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virissimo

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Claude Science 22 days ago

It seems to me that LLM's could massively improve reproducibility issues if journals would require that the papers be reproducible by model X using a standardized prompt in < N minutes, etc...

Build Your Own ALU 2 months ago

I've been working through Nand2Tetris with my 13-year-old son, but the official hardware simulator was pretty overwhelming. That's why I built a browser version that tests the first 2 chapters, is simpler, and has a tighter feedback loop with more helpful hints.

Let me know what you think, especially if you are young or teaching young people. If you have any feedback, open an issue here or comment below: https://github.com/jaysonvirissimo/build-your-own-alu.

It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.

I'm beginning to homeschool my kids in computing, and we are pairing up chapters of The Elements of Computing System (the Nand2Tetris book) with games that teach similar skills/kinds of thinking (Human Resource Machine, Comet 64, etc...), but we didn't find anything to supplement the first two chapters (where you build basic chips up to an ALU in HDL). I ended up starting creating a kind of browser based kata for those chapters here:

https://virissimo.info/build-your-own-alu/

LMK what you think.

Some left-coded popular conspiracies:

1. The Iraq war was a plot to steal oil reserves

2. World Economic Forum / IMF intentionally impoverish nations

3. Police across America are systematically hunting and executing Black men (thousands per year), but are protected by racist institutions

4. Trump assassination attempts were false flag operations

5. Big Pharma deliberately hides natural cures for cancer to protect corporate profits

SQL Anti-Patterns 9 months ago

There are ZIP codes that overlap a city and also an unincorporated area. Furthermore, there are zip codes that overlap different states. A data model that renders these unrepresentable may come back to bite you.

While it's true that CNN ran an article like that, the underlying claim has been formally rebutted by the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Association, who clarified that:

Women who experience miscarriage are not required to notify law enforcement and should not fear prosecution…recent public statements do not reflect the consensus of West Virginia prosecutors.

https://wchstv.com/news/local/wva-prosecuting-attorneys-deno...

Many European scholars did consider Troy fictional. For example, Jacob Bryant's "A Dissertation concerning the War of Troy" (1796) explicitly argued that Troy never existed as a real city and that the Trojan War was purely mythological. He thought Homer's place names derived from Egyptian and Phoenician religious vocabulary, so the entire Trojan War narrative should be interpreted as imported solar allegory without any historical basis.

Your original claim was that "only European powers had the urge for colonization," but now you're citing Arab, Egyptian, and Phoenician examples. Do you see these as exceptions? If so, wouldn't that contradict your original claim? Or are you reconsidering your definition of colonialism—or using "European" in a broader sense (that somehow includes Arabs and Egyptians)?

Only european powers had the urge for colonization, no other civilization in Americas, Africa or Asia really ever want to colonize, expand perhaps but not really colonize.

* Inca Empire: Relocated entire communities (the mitmaqkuna) into new provinces to cement imperial control—these were explicit colonies with an imposed administrative and cultural framework.

* Ancient Egypt: Occupied Nubia, built forts, stationed garrisons, and imposed Egyptian officials and religion on the local population.

* Mongol Empire: Installed governors across conquered regions stretching from Eastern Europe to East Asia, moved artisans and workers to bolster Mongol centers, and demanded tribute—hallmarks of a colonial system.

* Imperial China: Established commanderies in newly acquired territories (e.g., southern China), encouraged Han settlement, and superimposed its bureaucracy over local governance.

I did a year of computer science, but ended up going to App Academy with an ISA, because I couldn't really afford another couple of years. If ISAs are indentured servitude, but are still better than going to university, then what does that say about universities?

Perhaps we should have different words for voluntary (choosing to regain your hearing, etc...) and coercive (forced sterilization, etc...) "eugenics", since almost all of the negative connotations of the word are (rightly, IMO) attributed only to the latter.

jhbadger: But logicism, the idea that all of math can be reduced to logic, is itself a controversial philosophical thesis!

His likelihood of re-offending is low because he now has a near universally bad reputation and so is much less likely to be trusted with other people's money in the first place.

Whether that means he should have a shorter sentence depends on the purpose of criminal sentences. If the purpose is punishment or deterrence, re-offense probability isn't as relevant, but if it is merely to protect others while he is put away, it is the most relevant consideration.