tristramb

6 ms·

1.
by tristramb 1mo ago
You might be thinking of Russell's Principles of Mathematics which is a bit easier going.
2.
by tristramb 1mo ago
"Principia Mathematica is an odd book, worth looking into from a historical point of view as well as a mathematical one. It was written around 1910, and mathematical logic was still then in its infancy, fresh from the transformation wo
3.
by tristramb 1mo ago
Reminds me of a 'mimoid' from Stanisław Lem's Solaris.
4.
by tristramb 2mo ago
He learnt the hard way (as did all those who followed him into Russia)
5.
by tristramb 2mo ago
A year ago I started sending postcards to my 91 year old father because he has difficulties with modern forms of communication. They do still exist but you have to search for them.
6.
by tristramb 4mo ago
Its so the monsters can't see you.
7.
by tristramb 4mo ago
Or reading a forum populated only by bots.
8.
by tristramb 5mo ago
He liked to be able to reason about programs without running them. He preferred simpler languages because they contain less irrelevant noise which got in the way of that.
9.
by tristramb 5mo ago
"Kinda hard to find where Dijkstra praised something (except Algol 60)." Hamilton Richards, who was one of Dijkstra's colleagues at the University of Texas, told me in an email that Dijkstra was impressed by the work of Richa
10.
by tristramb 5mo ago
If the transients occur immediately following the nuclear explosions but not before them, then the correlation together with the earth shadow deficit suggests that the transients are caused by reflective debris produced by the nuclear explo
11.
by tristramb 5mo ago
Use the Tor browser
12.
by tristramb 5mo ago
Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not necessarily that it doesn't work but that it becomes impos
13.
by tristramb 5mo ago
But it was like this before. Its just that now the sewer that was keeping it all hidden has now broken and it is spewing out all over the world.
14.
by tristramb 6mo ago
Just behind me where I am sitting at the moment I have 21 RUBs containing my collection of about 42000 pinned out flies (mostly). The RUBs are stacked in and on top of bookshelves. I seem to remember that you could buy a rack to hold them b
15.
by tristramb 6mo ago
"To explain what I was doing in logic-driven software architecture I looked for a good metaphor and, on the spot, proposed that there was a kind of “contract” between caller and callee. He did not say anything, but his mere presence ha
16.
by tristramb 6mo ago
"Around Easter 1961, a course on ALGOL 60 was offered in Brighton, England, with Peter Naur, Edsger W. Dijkstra, and Peter Landin as tutors. I attended this course with my colleague in the language project, Jill Pym, our divisional Tec
17.
by tristramb 6mo ago
I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watching the disaster unfold. I am happy to be out of it. So lo
18.
by tristramb 6mo ago
It's not unlikely that Donald Knuth looked at examples of 16th Century typesetting when he came to design TeX. Or looked at examples of typesetting that had been influenced by 16th Century typsetting.
19.
by tristramb 7mo ago
I think it is a good general principle that, for any process that is likely to be a tempting target for scammers, you should require a non-electronic step to initiate that process. Requiring a physical letter of application for a job, for e
20.
by tristramb 7mo ago
It doesn't have to prevent the scam completely, it just has to make harder for them to scam you than it would be to move on to scam someone else.
21.
by tristramb 7mo ago
I seem to remember (but I can't find the source) that Wirth initially had three aims in designing Pascal: 1. To use it in teaching a structure programming course to new students. As in the late 60's all student programming was bat
22.
by tristramb 8mo ago
Personal freedom includes not being manipulated by commercial interests.
23.
by tristramb 8mo ago
The Empire was self-financing. Taxes on trade paid for the ships and sailors to protect the trade routes (with a fair bit left over).
24.
by tristramb 8mo ago
Many years ago (or so it seems now), I was turned on to slime moulds by the photos of Kim Fleming on Flickr ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/myriorama/albums/1271006/ ). The undersides of logs can be a good
25.
by tristramb 8mo ago
The Grothendieck method can be applied to implementing a new feature in a software system. You just refactor the existing code until the implementation of the new feature becomes trivial.
26.
by tristramb 9mo ago
In 'Managing Technical People', 1997, page 199, Watts Humphrey says that, after several failed attempts to produce a PC by IBM procedures, they set up an independent team that could skip the procedures as necessary to get the job
27.
by tristramb 9mo ago
I recently came to realise that my memories of my experiences of early childhood are probably greatly affected by seeing my younger siblings going through those same experiences a few years later. At age five or six I would see my mother re
28.
by tristramb 10mo ago
It always pleases me to see pictures of NGC 4216, the edge-on spiral galaxy with a star beside its nucleus. I used to use it as a pointer to the short-period contact binary star CC Comae Berenices back when I used observe eclipsing binaries
29.
by tristramb 11mo ago
Same here. My first though was 'This is an AI prompt.'
30.
by tristramb 11mo ago
+1 for quoting Kipling in 2025

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