Xirdus

8 ms·

1.
by Xirdus 5d ago
Thermostats are made with way more granurality than needed, like body scales with 100 gram/quarter pound precision or battery testers with millivolt sensitivity. Most people have single zone HVAC with one controlling thermometer, and i
2.
by Xirdus 5d ago
Empirically, my wife can perceive a 0° change on a bad day. The same temperature can be too hot and too cold at the same time. That said, I have never encountered a situation where 1°F makes any difference. If somebody feels bad, it takes a
3.
by Xirdus 5d ago
In theory you can automate finding interesting research directions by identifying conjectures with many dependencies. And notation has never been mathematicians' forte, with them trying to cram the entirety of universe into single lett
4.
by Xirdus 5d ago
> Changing the name of a variable or block for example, could create “holes” in the calling sites WTF. Isn't the whole point of visual programming that you are NOT bound by the limitations of text as a medium? A block refers to a sp
5.
by Xirdus 5d ago
Almost every "normal" job has regular performance reviews where individual contributions, not collective outcomes, are reviewed and used as a sole input for raises, promotions, and firings. If you can't sufficiently document
6.
by Xirdus 5d ago
We had it (or one of the clones) in middle school, but it was a demo version that had saving disabled. Half of each class was messing with the turtle. The other half was writing down the code with pen and paper so that we can have it graded
7.
by Xirdus 5d ago
Counterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.
8.
by Xirdus 6d ago
Got it. But why?
9.
by Xirdus 6d ago
As far as I can tell, literally every single benefit of Fahrenheits I've ever heard of boils down to being used to dealing with numbers around 100 but not around -30. I have yet to hear about any such benefit that isn't 100% attri
10.
by Xirdus 7d ago
I regularly see people going over 110 MPH on European highways. And no, I don't consider it reasonable to arrest people just because they reached middle RPMs on the top gear of their cheap SUV.
11.
by Xirdus 7d ago
You can make pretty much the same chart for Celsius and it makes as much sense. 40 - scorching hot 35 - super hot 30 - sunny summer day 25 - nice warm weather 20 - nice breezy weather 15 - a little chilly 10 - bring a coat 5 - getting cold
12.
by Xirdus 7d ago
If it makes you feel better, in Poland we still use millimeters of mercury.
13.
by Xirdus 7d ago
The problem with "0F is fricking cold" is that so is 5F, and 10F, and even 15F to many people; and the difference between, say, -10F and +10F is pretty much none for practical purposes. Whereas knowing whether it was +1C or -1C du
14.
by Xirdus 7d ago
I really don't get this argument. Why does more extreme temperature mean that F makes more sense than C?
15.
by Xirdus 7d ago
Must be an Anglosphere thing. Every non-English computer and office software I've ever used correctly defaulted to A4.
16.
by Xirdus 8d ago
Parents used to offload parenting to streets, fields and forests for decades. I don't think the offloading is the cause. But switching the offloading provider to SOCIAL MEDIA (of which Youtube is one) might've been.
17.
by Xirdus 10d ago
Note that even "plain" JavaScript is very high-level with tons of abstractions. Most website features are one-liners that call into browser APIs where the actual implementation lives.
18.
by Xirdus 10d ago
Maybe not all AIs, but LLMs benefit immensely from abstraction. They are trained on human code, and human code usually uses very high abstraction - so high abstraction is overrepresented in training data compared to low level implementati
19.
by Xirdus 12d ago
There are teams that do work, and there are teams that don't do work. It's no coincidence that most documents exclusively benefit the latter. Ironically, the documents that would actually help people doing work are often missing a
20.
by Xirdus 12d ago
> The goal of this site is to educate users about how people lived, not educate them about stats. IMO. And IMO, a website that's 95% stats by volume very clearly is about stats. If the goal is teaching anything, it's teaching s
21.
by Xirdus 13d ago
Don't get me wrong. Planning is essential in getting anything done. But in my humble experience, 80% of planning documents are entirely useless, and the last 20% could be shortened by 80% without loss of quality. For other kinds of doc
22.
by Xirdus 13d ago
It's not a design flaw, it's a feature - a built-in scapegoat for everything that goes wrong!
23.
by Xirdus 13d ago
With been in delusional trance for 30+ years generating "value" in form of endless documents, analyses, memos, presentations, reviews, reports, and so on and so forth. The only thing that changed recently is that producing documen
24.
by Xirdus 13d ago
But "is far more likely to fall near the present" = "is far more likely to fall near the present". The author makes the claim about probability distribution themselves, then does the opposite.
25.
by Xirdus 13d ago
Traditionally, AGI means being capable of learning everything (not necessarily at once) that can be learned by the same AI agent. It differs from the commercially meaningful definition in that a standard specific-purpose-built AI can still
26.
by Xirdus 14d ago
Hardcoding feature flags prevents you from deploying the same build with different flag sets side by side and comparing results. Depending on the nature of the project, it might be irrelevant or it might be a deal breaker. Especially in clo
27.
by Xirdus 15d ago
Obviously it is. Just like when you give a monkey a camera and it takes a selfie, the photo is obviously yours. But the legal system doesn't care about obviousness.
28.
by Xirdus 15d ago
My point is exactly that there's no such thing as legally required quality management system for software. And that's what makes software development uniquely shitty in terms of not having documentation or following written instru
29.
by Xirdus 15d ago
The joke about software developers refusing to enter an airplane running their own code dates back at least 30 years. Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for qualit
30.
by Xirdus 15d ago
They're worse . See above.

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