Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
"What is a Hilbert space?"

-- David Hilbert.

Comment · 24 days ago
Because you either continue paying rent for the room you're renting the rest of the year, or you risk not having digs in the fall.

For those European workers, a US wage more than pays for the rent for their vacant rent back home.

Comment · 2 months ago
> But how do you verify Facebook? Facebook computes what?

You start by verifying the permissions structure for Facebook posts.

And by verifying the shortest, least complex functions in Facebook's server side code base.

Comment · 2 months ago
The trouble is the simulation tools are either proprietary and thus have only a small mind share among software developers, or academic, and either way, PLC programmers have not gone near them yet.

But a decent LLM should be able to translate the description of a plant to a TLA+ model (or Alloy, or something similar.)

Comment · 3 months ago
> My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.

Joining a fraternity makes you jointly and severally liable for anything your frat brothers do. It's the very opposite of working or investing in a limited liability company. Makes sense for a fraternity to be more tame...

Comment · 3 months ago
Which is why I am sitting right now in a meeting and the presenter is logged in from Bangalore and I don't even want to know what `TZ=Asia/Kolkata date` will tell me.
Comment · 4 months ago
I'm often shuffled into teams where I am the only American and everyone else is Indian, working in India, and I take a small measure of pride in switching to the formal register that Indians like to use in workplace English, and using the idioms they have.
Comment · 5 months ago
It didn't hurt that you can't play Fruit Merge on a TI 84
Comment · 5 months ago
The strange thing is he picked a fight with a store of humanities papers rather than scientific ones.
Comment · 5 months ago
Seems to me these LLMs have a critical mass of Python training data and Rust training data, so there's no advantage for Python there.

So as the article points out, an iterative process that catches the mistakes at compile time is much more suited for an AI than one that catches them at runtime.

Comment · 6 months ago
The Pyramids have a recently noticed Tamil inscription from Indian tourists visiting 2000 years ago.

And the Neo-Babylonian Empire had the first tourism minister taking care of a paleo-Babylonian site.

Comment · 10 months ago
The firmware for a diesel engine goes into a diesel engine. The company can be required to get a PE's signify for putting the firmware in. After that, if it's copied elsewhere, that's not their problem.
Comment · 10 months ago
This is why we need Professional Engineer licenses for software.

There are times when a product design needs to be reviewed and approved by someone who cares more about his license than about his job. It doesn't happen as often with software as it does with civil engineering, but often enough that it needs to become a thing.

Comment · 10 months ago
Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.

Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.

But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.

Comment · 10 months ago
Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).

Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.

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