mrcsd

I really disagree with the straightforward reduction of engineering to 'math but practical', but I'm finding it hard to express exactly why I feel this way.

The history of mathmatical advancement is full of very grounded and practical motivations, and I don't believe that math can be separated from these motivations. That is because math itself is "just" a language for precise description, and it is made and used exactly to fit our descriptive needs.

Yes, there is the study of math for its own sake, seemingly detached from some practical concern. But even then, the relationships that comprise this study are still those that came about because we needed to describe something practical.

So I suppose my feeling is that, teaching math without a use case is like teaching english by only teaching sentence construction rules. It's not that there's nothing to glean from that, but it is very divorced from its real use.

I don't think this is quite the same comparison. In Rust, multiple mutable pointers to the same object can exist at the same time. So, it's similar to C in this way. It is mutable references that must be exclusive.

Words are not reducible to technical statements or algorithms. But, even if they were, then by your suggestion there's not much point in talking about anything at all.

This is abhorrent. The feeling of safety underpins emotional well-being. What you advocate is only the repetition of past suffering. Without safety, what is left but fear?

I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.

From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.

I'm 34, grew up in London, went to state primary school and private secondary school. dijit's account of schooling ressonates strongly with me.

If all disrespecting is to belittle and look down upon, then fair enough, I agree with you. What I meant, in perhaps an ill-phrased manner, was that overemphasised respect can often lead to stasis, where people might not want to change in case they are seen as disrespectful. Hence my use of disrespect, in that it is a relative judgement, and which can and has been used to discourage creative difference or just difference in general.

Disrespect is part of progress, respectful humans are liable to blindness of flaws. Just as part of youthful creativity is disregard for what has come before.

So, just like normal then?

I don't disagree with being cynical about social media, but community belief is the overwhelming mechanism by which fact is decided throughout history, including now.

Care to expand upon the issues you were running into with hypothesis? I'm genuinely curious as I may soon be evaluating whether to use it in a professional context.

Surely an ability to balance requires that both sides of an issue be deemed somehow legitimate, no? In which case, surely there must be some sort of "right" which forbids injuries to nature, without which there can be no legal standing to prevent such injuries. In other words, why is there a procedural right to pollute and yet no right to stop pollution?

Writing a substantial amount of unsafe Rust really sucks the beauty out of the language.

I really disagree with this take, given the examples of unsafe code the article chose to exhibit. Trying to write C in Rust totally goes against the grain of Rust's ergonomics, which are oriented towards discouraging unsafe code patterns. It should be a pain to attempt something dangerous, and it should feel really easy to write safe code, because this setup naturally encourages the vast majority of code to be written safely.

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but not the literal fact of it. Sure, interesting proofs require pulling out some interesting knowledge in the reasoning, but notions like "surprising" or "interesting" are about human subjectivity and don't really exist as a property of a deduction. Surprising or interesting knowledge is not somehow new knowledge that wasn't there before, it's just that we didn't see it previously.

Just thinking on my feet as to how I separate abstractions from indirections and it seems to me that there's a relatively decent rule of thumb to distinguish them: When layer A of code wraps layer B, then there are a few cases:

    1) If A is functionally identical to B, then A is a layer of indirection
    2) If A is functionally distinct from B, then A is likely an abstraction
    3) If A is functionally distinct from B, but B must be considered when 
       handling A, then A is a leaky abstraction.

Funnily enough, logical deductions or formal theorem proofs can be seen as a set of transformative steps from the initial premises to the conclusion, where no new information is added in the process. Which makes the conclusion (at a stretch) a bit like "just" rephrasing the initial premises.

IMO cognative load is much easier to manage when required (human) memory use is less of a factor. In practical terms, this means maximising the locality of reasoning, i.e., having everything you need in front of you to make a decision. One of the reasons I favour rust is precisely because this factor has been a focus in the design.

Not necessarily. Since the argument to `.or_else` is a function, the fallback value can be lazily evaluated.

How can we make better tools if we don't blame tools?

In my experience, the connotations are very similar to English use. What matters is the context. Say sekuhara or sexual harassment at work: very serious connotation. Amongst friends or in media (comdey/anime/etc): potentially frivolous/unserious connotation.

Based on their simulations, Fry and Madzunkov built small-scale models of their electrostatic shields and tested them in a particle beam at Brookhaven National Laboratory with good results—they showed that the ASPP software was fairly accurate in its predictions. “We are at the stage where we need to start looking at building larger demonstrators. Stojan and I proposed putting a device on a lunar surface as a technology demonstration for the plasma mitigation method. Sometimes, you’ve just got to focus on applications that perhaps you don’t want to do first,” said Fry.

It is only a small scale model, but your comment really doesn't warrant such certainty about simulation only.

Recent Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/04/wobbly-space...

It sounds like you're working on a mature C++ codebase, so yeah, good reason to stick with that. But I'm curious whether you feel it's worth spending effort on this discipline, outside of working on a particular codebase?

I don't know C++, but being freed from making effort to avoid a class of bugs was easily enough for me to learn Rust instead (not that this was the only reason).

I've recently started writing daily, since September. Setting a daily word target was what worked for me, I do at least 1600 a day and try not to write too much more. If you're writing a first draft of around 90k words then it will take only 56 days to get there at 1.6k a day. My realisation that this was actually a pretty small time commitment really helped me finally take the plunge.

This is obviously an old idea, and indeed I'm just copying a similar process to Haruki Murakami's. I definitely recommend his series of essays on being a novelist: Novelist as a Vocation (this really helped me).

On to second draft now and moving from daily word count to number of chapters or paragraphs edited has helped as just a metric for pace. Doesn't mean it's quality writing, just that I have a sensation of movement and progress.

Leaving aside whether there is only one constitution, when has writing any governing document ever been trivial? Literally, humanity has struggled and continues to struggle to write down and effectively communicate even documents of much lesser importance, API documentation or text books for example. I'm sorry but I don't see how this point can be made seriously.

It's a fair point that obstructing draft legislation is a kind of de facto prohibiting of votes, even if crown consent does not enable stopping a vote directly. But in practice I don’t think consent could possibly be used this way without the tacit approval of the government (like with the prorogation of parliament case). I brought up parliamentary sovereignty above precisely because of this. If parliament is sovereign then ultimately the limits of crown consent are for parliament to decide. So the crown does not truly have a binding veto, if that veto can be removed or undone by parliament.

That said, it would be very interesting if such a veto was attempted and it went to court, we’d get to see more constitutional clarification in action!

Of course I agree that there is no written constitution, I said as much above. But there _is_ a constitution. Constitutions do not have to be written, unless you think otherwise?

Yes, there is a constitution [0]. No, it's not writen as complete in any set of documents.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...

All of the crown's powers can be changed or removed by parliament, the recent Prorogation of Parliament [0] case saw the supreme court of the UK reaffirm the "sovereignty of Parliament". So the (valid) issues with consent you are raising should be taken up with your local MP, since the power of conset is based upon the power of the UK's democratically elected body. By the by, I daresay I'm not a royalist.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/decision-of-the-supreme...

That's not correct, crown consent cannot stop a vote. And regardless of this, parliament is sovereign [0], that supremacy overrides any power any monarch could have in the UK.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty

Surely burning witches to improve the weather is exactly an example of metric use gone awry? To your point though, it is exceedingly common to know we are better at something without a clear metric. It is not controversial to suggest that someone may be better now at communicating than they were as a child, even though there is no clear way to define this.