tinym

Are there any architectural blogs you recommend?

To your point they also, like, wrote their own PHP interpreter. If you asked your Facebook interviewer about PHP you'd probably get an interesting answer!

I think the example of video games and movies is instructive - there's always a ton of "cut content". In software, we can always change the requirements to meet a deadline :)

No, the mysteries that "are deep, hard to understand, and not worth the effort" are why Scientific American is publishing this junk article. My lay theory is that SA hasn't been worth reading in decades and basically nobody can write well about quantum mechanics for a casual audience..

The skill-based matchmaking that's popular today is optimized for setting up a fair game, ie. theres a roughly 50/50 chance of either side winning. It makes logical sense, but it turns out nobody actually wants a fair match!

Rather the opposite - us-west-2 is big but not the biggest region, or the smallest, or the oldest or newest, it's not partitioned off like the China or GovCloud regions. Because us-west-2 is fairly typical it tends to be one of the last regions to get software updates, after they've been tested in prod elsewhere

They're different doctors! Surgeons are a subset of doctors, and plastic surgeons are the ones who decided to chase money over glory

It's hilarious that the replies in this thread are mostly people arguing bitterly about how to make pancakes

It's probably been in a lot of movies, but I've always loved this scene in THE CORE where they land a space shuttle in the LA river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg

Well, at least once, recently

People here know offhand what they weigh in pounds, and the packaging on food lists macronutrient content in grams. The article could've listed g/kg as well, but for a US audience g/lb isn't particularly wacky.

Only slightly pedantic: The United States has been at war for just over 16 years now.

This isn't the first round of AI that's been useful for "large-scale profitable applications"

Well; good?

At the very least:

* What people buy * What people want * What people say they want * What people would actually enjoy * ...

The current theory is that particles are waves, or rather localized excitations ('bumps') in a field. One of the surprising things from quantum theory is that these bumps have a finite minimum size, and they can only increase in multiples of that size; this unit is what we call 'a particle'.

This model seems to work (makes accurate numerical predictions, etc.) for all the known fields other than gravity, so physicists think there should be a 'graviton', ie quantum of the gravitational field. But they haven't been detected directly and we don't have a good mathematical theory of them (for a bunch of reasons I don't understand, but I think "gravity is really weak" and "gravity is nonlinear" are a good start)

Would pessimism help?

I had a bramble of related ideas in mind, and instead of putting in effort to untangle them I lazily let them came out as a pithy aphorism. But:

- Even if all of Musk's enterprises were aimed at colonizing Mars (like gp suggested), they can be quite useful here.

- Turning Mars into a self-sufficient habitat is both an absurdly long-term (and laudable) goal and no guarantee of survival. We have to worry about the problems of surviving on Earth today and, in the very long run, how to live in many other places.

(upvoted your comment, because I agree with it)

By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll know how to make a home on Earth.

He maintains that attitude deliberately (it's part of the joke).

I agree with you very strongly, but I want to reframe it a bit: the fact that there is no "true self" and "we are in control of who we are" is basically the modern condition, and the 'be yourself' mantra is one attempt at an answer to this.

You've seen their merits, then - now think about when they would be worth taking...

The article was posted October 18, 2016.

Woit's language is usually so measured it's actually shocking to see him straight up call someone 'embarrassingly incompetent'

There's a lot to be said about the vagaries of workplace romance - but don't just fucking grope your coworkers!

>I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else.

This is an aside, and I don't particularly want to evaluate it as good or bad, but this statement is striking compared to the neoliberal idea of 'a rising tide lifts all boats' - i.e. increasing general prosperty raises prosperity for the lowest individuals.

One hopes Betteridge's law is in effect

Eilenberg & Mac Lane needed a word like 'set', 'group', 'class', etc, except of course those were all taken. They claim to have gotten the word 'category' from Kant, although they didn't intend an actual semantic relation.

At least within mathematics and physics, 'the properties of one defines the properties of the other' is a pretty good explanation of what's meant by 'duality'. Looking at that wiki list it explains all of the dualities I'm familiar with except (maybe?) the wave-particle duality.