ceceron

War with the Newts is wonderful, though The Absolute at Large is also worth of attention :)

That's why I am so often disgusted with the psychology research ethics. So many experiments are impossible to reproduce (vide recent reproducibility crisis), some (like the Stanford Prison Experiment) are debunked, but it is already too late — the damage is already done. As soon as a controversial research thesis reaches the public opinion (Zimbardo made sure his thesis would become popular), it becomes part of the "folk wisdom" and is repeated as a holy truth and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

AFAIK Python [optional] type system supports both. The nominal types are the "common" types, while the protocols [1] are structural. It's quite cool, actually :)

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0544/

AFAIK there is no single generally accepted definition, what does it mean for a language to be declarative.

Some people believe that pure functional languages are declarative because of the analogy with mathematics — computations are determined purely by the statement structure, not by the ordering of the statements.

Some people (including me) have higher requirements — the declarative programming language should never tell what to do, should only define the problem without providing an algorithm to solve it. According to this definition, pure functional languages are far from declarative as much as the procedural languages. The only pure programming languages here (AFAIK) are some variants of logic programming (Answer Set Programming, Problog, ...), Constraint Programming (MiniZinc, Essence, ...), PDDL, some configuration languages (not all of them), etc. There is nothing wrong in having conditionals/loops in the declarative language, as long as they are used to define the problem, not the algorithm to solve it.

Are you saying, you trust diplomats and politicians solely on their word? I'm happy, there are still so innocent people :)

There are a lot of very good answers already in this topic:

- quality doesn't bring enough to the business value;

- high demand requires hiring people without enough knowledge/skill;

- other people have just different quality metrics than you;

- "know-how" transfer between generations is difficult...

IMHO the similar question may be asked about any domain of life: why not all the buildings are well-built? Why the political/social systems are not just? Why good art is so hard to spot nowadays? They have different answers, but there is one common theme: building "well" is difficult; creating a "just" political system is "difficult", creating a good art is difficult; also writing "useful and reliable" software is difficult.

It's only natural that not everybody is a perfect software engineer, therefore is not a surprise that not every software will be perfect. What's more, there are a lot more mediocre software engineers than the perfect ones, therefore the majority of software will be... mediocre. The same about art nowadays — the sheer amount of music produced (even the word "produce" suggests it) every day makes sure that, in overall, there is a lot more terrible music compared to good compositions. I believe that software engineering has the same issue — the rising number of software projects is an enough explanation for low quality of the software we are able to perceive.

In fact, I don't believe the quality of the software engineering degraded over the years, but it's just more difficult to spot the great projects in the avalanche of "normal" life.

In Europe, UHT has caught on even in "wealthy" countries. In most shops you can buy both kinds, the UHT cheaper and the unprocessed as the more luxurious version. I think you're overstating the taste difference — as a child, I was often drinking really fresh milk (my grandma had cows). Later, most of my teenage life I was drinking UHT, and now I'm drinking the unprocessed refrigerated milk. I agree with you that the unprocessed one is better, but the difference isn't mind-blowing. I even know people that prefer the UHT taste.

Try `gcenx` distribution of wine with crossover patches (https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine). Work fine on M1, enough to play Heroes of Might and Magic III with various mods. I haven't tried playing the Jazz2 though.

True, that's why I haven't used 'finite' in my comment.

Apparently I've missed that the parent referred to the finite collections and in fact was wrong making my previous comment misplaced. Thanks for pointing it out :)

The number of symbols in the language may countable, but the number of sets of symbols will be indeed uncountable, i.e. AFAIR the number of sets of natural numbers is uncountable — you can even construct real numbers as sets on rational (still countable) numbers.

In 2014, I've met in Krakow a Ukrainian woman in her sixties, feeding pigeons just next to the Wisla river. It wasn't anything uncommon, during the Crimean crisis hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians migrated to Poland. She asked me in Polish/Ukrainian how to reach the main square — she has been in Krakow for many days but hasn't been able to see the city attractions. I had few minutes to spare so I decided to walk her to the old city (~15 min walk). The short walk transformed into a tour over the restaurants — we had to visit every kitchen to ask if they would employ her as a kitchen aid; then over the churches — she was an orthodox, I believe, but she prayed in every catholic church for her family, Ukraine and finally, for me. When we have finally reached the main square, she was so authentically delighted with the place — she stopped everywhere to admire and marvel on various old buildings and... tourists. She was so happy to be able to talk (me, being a poor substitute for a translator) with tourists from USA and western Europe. Tourists were also happy to give her some small souvenirs (e.g. very small American flag you can attach to your backpack).

