physicsguy

Transfer of ownership is probably the least controversial part of owning a house in the UK too.

There is no "company" in effect and hasn't been since 2020. The government is the operator and tells companies where they can run trains and what they charge while the companies have levied a % of revenue. That's changing as the government is now bringing operation back in house as 'Great British Rail'.

I'm a phyicist by training and have published in the past but I left academia and so haven't for a number of years now.

I tried out using Claude to do some physics problem solving - mix of maths and simulation - and ended up with it getting in quite a mess. It's incredible at setting things up, suggesting approaches you might not have considered. I found it much much worse at interpreting things.

Static memory allocation is widely used in quite a bit of embedded software, particularly safety critical stuff. There it's often latency related since you don't want hangs while memory is allocated.

I've even seen it on some simulation software's core that was written in the 80s originally; at the time memory was much more constrained so allocating upfront meant you could check upfront whether the simulation could actually run or not vs crashing out part way through.

They had a thing of encouraging talent and putting it in special schools to develop it. Then Maths reading groups etc.

Not many Cockneys in London these days, they're all in Essex

I had that when workign with a lot of other Europeans. When I moved to a company where everyone was British I had to re-adapt, particularly because I'd become more direct after working with a lot of Germans.

The hydration breaks are a FIFA thing, we can't blame the US for that one. We're not really seeing the ads and half time crap and things as the international broadcasters don't show them.

Traditionally everyone had sash windows ("sliding windows") or casement windows ("swing open") made from wood. Nowadays sash windows are very expensive so almost everyone has casement windows, or even casement windows that look like sash windows, both constructed from UPVC. It's only in historic buildings people typically still install sash windows. I had to do that in my house because of it being a "conservation area" and it cost £14k for four timber double glazed sash windows! There are some UPVC sash windows now but they're pretty uncommon still.

This might sound ridiculous to you but in the U.K. we generally don’t have tilting windows. They are really common in Germany though.

In the UK people predominantly use debit cards but credit cards are widely available. Everyone gets a debit card with any current account (i.e. non-savings account). In March this year there were 2.3 billion debit card transactions vs 400 million credit card transactions according to this:

https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/data-and-research/data/card-spe...

I come to HN...

Actually use a modern compiler

This was always a pain point in C++ embedded space, to be fair.

I think most people didn't really care enough because if they knew C++ and they cared enough, they could still effectively contribute to the kernel.

That's not really true at all though, even in very complex software it's pretty rare to have more than ~10 external dependencies in a C++ project. People tend to roll their own a lot more, partly because dependency management is a lot more painful and fragmented. Boost is effectively an extended standard library, as is abseil, but the language has got much better at incorporating back features since C++ 2011, but even so, the dependencies tend to be slow moving and fairly stable.

It's alright, just get ISO27001 and list them as risks!

It provides legal stability compared to unpredictable arbitrary decisions by the US executive.

I don't think assuming the European commission will act rationally or stably on this is really a good idea, and I say that as a European...

I worked in very technical engineering software company and they were super paranoid about their special sauce IP of a product that did analysis of a certain type of data, without being able to see that all the pieces of that special sauce were actually just functions from SciPy strung together and which you could look up in a textbook. Don't get me wrong, you need the right background to understand it and that's not trivial, but if you got someone from the right area you could replicate it pretty easily.

You can defensively set shipped binaries as fallbacks in the event the application is running on a newer system that dropped critical functionality

Not if they're GPL licensed you can't. And that's a headache most commercial people do not want at all when trying to write software that's often for a marginal part of their audience anyway.

If the author's vision of the future is correct, then competent software engineers are safe. Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

I think this is true in some things and less true in others.

It's a pretty high moat getting into stuff like simulation software because the people working on numerical methods overwhelmingly have PhDs and it's a mixed skill set. Domain expertise here requires you to know maths to a high level. Even mechanical engineers often struggle here; it's often applied mathematicians and physicists turned devs that work on this stuff.

I worked on a fairly gnarly signal processing thing a while back that required bringing together knowledge of physics and software and maths and I found explaining it to people was tricky as their eyes glazed over at some point because their knowledge typically only covered one part of those.

I have had similar when trying it too. I couldn't even drive Claude Opus 4.7 to get PETsc to compile properly (with all the optional dependencies)

Of course but sometimes designers like architects design something that can’t easily be built.

Coding up a decent performing basic 3D finite element solver from scratch in C++. Still needed to know what I was doing but it’s a non trivial problem.

I still couldn’t get it to do more advanced stuff.

It’s non trivial now - will it get easier in 12 months though?

If the bottom is falling out of the market in AI I think it's likely other things will fall too though.

I have found this with (mechanical) engineers. They know what they want to see but don’t understand the underlying details which are more mathematical than the average engineer is able to work with. So the people working on engineering software are often physicists or applied mathematicians.

Depends on the task and the writing though doesn't it?

There's not that much depth in a lot of 'everyday' writing. For many tasks that means that you don't need to be hyperintelligent - reading a recipe or a shopping list, reading a newspaper article, etc.

My much larger company has got people already using various models through Bedrock because the Claude and OpenAI limits are too harsh and it's too expensive.

I think this is an age thing but I think young people getting into programming are dramatically underserved by not doing this. I think Claude/ChatGPT are great at getting answer to a specific question or set of questions and even going quite deep on it, but they don't offer the clarity of the human 'big picture' and 'right order for introducing these concepts' view on a topic, at least not yet.

Edit: I should say, topic conceptual based books I mean here. Something like 'Designing Data Intensive Pipelines', not 'Learn Python' which is out of date before it's even published

C APIs are much more annoying to wrap in Go than in Rust because of lack of enums (important) and unions (less important).