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Re:Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell on Saturday September 26, 2026 @10:09AM (#49856736)
yes. do you have a more useful meaning for tensors?

MLIR distinguishes arrays and tensors by allowing array mutation, but not for tensors; which allows a large class of optimizations

though the internal representation is one and the same

i understand it is the same for SIMD aswell (modulo alignment etc)

my flight crashed... due to lack of memory i assume, brave browser. surprizingly little existential terror as it went down. i was quite brave about it
Re:An audit of the Bible and the God in it on Monday September 07, 2026 @09:46PM (#49604806)
a bunch of thoughts, and more than i will list here:

"I know I am good because I know my inner thoughts. Even toward people who didn’t deserve kindness" ... why doesnt that make you irrational? some people are not good enough to deserve your kindness, but you yourself are sooo good that...

"logically: If being a good person, truly, fundamentally good, isn’t enough to earn divine grace" ... you are this good? think of it this way: eternal divine perfection self-giving, etc, and in your short life, you have earned all that, you are good enough to claim it all as rightfully yours; who is anyone else to pay their life in your place and sacrifice their everything, when you are already... better than them

i read an independent study that found other ai were all left of center (how ever one measures that, sentiment analysis normalized to a given population??). they said grok was evenly left/right split

but what's to validate any given population as centrist anyway

they suggested the ai opinion drift was caused by internet demographics not directly reflecting actual population i.e. California publishes more etc

i mean, well done

> using direct mutual recursion instead of array-stack machinery

the reason for array-stacks is using recursion can "blow the stack" i.e. has almost arbitrary failure on deeply nested pathological inputs

using recursion is going to be faster, to about the degree you bench, but there is a reason the parser you bench against doesn't use it!

Re:Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine on Thursday February 12, 2026 @03:51AM (#46986368)
ive owned two cars. the modern backup camera means the new one has small "stylish...." rear windows. it is wayyyy more dangerous than the older one with no sensors

i only have those two data points; but give me an older car with larger windows every. single. time.

Re:Devastating BBC Memo in Full on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @12:14PM (#45889998)
thanks, i found that main link to be a paywall

do you still put source links in that case -- since many will click and not be able to access it?

Re:Devastating BBC Memo in Full on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @12:11PM (#45889952)
thanks for the reply

ive lived a large part of my life in the Middle East, so my opinion of bias is formed from seeing news outlets write about situations ive lived in

> So ask yourself, which direction is the BBC bias truly happening?

i have. im not asking who is committing war crimes. im saying bias needs to be fixed -- the issues presented in the report are massive irrespective of who committed war crimes!!

and if we desire to truly and correctly ascribe war crimes, then we must start with removing bias. else we lay error ontop of error

Re:Devastating BBC Memo in Full on Monday November 10, 2025 @11:39AM (#45877709)
by no means an overview of the situations, but good to give quick excerpts from one of the issues in the report:

This was not the first or last time the BBC has reported stories about starvation in Gaza without telling audiences that the person highlighted has pre-existing medical conditions that might explain their emaciated appearance

... The same programme also featured images of baby Siwar Ashour who suffered from allergies and required specialist formula. She also had a congenital oesophageal condition, which had been reported in The Guardian.

By the time of broadcast, the BBC already knew the story was out of date and that baby Siwar had received the necessary formula a week earlier, she was maintaining weight and had been discharged from hospital. None of that was revealed in the programme - meaning the BBC had broadcast another inaccurate story.

--

Former ICJ President Joan Donoghue told BBC’s HardTalk programme the media had widely misinterpreted its findings. She said it was not correct to say the ICJ had ruled there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza.

But a report to the EGSC flagged “numerous instances” of the phrase being used on BBC reports, analysis and live two-ways on both television and radio. It was also cited by International Editor Jeremy Bowen and on Newsnight.

The report said there were too many instances of the BBC misrepresenting the ICJ’s ruling to be listed in full.

--

The strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area. The source for both stories was the Hamas controlled Gaza Civil Defence Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage.

The internal report to the EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.

One online story incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied.

It seems that the most likely explanation was the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israel ground forces.

The EGSC was reminded that the BBC had itself reported extensively on Palestinians digging these graves at the time. These reports had topped its bulletins.

How could this then be forgotten in the subsequent BBC coverage that suggested something more sinister had occurred? The EGSC was offered no explanation.