All in all, the short walk took few hours, she was very talkative and I've learned a lot about her life in the central Ukraine and I've been invited to visit her anytime. The thing I will remember the most is how she appreciated the world around her, everything was so interesting and new — a world-view foreign to most of the people I know. It was a very enriching walk and I don't regret it, even if it destroyed my daily routine ;)

I had completely different experience. Pathfinding and inventory - honestly I don't remember, they didn't stay in the way. Not more than in any contemporary game. Combat wasn't in the center, but was fair and challenging enough to blend into the narrative. The gameplay was designed to facilitate the story-telling in a way to put the player as an agent in the epic tragedy.

I hate modern narrative-heavy games deciding to remove the gameplay to focus on the story/atmosphere. Movies/books are much better mediums for this kind of entertainment.

Ok, now I'm lost. What does the "gameplay" word mean for you? Planescape had IMHO am amazing gameplay.

Good example of a great RPG with terrible combat system was Arcanum but even there the gameplay was great (except the combat).

I've switched to SE 2022 and it's "okayish". Much worse experience but good enough to get by and is reasonably priced. The mini model is another option, but is worse (no fingerprint, no button, notch...) and simply too expensive. The only plus of the mini model is the size, which is still worse than the original SE.

To be honest, my favourite model was 4s ;)

- subtitle settings get reset every time I close the website.

I also find this ridiculous and annoying, but... I've found a "solution". Just open a mobile Disney+ app (I've used the iOS one) and set the subtitles/audio language there and this change is persistent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

IMHO all the modern "streaming" UIs suck, but the Disney+ is definitely the worst I've experienced.

I totally agree. MiniZinc is a great tool to prototype solvers for combinatorial optimization problems. It's mature (but still growing) and has support for many different solvers, not only from the Constraint Programming/SAT family. You can easily switch to MIP solvers (like Gurobi) or even try some local search approaches.

It has very good documentation, reasonable IDE and AFAIK three great courses on Coursera for beginners. I have been teaching it myself[1] and all my students were amazed how quickly one can develop a working prototype for real-life industrial problems.

[1] https://gitlab.com/agh-courses/2021-2022/constraint-programm...

Exactly my thought. Looks like a poor man's swift (poor because many features from Swift are still only in planning).

The one difference is that jakt is transpiled to C++ (IMHO it's a disadvantage, but could be useful).

I've been avoiding her books but being a Polish I tried to appreciate her writings when she got the Nobel. I found her style technically very good, but nothing special (compared to other Polish literary giants like Miłosz, Szulz or Lem). The bigger issue for me was the contents - it was over-intellectualized and lacking in meaning; a classical triumph of form over content.

The best Polish female writer I've read is Maria Dąbrowska and her amazing book "Nights and Days". Something like Polish "The Forsyte Saga".

I'm just finishing "Rationality: from AI to Zombies". Started ~25 days ago. It's quite long and frankly rather underwhelming given promising beginning. I don't recommend the title.

Also, I'm in 25% of Deep Learning by Goodfellow. I started it two months ago but had a long break.

When I was a teenager, I read yearly ~75 fiction books. Being an adult I read less, but I'm more careful with the lecture choice given the limited time.

I am a big fan of the Constraint Programming paradigm. Still, there are several distinguishable approaches:

1) Constraint Logic Programming — quite cool as long as you have experience in Prolog, but choice of underlying solvers is limited: Prolog runtime has built-in solver.

2) Answer Set Programming - syntactically similar to Prolog, but later compiled (grounded) to elementary logic solvable with SAT techniques — very efficient.

3) Constraint Programming via Solver API — there are many solvers: Choco, Oscar, OR-tools that are usable programmatically. This approach is advertised in the article.

