nealabq

My 50-year-old HP-21 with red LED display still works. I'm very fond of it. RPN forever!

Were this fiction, I would expect a denouement where images of the two memorial stones, black and white, when placed side by side (as Swift intended), reveal a subtle joke.

I find myself wondering if this essay is meant as a gentle satire. Bemused not savage, not Swiftian.

I am reminded of Lord Peter Wimsey.

I think he meant it can fall onto his toddler, causing injury.

You're right of course. I was thinking specifically of printing log/debug statements in the assert(..), but that usually only happens if the assert(..) fails and exits, and in that case the "no side effects" rule no longer matters.

I don't mean to be that guy, but for "functional" programmers a print statement has "side effects".

But your meaning is clear. In an assert expression, don't call functions that might change the program/database state. Be as "const" as possible.

In C++ you should probably #include <cstdio> instead of <stdio.h> unless you have a good reason. And especially avoid #including both. <cstdio> provides the function std::getc(..) while <stdio.h> usually provides getc(..) as a macro.

htons(..) and related socket-utility names are also often macros, but I'm pretty sure there is not a std::htons(..) in the C++ standard, partly because 'htons' is not an attractive name. Since it's (sometimes) a macro don't qualify its namespace like ::htons(..).

A long time ago in the Microsoft C (and later C++) dev envs there were macros named "min" and "max", which I thought were terrible names for macros.

Chompsky, in his early days, wrote of deep grammar or deep structure as opposed to surface structure. He theorized that there was a universal set of semantic concepts represented in human brains -- like "verbs" or "noun phrases" and how they interconnect. But Chompsky didn't take this too far. The work in this paper may be teasing out what this human "deep structure" is, a sort of world view and social view that's at least partly genetically encoded.

Third-derivative pun.

Riposte: I knew you'd say that! Snap!

Since Iceland is so isolated, it may be a good place to see if a gene drive can actually eradicate.

The Blackfly song has it right then? Thank you National Film Board of Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f389hIxZAOc

Is being a monster a good or a bad thing?

Could you do this with dry corn starch? Shake it up in the bottle and light it before the dust settles.

No recursion means no Erlang. Which means no RabbitMQ?

This is a bit of a stretch, but it's a little like distillation, where you are extracting from the vast knowledge of the LLM and inserting those patterns into your brain. Where you have an incomplete or uncertain mental model and you ask a tutor to fill in the blanks.

Altho maybe I'm stretching the analogy too far.

I'll be interested to see how circumspect the FAA is, given the political situation.

Personally, I'd include the Relational Calculus, or even the Paxos algorithm. But I'd also include Neural Nets knowing what I know now. But I wouldn't include Quantum Computing yet -- not until it's proved to work.

Is there a line between research/discovery and engineering? Binary numbers and Boolean algebra is discovery, while IEEE floating-point numbers are engineering. Choosing digital over analog is engineering, while inventing the transistor is discovery. Serial over parallel for networks and busses -- engineering. Turning machine & halting problem -- discovery. Von Neumann architecture -- engineering. Combinatory logic -- discovery. LISP -- engineering. Public key encryption -- discovery. Graphical UIs -- engineering.

But there are fuzzy areas, like hashmaps. Discovery or engineering?

Tho perhaps it's pointless, or worse, elitist to even make this distinction.

When the grippers close they probably close the loops of a coil that wraps around the wire. So it's harvesting the ever changing magnetic field that arises from AC current, independent of voltage. You can still get some power from coils that aren't wrapped around the wire but are still parallel. I think that's how wireless phone chargers work.

You can also take power using a capacitor instead of an inductor, from the changing voltage (not current) in an AC line. Like when you hold a florescent tube vertical under a hi-power line, and it lights up.

You hear of people occasionally eating frog-legs, alligator, rattlesnake. But maybe these also taste "bad". And since frogs are insect eaters, maybe bioaccumulation isn't as much an issue.

In the mid 80s I had a sofa and wing-back chair made by a little factory called Bader and Fox(?) in Portland OR. I went to the factory (the two owners were the only ones there) and picked out fabric/style/etc with some special instruction about the angle of the arms and stiffness of the stuffings. Cost about $1600.

Best furniture ever. Carted across the country twice. I still use both pieces every day. They've been reupholstered once.

A typical fission nuclear power plant produces about a gigawatt of power. About 8.76 terawatt hours (TWh) every year.

According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 humanity used about 27400 TWh in 2023, with bitcoin mining using in the range of 67 to 240 TWh. So we're using roughly half-a-percent of global electricity (~140 TWh) on bitcoin. That's about the 16 fission reactors.

If we decide that AI is as worthwhile as bitcoin then we should be willing to invest that much electricity. Maybe the U.A.E. is thinking they could provide those power plants.

ASML recently delivered their first high-NA lithography system to Intel. While TSMC is being more cautious, hesitating to commit to this very expensive machine. Intel's making a big bet, and it may (or may not) pay off. We'll probably know by the end of 2025.

Intel may end up back on top.

https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/intel-and-a...

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-receives-it...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsm...

Note that reaction wheels do not make use of gyroscopic torque (which balances these monorails). They are different control mechanisms. Altho both use spinning wheels.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope

Turner syndrome happens when one of the X chromosomes is missing. The result in humans is a short female who may have some heart issues and may be sterile. At least according to the woman I know who has it.

As in men, the single X-chromosome doesn't deactivate.

I'm curious how single-X manifests in other mammals. And if Turner has autoimmune implications.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/turner-syndro...

Gemini is not distinct and memorable. It feels like a muddled compromise.

I'd name it GooGaa or Googa. Like "Google" and "goo-goo-gaa-gaa" (baby's first babbling). It's flowing, friendly & familiar.

Smalltalk doesn't have operator precedence rules. They just apply left-to-right. The infix operators aren't part of the language - they're messages (aka methods), and precedence would be inconsistent with the language's simple syntax.

A century is about 3 billion seconds, and Earth's surface area is about half-a-billion square kilometres, so one of these hits Earth about every 6+ seconds.

you're suggesting a periodic table of all periodic tables that do not contain themselves. sounds doable.

This'd make a nice lyric. If only "Harvard" rhymed with "discovered".