI.

what an amazing turn of phrase - “reset and synchronization once the talking points get assembled” Literally describes 99 of the 100 post-jira action items coming out of the clueless PM’s mouthhole.

Amazing story. I enjoyed reading this so much. The sad fact that this was written in 1966 - like the gentleman advocated for gutting the public school system 6 decades ago, and only now we are getting around to the business of defunding the dept of education. The story has foretold everything - the culture wars, the sacred cow/buffalo, utterly divergent visions of the left and right when it comes to what education means…Rafferty seems to be a futuristic mind reader. Amazing.

You are deliberately missing the point and confusing X with ‘something that looks like X’. For eg., using QBasic, you can pick some random spot on the monitor and have a white dot show up at that spot. What you end up doing is directly writing to the vga buffer address of that spot. That’s the X. You can directly talk to LPT1 and directly get the dot matrix printer to print an ascii character. That’s the X. All these things were possible because the synergy between the hardware and the software was extreme. QBasic was just a shim. You were directly talking to the hardware in as few steps as you possibly could. The assembler code for your BAS file could be inspected and you could even muck with that.

All of that has gone out the door. What you have with javascript is something that looks like X. So I can use a html canvas element and get its drawing context and do an arc with the right parameters and fill and hide the scrollbar with some css and pretend that what you now see is like the X. But its not! To actually get rid of the browser window and only have the white dot, you would need a full blown electron install or worse. And it still wouldn’t get you to the X. We already had X. Now we have something that barely approaches X after a great deal of effort.This is supposed to be progress ?!!

> Most of the experts from that report have a direct financial benefit from claiming that this will happen

Rigetti $RGTI is up 400% this month. 135% this week alone. He’s right.