4) common API - there are libraries, e.g. Numberjack, that generalize API over several solvers

5) Constraint Programming via Modelling Language: there exist languages designed just to define Constraint Programming models. MiniZinc is at the moment the most mature and has the most extensive support from industry.

6) related techniques: SAT, SMT

Normally I start with 5) as it allows me to quickly prototype a solution for the problem. Only when it's not enough, I switch to 3).

Yes. But still I find beauty in great abstractions ;)

MiniZinc language for Constraint Programming uses /\ and \/ as AND/OR operators.

I'm terrified of such simplistic narratives (in any domain, not only politics) and I believe they are very dangerous, especially in the modern societies which are very prone to accept easy explanations... Mearsheimer's narrative is internally consistent and seemingly explains the reality in a simple manner. It will definitely seduce many readers into a false feeling of understanding.

In my humble opinion, his story lacks lots of context, both cultural and historical. Russia has never belonged to the Western culture, not even in the XIX century. Its mindset is radically different and not reducible to analysis based on the assumptions common in the Western societies. Treating it as a "partner one can civilize" has been a mistake made repeatedly in Europe and resulted in many tragedies in the last ages. I hope the current conflict will open eyes of many naive idealists looking for the rational outlook on the modern world.

I'm always scared of such articles/narratives. Because they are internally consistent and seemingly explain the complex reality, they easily seduce rational readers giving them specious feeling of understaning.

In my opinion, this article has been written by an intelligent pragmatist that clearly has not lived in the Russia vicinity. I'm not arguing ad personam — I'm just stating that the article shows no understanding for the the Russian mentality. It's a common error to treat Russia as a Western country, while it... is not and never has been. Rationalizing the Russian behavior in accordance to their official statements is naive and historically made many countries suffer terrible fate.

Sure. I've used "possible causes" instead of hypotheses to match other reasoning methods.

I don't want to sound nitpicking, but if you're correcting someone, you should be ready to be corrected yourself...

Sherlock Holmes used abductive reasoning.

Deduction: cause + deductive rule -> effect

Induction: (cause + effect) x many times -> deductive rule

Abduction: effect + deductive rule -> possible causes

The Crossover version works well on post-Catalina systems. You can just buy it or... compile their code :) There is a gcenx build available here: https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine .

IMHO this kind of list defeats its purpose. Being popular / having high rating in the popular services is definitely not an accurate marker of being "mind-expanding". In fact, I would expect most of them be rather safe/easy/conforming to what people find acceptable, therefore not challenging their minds. Just looking at the philosophy section of the list proves the point. Also the sci-fi part is surprisingly poor in substance — one would think that technical people should be well-versed in that particular genre.

I would prefer to read a list curated by a single "expert" person. Such a list would be shorter, more biased, but hopefully not so bland. For example, Eli Bendersky puts every now and then a nice summary of his impressive reading adventures.

You can imagine the drug would help, sure. But that's it – your imagination. But yeah, if we assumed the Modafinil was indeed a proven "cure" against sleeping while driving, and it was given free, then the situation would have a similar structure as the one analyzed by the author. Obviously, they still differ significantly: a) you would have probably to take Modafinil before each drive – vaccines have a more permanent effect b) it is easier to track vaccinations than taking a drug, it's much more manageable.

This is not only a risk management game – your simplified "absurd" examples are of the kind: "author wants to bar risky situations, why not bar big cars, they're risky". One has also to weight various social factors/costs. If barring bigger cars from the road would be beneficial for society, then yeah, let's do it, but I wouldn't bet on that. The vaccinations have some added costs (production, distribution) and risks (side-effects), but the question is whether the cost/risk of the longer pandemic isn't even bigger (AFAIR it is). I don't say, that OP is right that people should be forced to be vaccinated, but I don't find it absurd given that we've already sacrificed many other freedoms for the society. It's like @mayewsky writes, we already bar some drivers (because of age/health state/previous offenses against the law) from driving. It's nothing new and it's not controversial AFAIK.

No. It's not. It would be similar, if you had a "potion", that people could drink to magically enhance their driving skill. This potion would have some possible rare negative side-effects. And then there is a question: should people be required to drink this potion while getting the driving pass?

Even today, very bad drivers are forbidden to drive the cars? Is it an attack on their freedom?