The question becomes even more pressing when you learn the journalists responsible for the first set of stories were the same journalists who wrote the second set of stories suggesting the graves were evidence of Israeli war crimes

the 'therapist effect' says that therapy quality is largely independent of training

some research on this: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Ftep0000402 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8174802/

CBT (cognitive behavioural training) has been shown to be effective independent of which therapist does it. if CBT has a downside it is that it's a bit boring, and probably not as effective as a good therapist

--

so personally i would say the advice of passing on people to therapists is largely unsupported: if you're that person's friend and you care about them; then be open, and show that care. that care can also mean taking them to a therapist, that is okay

Re:Forth: The programming language that writes itself on Monday October 20, 2025 @07:15AM (#45642624)
that is quite wild...

it implies expressivity is the ability to constrain

it implies drawing on a page, or more broadly, every choice we make, is in equal parts a creative and destructive act

so maybe life, or human flourishing is choosing the restrictions that increase freedom of choice? it's so meta it's almost oxymoronic; concretely: we imprison people to maximize freedom; or, we punish children with the aim of setting them free from punishment

this is the same as the walk from law into grace found in Christian ethics

maybe the ultimate programming language then, provides the maximal step down that path, and this is also the most useful definition of "power"

i.e. place on people those restrictions that increase their ability to choose

Re:Forth: The programming language that writes itself on Monday October 20, 2025 @06:15AM (#45642195)
planting flowers? trowel

planting foundations? excavator

once you specify "the job", the best tool is "the solution" to that job only. anything else is excess complexity

however if "the job" is unspecified, power is inverse to the length of "the solution"

so is constraint of power bad?

--

a fascinating question

just like music can be created by both additive and subtractive synthesis; every line of code creates both a feature and a constraint on the final program

in which case power can be thought of as the ability to constrain...

Re:Dropping Trust in US Media on Thursday October 02, 2025 @03:16PM (#45454119)
> With confidence fractured along partisan and generational lines...

the root cause, i think, is a devaluation of truth; for "truth" in the name of partisan lines

this is so so common: "we know this is not true, but we advance it to improve our position or virtue signal etc"

this was, i think, foundational to the collapse of society at the beginning of the 1900s -- we "believe this" because we get other peoples property or otherwise advance our cause

being truthful costs us, and people are no-longer so willing to pay

the root cause of that, i would say is they have walked away from Jesus who pays his life for our benefit; only people who live like that can be trusted to tell the truth

Re:Will Jesus Christ return in an election year? on Thursday May 29, 2025 @07:32PM (#44131398)
;) i love critical questions

> As if anything else mattered but a clean moral behavior

this is actually a strongly non-Christian view point: 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' i.e. no morals are clean enough unless it's 100% of God (why should he accept less?). yes, our harsh moral failures, or even successes could never be enough

hence 100% humanity and divinity of Christ -- he alone provides a 100% perfect bridge, paying 100% the cost for us, one that was infinitely beyond our ability to pay

this is 100% grace, joy, freedom and surety. thanks be to him

Re:GPT-4.5 on Friday February 28, 2025 @12:18PM (#43208015)
what you're saying is they love to hallucinate... and ai will help them get there

God help us all

that's a nice solution!
it changes debug semantics

this is the reason guido avoids it. programs will still fail, except now without a stacktrace

Re:In Search of a Faster SQLite on Monday December 16, 2024 @02:00PM (#42434108)
they compare threads and coroutines for limbo. threads have much worse p90 latencies since they context switch.... im not sure they can draw any conclusions except that coroutines are faster (of course)
Re:God Plays Chess (2018) on Monday December 09, 2024 @07:43PM (#42372352)
might even be 10^35 ;)
Re:God Plays Chess (2018) on Monday December 09, 2024 @07:42PM (#42372346)
interesting, it may be able to reduce the space -- when one sides peice count exceeds the other, a win (or bad play) could be assumed or proven

that might reduce the search space enough to find an optimal play through to the start game...

that would be fun

many languages gracefully handle errors, making those errors transparent to automated detection -- our crashes are now silent correctness failures

this trend in programming culture reduces our ability to do automated error detection!

you make a good point, and a good case for crash early and crash often -- with choice of erlang style recovery, or fuzzing style hard nosed correctness enforcement

its the simple things

  fuzzing
  unittest
  scm
  code coverage
if youre programming without those, youre doing it wrong, and chatGPT isnt going to help

any more im missing?

Re:Superstitious Users and the FreeBSD Logo on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @06:30AM (#41847069)
humpedback whale defending other species could be an example of this

or ants could represent impressive engineering and ability to symbiotically exist with other creatures like aphids, caterpillars, and even a tree in the rain forest that gives them sap and they defend it. maybe a specific kind of ant could be iconic

Re:Superstitious Users and the FreeBSD Logo on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @05:50AM (#41846838)
puffin or pangolin?

puffin would have double benefit of being better than a penguin

Re:Superstitious Users and the FreeBSD Logo on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @05:24AM (#41846666)
is there an alternative mascot people could prefer?

on a mascot rating puffy is easily the best imo... what could freebsd have?

any ideas?

Re:FreeBSD: How Can We Make It More Attractive to New Users? on Saturday October 12, 2024 @09:25AM (#41818890)
a vote from a population count of approximately one; but i need:

1. mascot change. demons are not my thing

2. suspend/resume

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