Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
GP’s “Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud” means “elevator for the gallows.” I think they are familiar with the composition, you might be missing the point of their comment.
Comment · 4 months ago
Big Egg
Comment · 4 months ago
I think everyone says “couldn’t care less”. But Wiktionary does say “could care less” is “American, nonstandard, proscribed”, so I guess only Americans have that (defective) alternative phrase.
Comment · 4 months ago
What is ISE?
Comment · 4 months ago
The behavior is agnostic of the endianness of the target platform.
Comment · 4 months ago

    cond1 ? res1 :
    cond2 ? res2 :
    cond3 ? res3 :
    or_else_res
If they are truly nested, then that is confusing. But if you have an if-else chain, then it can be quite readable.
Comment · 4 months ago
As programmers in programming culture, we have a distinction between hacker and, potentially, cracker that no ordinary person has. ESR’s prescriptivism is pretty much worthless in this respect: words mean what people think they mean and what people use them for, and programmers do not have a monopoly on how people use the term.

OED has the “computer intruder” sense first cited in 1963, and the “enthusiastic programmer” sense first in 1969 (“now much less common than sense 3a”). Cracker first appears in 1968.

Besides, it is easy to disambiguate which meaning people mean. “Hacker attack” can only refer to the common usage of the term, not programming-culture usage.

Comment · 5 months ago
Where did you leave to?
Comment · 6 months ago
If you want ‘git diff | pager’ to work like that, you’re out of luck. There is no way for the pager to communicate with git or the shell to rerun the command; the pager doesn’t even know what program is on the writing side of its stdin pipe. You would need something like ‘pager --command "git diff"’, where the pager invokes a command producing output. I do agree that it would be nice.
Comment · 7 months ago
Pronounced octópodes, /ɒkˈtɒpədiːz/, with the -es rhyming with Heracles etc.
Comment · 8 months ago
Maybe the Briggs-Rauscher reaction?
Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 11 months ago
iOS repeated “learns” new words that I use that are misspellings of real words (because I mistype things in a predictable way). It becomes so convinced that it will autocorrect the real word into the typo. And knowing how the keyboard works, I wouldn’t be surprised if it enlarges the touch targets for the typo once it thinks I meant to use the typo.

The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.

It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.

Comment · 1 year ago
Strang does include that. I just checked the fourth edition, like you say you did. Scrolling down two pages to get to the first page of the table of contents, I see the heading “cosines and projections onto lines”. I navigate to that section and it explains all the logic, proof, and intuition behind the connection between angles and dot products. Please don’t spread misinformation…

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