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Makes an affine space linear. It was a natural extension to provide direct transformations that encapsulate symmetry transformations, introduced by Mobius in his barycentric calculus.

Probably experience.

(Disclaimer: I have Slavic roots.)

For a moment I thought I clicked on a parody web site.

Harmy's despecialized versions are awesome. I watched them in a single sitting a couple of months ago. They have been the only recent editions that resonate with my childhood memories and give me that warm fuzzy feeling that everything is in its right place as I remember it. Moreover the days before I rewatched Andor and Rogue One in tandem. IMHO, as a full saga and the culmination of a story, they are as close to perfection you can get.

I copied the code from the book and then did my own mods. I also ended up rewriting the engine with 6502 assembly macros. That made me realize, and appreciate, high level languages that had first order functions and very different approaches to computing and data structures, in contrast with BASIC arrays, gotos and gosubs. At the same time I was learning to program in Logo, which, without being aware of, introduced me to the world of Lispy languages and what computing really is. That tainted me a bit and left me a bit frustrated when I moved on to C and, much later in the 90s, to C++.

I learned to program with some of these books. Usborne also quickly published them in Spanish, and I was lucky that some editorial companies used to go to my school to sell their books. I grabbed the machine code and adventure programs. That was 1985 and I was 10 years old. Still looking at the drawings brings me good memories and goosebumps.

True. I have often encountered motion controllers where the implementer failed to realize that calculating derived variables like acceleration from position and velocity using a direct derivative formula will violate the Nyquist condition, and therefore yields underperforming controllers or totally noisy signal inputs to them. You either need to adjust your sample or control loop rates, or run an appropriate estimator. Depending on the problem it can be something sophisticated like an LQR/KF, or even in some cases a simple alpha-beta-gamma filter (poor version of a predictor-corrector process) can be adequate.

I mostly learned programming GUI applications, in Xwindow and in general, studying the code of xv. The GUI controls were written from scratch using X resources and the code quality was top notch. I remember printing the full source code back in the winter break of 1994 at my university printers since I was going on vacations with my family and I was going to be completely disconnected. I studied the code writing side notes every time I had a moment to relax. Good times. Many thanks, John.

Well, for 'The Nine Billion Names of God' the monks finally ended up renting a computer. ;-)

It seems that common sense is very difficult to program. Perhaps because we don't really know how to properly define it or how an encoding of it would look like.

All of these models keep trying to convince me they can solve the Post Correspondence Problem.

People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?

Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.

Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Yet he did a lot of good leaving his money to academia and medical research.

I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.

Hmmm... So you are telling me in the age of AI you still need to hire software developers that know how to code? How ironic. ;-)

Statements like these always brings me to memory the opening line of Hamming's Numerical Methods book: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. It is very easy to get carried away and forget that - in particular today when processing power grows exponentially. Even more when we know there are a myriad of problems that are uncomputable, literally, and human common sense and intuition (insight) are as relevant now as ever.