tumba

What CO2 sensor do you use? Any recommendations?

You're not the only one!

In Zero History, the purpose of the shirt was not to fool the algorithm, but to trip a deep "gentlemen's agreement" between intelligence agencies to make invisible anyone bearing a certain pattern in order to protect the intelligence apparatus.

It will always be difficult to sustainably defeat recognition algorithms and I expect this to be an arms race along the same lines as other counter-surveillance techniques.

Gibson's suggestion that deeply coded and secret exceptions to mass surveillance might be used to protect state actors seems to me a plausible and concerning aspect of these developments.

> But at that time APL was not running on any computer; and he stoutly insisted that it was unnecessary that it ever run on a computer. It was for him a notation with which he could express algorithmic concepts; and for him at that time, that seemed sufficient.

Indeed. Because both APL and Lisp began as languages for describing computational ideas, it stands to reason that they would be particularly fit relative to languages that evolved under other fitness criteria.

I was intrigued to not the opposition to APL mentioned in the article by Djikstra and others on the basis of a different mental model of computation.

> I am firmly convinced that APL and LISP are related to each other along an important axis of language design and that acquiring simultaneous expertise in both languages is possible and desirable for the beginning student. Were they unified, the set of tasks that succumb to terse, flexible and expressive descriptions will enlarge enormously without overly increasing the intellectual burden on the student over his initial 16 week contact period.

In the context of setting the objectives for education in computer science for general students, I like the idea that the objectives are to (a) understand the limits and potential of computation and (b) achieve fluency in programming such that one can conceive of and describe computational processes for a wide range of tasks.

He explicitly suggests that fluency in using other people’s programs not be an objective. Perhaps this is a bit idealistic since most programming in the wild today consists of glueing together other people’s programs. But it seems like the right objective when possible—-in some ways it is a view of computer science as a liberal art.

  > My advice is this: as you learn Common Lisp and look for 
  > libraries, try to suppress the voice in the back of your 
  > head that says “This project was last updated six years 
  > ago? That’s probably abandoned and broken.” The stability 
  > of Common Lisp means that sometimes libraries can just be 
  > done, not abandoned, so don’t dismiss them out of hand.

I have found this to be true in my own experience. The perception of stagnation is, however, a common initial objection to folks working in CL for the first time.

This is understandable, given the fact that this is from Deloitte, who would like to sell consulting services.