r-bryan

7 ms·

1.
by r-bryan 4mo ago
Why does a carpenter cut the end off a 10-foot board to get a required 9ft-2in, thereby wasting 8% of the input and incurring dumpster charges? Suppose the architect's design specified the cutlist, to be transmitted to the board "
2.
by r-bryan 1y ago
Check out this 156-page tome: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13478 : "Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges" The intro says that it "...serves a dual purpose: on one hand, it
3.
by r-bryan 1y ago
Methinks Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment finds some empirical support here.
4.
by r-bryan 1y ago
Oh FFS why is print-vs-debug being debated as either/or? Both can be valuable, depending on the circumstances. It's clearly both/and.
5.
by r-bryan 2y ago
Well dang, we are not restricted to git as the only place we can put historical metadata. You know, discursive comments, for starters?
6.
by r-bryan 2y ago
I once worked with a company that provided IM services to hyper competitive, testosterone poisoned options traders. On the first fine trading day of a January new year, our IM provider rolled out an incompatible "upgrade" to some
7.
by r-bryan 2y ago
Yeah, basically the oil companies pumping up fossil fuel to burn, but we get a single use of it as plastic before it goes to the incinerator.
8.
by r-bryan 2y ago
A little stoichometry suggests that, ignoring oxygen, hydrogen, and energy input, the cited worldwide market for C2H4 would be satisfied by just about 1 gigaton of CO2. So if "we need to process gigatons of CO2 annually", that eth
9.
by r-bryan 2y ago
Earth escape velocity is 11.1 km/s, which is Mach 32 at sea level. They have some more engineering to do, maybe even invent something better than carbon fibers.
10.
by r-bryan 2y ago
"Always be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
11.
by r-bryan 3y ago
OK, but I'd rather prevent/cure the dementia.
12.
by r-bryan 3y ago
I can highly recommend Epsilon (emacs-like) from lugaru.com.
13.
by r-bryan 4y ago
Be an engineering mentor for your local high school robotics club. From personal experience, I can guarantee that you will come upon aspects of engineering where you are a rank newbie, yet wish you had even a little competence. It's ex
14.
by r-bryan 4y ago
There is an unfortunate fallacy here. Your notion "the real world" conflates the physical world with a social milieu. The physical world is (at this scale) immutable, so of course we must conform to it and update our science-like
15.
by r-bryan 5y ago
This scenario is very reminiscent of the leadup to the Innovator's Dilemma. The dinosaurs grow taller and fatter seeking and thriving on the juicy foliage higher up the tree, while the scrappy little mammals claw away at its soft unde
16.
by r-bryan 5y ago
I dunno. Don't we have yet to resolve where the curly braces belong, or emacs vs vi, or mac vs pc, or red sox vs yankees, or at least what materials to use for the staff bikeshed?
17.
by r-bryan 5y ago
The author missed Symbolics Document Examiner and its partner, Concordia, dating from around 1985. Disclaimer: I led the implementation team.
18.
by r-bryan 5y ago
As Carl Sagan might have said, "To build a platform from scratch, you must first create the universe."
19.
by r-bryan 5y ago
I don't see why zero-growth has to be zero-sum. If not all the "labor" inputs are eaten up by society-wide subsistence, some value will continue to accumulate, somewhere. To the degree that owners allow the workers to retain
20.
by r-bryan 6y ago
The book _Writing on Both Sides of the Brain_ (Henriette Klauser) got me unstuck. Ignoring the left-brain/right-brain stuff, imagine that you have a creative, let it fly part and a critical editor part. Constant criticism from the edit
21.
by r-bryan 6y ago
Cool. Now solve it for a circular fence on the surface of a sphere. In fact, solve all four cases {exterior, interior of sphere} X {exterior, interior of fence}. Spherical trig can only make the solution(s) even more heroic, right?
22.
by r-bryan 6y ago
Maybe it was ObjectStore (read about it on Wikipedia). Pretty clever, I thought.
23.
by r-bryan 6y ago
That PDF document was produced by some historical interviewers, not Symbolics. Your comment roundly criticizes Symbolics for someone else's work. Only in the words it contains does it have anything to do with Symbolics documentation!
24.
by r-bryan 6y ago
DIY appendectomy? Fine, suture self.
25.
by r-bryan 6y ago
As a mentor for a high school robotics club, I have learned the freeing joy of tinkering, as opposed to the engineering I have done my whole career. It's great to work with foamcore, X-acto knife, glue gun, little motors and electroni
26.
by r-bryan 6y ago
No, suggests my experience. For me, after somehow squeezing through DiffEq, I met complex analysis, taught by the math department. I started the semester, got way behind, dropped it. Did that a second time. The third time my advisor wou
27.
by r-bryan 6y ago
Without getting all quantum about it, it seems to work by configuring the graphene as one electrode (or both) of a capacitor. As the graphene flaps in the breeze (actually Brownian motion, I assume), the changing geometry will change the c
28.
by r-bryan 6y ago
Unless I'm creatively remembering, Dave Moon's EGC (Ephemeral Garbage Collector) in Symbolics Genera in 1985(?) had three generations.
29.
by r-bryan 6y ago
I can recommend _The Happiness Hypothesis - Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom_, by Jonathan Haidt, as relevant here. The book was suggested to me by a CBT practitioner. It languished on my shelf for several years because it sat adjace
30.
by r-bryan 6y ago
Hatred. Stupidity. Devotion. Greed: The four horsemen of the new Apocalypse. --Salman Rushdie (I forget which book)

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