aoanla

9 ms·

1.
by aoanla 1y ago
Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in the session). This is active learnin
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by aoanla 2y ago
Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)
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by aoanla 2y ago
Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in sidebars and the like.
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by aoanla 2y ago
I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to support them with Linux (or any other OS...) than
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by aoanla 2y ago
I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves their sanity...
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by aoanla 2y ago
I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks (plus, I found them a
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by aoanla 2y ago
I mean, it does - people search stuff all the time now, rather than thinking about it.
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by aoanla 2y ago
N-body problems can't be analytically solved. However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermediate states along the way In the case of the solar sy
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by aoanla 2y ago
Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited metric.
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by aoanla 2y ago
It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same property.
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by aoanla 3y ago
Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install. Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to plot" is now o
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by aoanla 3y ago
Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new
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by aoanla 3y ago
The classic of this field of books is Abramowitz and Stegun's "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" - although the two listed names are merely those of the compilation editors, as the calculations of the numerous tables of val
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by aoanla 3y ago
Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable
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by aoanla 3y ago
Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea: The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the fringe theory that gravity is really due to high frequency
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by aoanla 3y ago
Back in 2011, the UK Government commissioned an "independent review" of copyright etc (The Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property"). It broadly agrees with your ideas - at least in terms of the fact that copyright is far
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by aoanla 3y ago
I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others - however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am more just making the gentle point that people
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by aoanla 3y ago
I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you. I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a
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by aoanla 3y ago
Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despite being an active computer gamer at the time, and
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by aoanla 3y ago
I don't know, the brief time I spent with D:OS2, there was quite a lot of inventory shenanigans.
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by aoanla 3y ago
Absolutely. I watched a few people playing Early Access builds of BG3, and I can't believe more people aren't put off by how overly flashy everything is. Characters models overact expressions, and even the simplest action in comba
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by aoanla 3y ago
I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2. I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but didn't make it past the early parts due to being annoyed
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by aoanla 4y ago
The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it's much more debatable as to t
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by aoanla 4y ago
Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves , but the "Dodge" sequence ( REAMDE and Fall ) becomes blata
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by aoanla 4y ago
This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future tech thriller and part-1940s spy thriller, Seveneves (as note
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by aoanla 4y ago
I think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story whi
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by aoanla 4y ago
Yeah, I think the dissonance I fundamentally had with the ending of The Diamond Age is that it seems to not have any sense of irony (or any concept that, maybe, the Seed might not be the awful idea that his protagonists are trying to sell
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by aoanla 5y ago
There's an implicit assumption here that the "purpose of [physics] research" must necessarily result in concrete results in order to be "worthwhile". A lot of theoretical physics, at least, is increasingly really ma