jprival

11 ms·

1.
by jprival 2y ago
I think Scheme works well for the kind of conceptual overview the course is trying to provide. I think there is something to the argument that Scheme syntax is not ideal for readability of larger programs, but I would wager that the bigger
2.
by jprival 2y ago
> Paracetamol is an anticholinergic isn’t it? No, per https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15... Can’t say whether it’s good for your brain otherwise.
3.
by jprival 2y ago
because of his sort of ascetic impulses in other domains one doesn’t imagine him as particularly hard-living, but this 2002 ilxor thread (bumped for his death) suggests that he had his first heart attack way back: https://www.ilx
4.
by jprival 2y ago
It’s not a particularly fair accounting of the framing of the article, which also profiles people who are working precisely on making the technology more practical and portable and ends on a hopeful note. For the time being it’s a high main
5.
by jprival 2y ago
To look is to train one’s eyes on, or to scan for, something. To see is to perceive it. So one can look without seeing, and one can also see something without intentionally looking.
6.
by jprival 2y ago
OECD definition > any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS I don’t think that includes any of those, and Xanax is not fluorinated at all. You might have been th
7.
by jprival 2y ago
Also sometimes they do make really painful and arbitrary UI/UX changes - don’t get me started on the iOS podcast app. Personally I’m all for preserving keyboard shortcuts because that’s something I really internalize but it would be ha
8.
by jprival 2y ago
> enter doesn't open the folder That’s a little like complaining that Alt-F4 is unintuitive, isn’t it? It’s historical continuity. On the other hand, they changed Command-N… > there is only a back button and not a go up directory
9.
by jprival 2y ago
> This is despite the arrival of a boom in funding due to the generative model bubble. Does the boom in funding for AI companies make up for the overall drop in funding from late 10s-early 20s heights? That would not be my guess offhand,
10.
by jprival 2y ago
Reminds me tangentially of the study that found that strong chess players were much worse at recalling randomized positions than realistic ones: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03200937.pdf I’
11.
by jprival 2y ago
The appeal of prompting a whole song into existence kind of baffles me for the same reasons you are suggesting but there’s room for fun and creativity in working with samples and given the substantial cottage industry that royalty-free samp
12.
by jprival 3y ago
>Five years ago people were in agreement that the turing test was a really good test The limitations of the Turing test have been discussed for much longer than that. Ironically its dependence on human judgement is arguably a weak point.
13.
by jprival 3y ago
“Functional style” doesn’t offer the same guarantees, sure, but I wouldn’t underestimate the structural and readability benefits it can offer for certain kinds of tasks.
14.
by jprival 3y ago
It’s a pretty good bet that quaternary ammonium compounds are used to wipe many surfaces wherever you are. They are probably the most widely used non-chlorine disinfectants.
15.
by jprival 3y ago
There’s a graph in this very article that answers that question. Heroin deaths have declined significantly as fentanyl has displaced heroin on the market, but fentanyl deaths are far higher than heroin deaths ever were, because it’s far eas
16.
by jprival 3y ago
Worth noting that glucose meters are OTC. Continuous monitoring solutions generally seem to require a prescription, though there are telehealth companies that will help you sort that out. According to the article what the FDA really obje
17.
by jprival 3y ago
I recall certain intro CS courses being calibrated to be difficult enough to fit with the department’s (generally tough) grading guidelines without actually applying a strict curve to exam results after the fact, so as to encourage students
18.
by jprival 3y ago
I see a lot of conflation of “companies are shifting their product focus to AI” - which everybody knows everybody is doing - and “companies are replacing staff with AI.” To be fair the latter aligns nicely with the “bloat-shedding” rational
19.
by jprival 3y ago
I thought “Bard” was an Asimov reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) (on top of the more obvious references)
20.
by jprival 3y ago
About 420 ppm, an increase of about 120 ppm in the past 100 years? This is a strange question since it is obvious that it’s heavily “looked into” and easy to look up, and simultaneously hard to figure out what rhetorical point is being made
21.
by jprival 3y ago
Yeah the Power Macintosh line, as the name suggests, introduced PowerPC in 1994. There were Performa versions of those as well. Jobs’ return as CEO roughly coincided with the beginning of the G3 era (calling them that instead of PowerPC 740
22.
by jprival 3y ago
“rips” -> “kilorips” etc.
23.
by jprival 3y ago
> What are the benefits these chemicals have provided They have a lot of properties that can be useful in materials - hydrophobicity, lipophobicity, chemical resistance, low friction, etc. They are certainly used in some niches (like med
24.
by jprival 3y ago
I’m just used to seeing annual flu death counts that look more like this: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html . My first guess would be that it’s an issue of “confirmed” vs. “estimated” - and I’m s
25.
by jprival 3y ago
it’s been about 3x as bad as flu in January: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm edit: which is higher than some recent annual flu totals they have, but considerably lower than estimates
26.
by jprival 3y ago
Recalls Dick Van Dyke (still alive, by the way) being a VFX and 3D modeling hobbyist in the Video Toaster/LightWave Amiga days.
27.
by jprival 3y ago
Surely Apple recognizes “*nix-sphere web software developers who want a nice laptop” as one of their target professional markets in the OSX era, too. That’s sold a hell of a lot of MacBooks. It’s developers of software for their own platfo
28.
by jprival 3y ago
[2] doesn’t actually seem to call out California by name, though. It would have been a little unfair if he had, since California’s most famous public university was teaching intro CS with Scheme and SICP at the time.
29.
by jprival 3y ago
I don’t think the autonomous vehicle example and the radiology example are really analogous. I’ve agreed for a long time with the premise that an “almost self-driving” car isn’t much good - certainly at the consumer level the whole value pr
30.
by jprival 3y ago
My first ever programming book, a well-intentioned gift from my parents, was “Sam’s Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes ” - meant of course as a quick reference but always conceptually funny to me because… it’s C++.

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