kawa

8 ms·

1.
by kawa 2y ago
Their starship was bullshit. On earth they needed a big Saturn 5 like rocket to bring it into space and later they fly into orbit like it's nothing. If the planets they visited had much lower gravity then earth this may be possible, bu
2.
by kawa 2y ago
> What determinism do you argue does truly fall out in the end? Mechanics is fully deterministic. The question is if there is some kind of "QM random generator" which mixes into this, making things nondeterministic in the end.
3.
by kawa 2y ago
(Spoilers) I think that the part about the guy who's brain traveled to the Trisolarians and communicated back by telling a fairy-tale may be a story about the author himself: He's also in an authoritarian regime and unable to tell
4.
by kawa 2y ago
> Just because a system is randomized doesn't mean it's not predictable That's of course true (In fact I tend to also believe in a non-deterministic universe "at the core"). But if determinism falls out in the en
5.
by kawa 2y ago
> Sure, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it will be some kind of deterministic computation underneath The universe behaves very deterministically if we look at "clumps of matter". Why is it this way when this
6.
by kawa 2y ago
> The best models Yes, models. But a model doesn't need to be "real", it just models something real to a certain extent. But models tend to break down if you look close enough, and I think this may also happen to QM at s
7.
by kawa 3y ago
"Thou" sounds very similar to german "du" which is the current informal form. In older german the second person plural ('Ihr', similar to "vous" french from which "you" may come) was also t
8.
by kawa 3y ago
An "unpure FP" is a procedural programming language, because "unpure functions" are generally called "procedures". But people tend to avoid the name "procedural" at all cost - which is bad because pro
9.
by kawa 3y ago
Lisp is not a FP. It's a "List processing language" with some features based on Lambda calculus. Real FP means referential transparency and that started with languages like Miranda and later Haskell. What many people consider
10.
by kawa 6y ago
It's a little hyperbole but in principle it's true, especially in Germany. Of course you can like the concept of redistribution of income and wealth, but that doesn't makes it "blatantly wrong and reactionary".
11.
by kawa 8y ago
Yes, it's quite complicated now (but it's getting better). But it's not as easy as replacing it with something simpler. If you do, you will discover all the things you can't do with it. So you start to improve it, add fe
12.
by kawa 10y ago
There's violence and there is violence. While I can enjoy an action movie or an UFC match, watching images from the Holocaust still makes me sick.
13.
by kawa 10y ago
While people are of course more alike to each other than, for example humans and cows, there are still a lot of differences between single persons. People tend to assume that other think as they do, but that's one of the most common so
14.
by kawa 10y ago
If someone tries to explain stuff based on the "human psyche", it's important to understand that people aren't the same. If someone talks about "we" or "humanity" as a whole, he/she doesn't
15.
by kawa 10y ago
Interestingly the way the author understood the joke with the eggs doesn't speak to well of him: A human can't lay eggs, so the only sensible conclusion is that the deluded person isn't the brother who thinks that he is a chi
16.
by kawa 10y ago
Why allows it for free will? Consider those two situations: A: You know everything and decide about something based on all the facts known to you B: You know everything and decide about something based on all the facts known to you plus the
17.
by kawa 10y ago
Whats a "disease" and whats not is not easy to define. If we could look at the living brain at a microscopic level, comparing individual dopamine receptors and the connectome of individual brains, it would be quite easy to give ob
18.
by kawa 10y ago
Boys are more often diagnosed with ADHD (by a factor of 2 to 3) but that probably because boys simply have a higher base aggression level which is "added" to the ADHD symptoms which makes ADHD in boys easier noticeable than in gir
19.
by kawa 11y ago
The video discusses what engineering really is and what the differences are between software engineering and other kinds of engineering. Gives some food for thought and is kind of a well researched reply to http://www.theatlantic
20.
Is software engineering really engineering and how can we improve it?(youtube.com)
3 points by kawa 11y ago|1 comments
21.
by kawa 11y ago
If you make the opening shot in billiards, the balls are all over the table in the end. In principle you could now make another shot which restores the original, ordered position, but in practice it's impossible. So the opening shot is
22.
by kawa 11y ago
Observation means: Interaction with a 'classical system'. Now because of entanglement this also works if we look at chains of interactions: Interaction with another single atom for example is no observation, but if this other atom
23.
by kawa 11y ago
Politics works on a combination of public opinion and donations to candidates and parties. If you have a lot of money, it's quite easy to move things a bit in the direction you want. Also here, you're doing it for a "good cau
24.
by kawa 11y ago
There's only so much profit in the drug business because of the illegality of many drugs. Changing that would kill the profits of many very rich and powerful criminals and cartels. So it's very understandable that those people do
25.
by kawa 11y ago
The browser is the "de facto operating system" for the web and javascript is its programming language. Javascript really is the new BASIC...
26.
by kawa 12y ago
I would dismiss it as some crude conspiration-theory, but the fact that only 4 month later a plane of the same company has been shoot down under unclear circumstances over the Ukraine is really quite odd.
27.
by kawa 12y ago
All those languages look like a combination of Java and ML to me. Of course they use different features and small additions here and there but overall: ML+Java.
28.
by kawa 12y ago
BTW: Union types ("tagged unions") predate OOP by some years and thus were there long before OCaml or Haskell. Algol68 had them and also Pascal for example. The invention of ML was pattern matching on those data structures.
29.
by kawa 12y ago
I really ask myself why they insist to put the tabs on top. With todays widescreen-displays, putting them left or right makes more sense for most use cases (at least with FF its possible to get this via add-on). OTOH they try to get rid of
30.
by kawa 12y ago
But considering that the total amount of scientific knowledge is limited, linear progress will find "everything" in a manageable amount of time. Of course we don't know how big the percentage of our total knowledge is, but it

More ›