garethrees

5 ms·

1.
by garethrees 2y ago
Looking at Inferno book 4 (the virtuous pagans), Jacopo gives us notes for the Pleiad Electra at 4.121; for Hector at 4.122; Julius Caesar at 4.123; Camilla and Penthesilea at 4.124; Latinus at 4.125; Brutus, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia at
2.
by garethrees 2y ago
I am not sure that "Dante is clearly writing in the expectation that his audience will know these references" as claimed in the article. He put a lot of learning into the work, and maybe he had in mind an ideal reader who could fo
3.
by garethrees 3y ago
Language models are based on probabilities of tokens appearing in a context. For illustration purposes, imagine a very simple model with just one token of context that has been trained on a corpus of three sentences, all of which are true,
4.
by garethrees 4y ago
Another way to sum a column of numbers uses calc: M-x calc-grab-rectangle RET V R +
5.
by garethrees 4y ago
A couple of issues that came up for me when porting from x86 to ARM recently: 1. The x86 architecture gives programmers a lot of memory ordering guarantees, so that communication of values between threads does not usually need memory fences
6.
by garethrees 4y ago
Jeannette Power's "Observations physiques sur le poulpe de l'Argonauta argo" (1856) is available at the Internet Archive [1]. [1] https://archive.org/details/b2228476x
7.
by garethrees 4y ago
This bit of speculation goes back at least to David Eugene Smith (1925), "History of Mathematics", volume II, page 59: "There is a possibility that the Romans avoided IV, the initials of IVPITER, just as the Hebrews avoided י
8.
by garethrees 7y ago
> Typically pretty wet weather for the (spring) race Paris–Roubaix is certainly memorable when it's wet and muddy, but the last time it happened was in 2002! Early spring is the driest part of the year in north-eastern France, and s
9.
by garethrees 7y ago
A warning heuristic needs to have a low false positive rate; a low false negative rate is nice but is not necessary. The purpose of a warning is to detect some common errors without inconveniencing too many correct programs. If some other e
10.
by garethrees 7y ago
Here's the letter from Chris Boardman and the other commissioners, which doesn't seem to be linked from the Guardian story: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/2145/19-1309-s...
11.
by garethrees 7y ago
This seems like a good idea to me, since there's evidence that programmers are making this mistake, and the proposal is to add a warning only for the expressions that are most likely to be mistakes, that is 2^{decimal integer literal}
12.
by garethrees 7y ago
Discussed a couple of days ago in the context of average Uber speeds in London and other congested cities [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113084
13.
by garethrees 7y ago
This is a well-known principle of urban transport. If driving is faster than the alternative transport mode (whether that's public transport, if any, or walking), then at the margins people will switch to driving, but that means more t
14.
by garethrees 7y ago
The difficulty of Chaucer for modern English speakers is exaggerated because of the unfamiliar spelling. The reason that modern editions don't modernise the spelling is that if you do this it becomes hard to figure out the rhythm. For
15.
by garethrees 8y ago
This one-line shell script is a bit simpler: base64 /dev/urandom | head -c 16 (Vary the number of characters according to the desired entropy: you get 6 bits of entropy for each character of output, so 16*6 = 96 bits in t
16.
by garethrees 8y ago
It's slightly more efficient to squeeze non-alphabetic characters first and then convert to lowercase, rather than vice versa, because in the former case most of the non-alphabetic characters only get processed once, compared to twice
17.
by garethrees 8y ago
McIlroy's claim was not that his script is the shortest possible way to implement the task, but rather that the Unix philosophy of combining general-purpose tools operating on text streams is a better engineering approach than Knuth&#x
18.
by garethrees 8y ago
The film was based on the novel "No Highway" (1948) by Nevil Shute, who had worked as an aeronautical engineer at De Havilland.
19.
by garethrees 8y ago
Do you mean Aaron Swartz?
20.
by garethrees 8y ago
The linked post is a bit poorly expressed, but I think there is a good point there: fixed-size binary floating-point numbers are a compromise, and they are a poor compromise for some applications, and difficult to use reliably without knowi
21.
by garethrees 8y ago
The description must be sufficiently similar to something that did happen, though, for you to be confident that you recognise the incident.
22.
by garethrees 8y ago
In C you avoid signed integer overflow either by knowing that the result will be in range before applying an operation, or, as a last resort, by testing that the operation is defined before carrying it out. For example, if a and b are ints,
23.
by garethrees 8y ago
The purpose of the letter lock is to detect tampering: that is, to make it difficult for an eavesdropper to open and read the letter without leaving evidence of having done so. The standard letter lock was a wax seal: that is a blob of seal
24.
by garethrees 8y ago
There doesn't seem to be any pointer dereference on the line that paavoova quoted, so I don't see how your comment applies.
25.
by garethrees 8y ago
The cast is defined by ISO/IEC 9899:1990 §6.3.2.3.1, since block is a pointer to void, and struct header_t is an object type: "A pointer to void may be converted to or from a pointer to any incomplete or object type." The sub
26.
by garethrees 8y ago
There is a particular use case which leads to frustration with Python 3, if you don't know the latin1 trick. The use case is when you have to deal with files that are encoded in some unknown ASCII-compatible encoding. That is, you know
27.
by garethrees 8y ago
> Mind you he still that the bottom spokes of a wheel are in compression I think you might want to read pages 7–8 again: "Wires must be tensioned to prevent their buckling under load. With tension, wires can support compression load
28.
by garethrees 8y ago
Ian Stewart's article in Scientific American was based on "Train Sets" by Adam Chalcraft and Michael Greene (Eureka 53, pp. 5–12), which also provides the basis of the Duplo constructions. (But note that Duplo has linked poin
29.
by garethrees 8y ago
This is a great achievement, but the headline is misleading because it's only Portugal's ELECTRICITY GENERATION that (temporarily) reached 100% renewable, and electricity constitutes only about 25% of Portugal's energy consum
30.
by garethrees 8y ago
This is a good question and doesn't deserve to be downvoted. I think the reason must be that the problem lies in the intersection of three areas of development (the C programming language, the C standard library, and the POSIX operatin

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