aoanla

Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in the session). This is active learning with small group work and peer learning - which students tend to actually quite like. (Flipped classroom works better the more engaged the students are in the topic - for electives, fine, for mandatory courses, less good.)

Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)

Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in sidebars and the like.

I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to support them with Linux (or any other OS...) than it was a decade ago. The problem is power users with some specific needs, who also tend to be the more vocal in tech circles. In that circumstance, the usability of Linux depends strongly on what kind of needs they are - programming is obviously not a problem, but it's a harder sell for, say, photography (I like Darktable, but I have found it v hard to sell Lightroom users on it).

I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves their sanity...

I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks (plus, I found them all being so small - especially the ones closest to the sun - made me constantly worried about falling off), and I couldn't finish it. (I did watch a YouTube play through to get some of the experience without the terror later)

I mean, it does - people search stuff all the time now, rather than thinking about it.

N-body problems can't be analytically solved. However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermediate states along the way

In the case of the solar system, yes, it helps that the Sun is much more massive than everything else (and then Jupiter is 4 times more massive than Saturn, the next biggest) - you can go a long way to a "reasonable" solution by starting with the 2-body solution if only the Sun affected each planet, and then adding in the perturbation caused by Jupiter and Saturn. (In fact, that's how we predicted the existence of Neptune, by noticing that there were extra perturbations on Uranus beyond those, and hence another massive planet must exist, far enough away from the sun to only significantly affect Uranus).

Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited metric.

It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same property.

Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install. Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to plot" is now only a couple of seconds thanks to this (and subsequent plots are, of course, much faster than that).

Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source. (And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)

The classic of this field of books is Abramowitz and Stegun's "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" - although the two listed names are merely those of the compilation editors, as the calculations of the numerous tables of values (and sheets of mathematical identities) required hundreds of human computers operating for years. Ironically, on publication in 1964 it was just in time to see the dawn of the electronic computer age that would supplant it.

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use Anki at all.

Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea:

The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the fringe theory that gravity is really due to high frequency quantum oscillations. (Almost everything in it's future is made of configurable quantum dot "pseudo-atoms" that can be reconfigured to states that don't exist in natural atoms.)

Back in 2011, the UK Government commissioned an "independent review" of copyright etc (The Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property").

It broadly agrees with your ideas - at least in terms of the fact that copyright is far too long (the report thinks 20 to 30 years would be long enough, possibly in two phases with a renewal needed in between) but notes that the UK is bound by international law to keep copyright longer than that.

It also recommends on weakening copyright with more exemptions...

...and in the case of patent law, making it more expensive to renew patents to encourage people to not just renew by default, and not allowing any additional things to be patented (cf US software patents).

It's also very grumpy about the way copyright law just happened whenever a wealthy industry asked for it

I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others - however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am more just making the gentle point that people shouldn't feel that they "have" to do NaNo, or that there's anything wrong with them if they try and fail.

If it does work for you, that is, of course, great.

Indeed, NaNoWriMo does - by the very nature of its focus on "pushing yourself to succeed" and positivity in challenge - make it hard to talk about not succeeding. (And I am pretty sure that attitude didn't help my own interactions with it.)

I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you.

I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a decade and a half ago, and not only failed to complete anything, but was also driven into a worse depression because of it. I had to avoid people talking about it in November for years afterwards or I'd start to relapse, too.

Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despite being an active computer gamer at the time, and liking TTRPGs). To be fair, though, that's partly because my experience in not being able to finish the above too games due to the difficulty of the combat put me off CRPGs almost completely (until the more recent era of combatless or near-combatless RPGs with things like Disco Elysium).

I don't know, the brief time I spent with D:OS2, there was quite a lot of inventory shenanigans.

Absolutely. I watched a few people playing Early Access builds of BG3, and I can't believe more people aren't put off by how overly flashy everything is. Characters models overact expressions, and even the simplest action in combat is accompanied by loud sound effects and exaggerated actions. It's very off-putting.

I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2. I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but didn't make it past the early parts due to being annoyed by the random thugs that would assault you if you stood still for too long, and the pseudo-realtime 2e-based combat being Byzantine and off-putting.

The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it's much more debatable as to the nature of those qualities (and, indeed, that the existence of the hierarchy itself doesn't change the fitness surface, so that the advantageous qualities are different to what they might have been without it). See, eg, the amount of energy antlered deer (especially males) expend on having large, healthy antlers, purely to compete with other male deer. "Having large antlers" is a "quality" that has very little adaptive value outside of the conditions created by the fact of a hierarchy itself.

Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves, but the "Dodge" sequence (REAMDE and Fall) becomes blatant to the point that much of the latter is full of people you just can't identify with, because they're all stupendously wealthy tech people.

This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future tech thriller and part-1940s spy thriller, Seveneves (as noted elsewhere here) has a big genre change some way through, and arguably The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O also blends a few different genres together, some of them historical. He's certainly more egregious about it in Fall, but it's something he obviously likes doing...

I think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story which forms the second part. (Part of the problem being that... there's really not a good reason for it - Stephenson's grasp of biology is much worse than his grasp of computing technology.)

Yeah, I think the dissonance I fundamentally had with the ending of The Diamond Age is that it seems to not have any sense of irony (or any concept that, maybe, the Seed might not be the awful idea that his protagonists are trying to sell us that it is, for example).

There's an implicit assumption here that the "purpose of [physics] research" must necessarily result in concrete results in order to be "worthwhile". A lot of theoretical physics, at least, is increasingly really mathematics [or computer science] research, that doesn't necessarily directly and simply apply to "real world issues", but that doesn't make it invalid.

(That said: also the majority of physics research isn't fundamental physics research, which is the stuff you're talking about. There's plenty of work in areas like condensed matter physics, plasma physics, quantum optics, etc etc etc that is still producing results and driving new developments.)