Looks like someone else mentioned PAIP. I’d add “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” as well.
Readit Newsajarmst commented on Common Lisp Books lisp-lang.org/books/... · Posted by u/katzeilla
Dead Comment
ajarmst commented on Obvious and possible software innovations scottlocklin.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/haltingproblem
If they're so easy and obvious, why hasn't the author done it, at least as a demo? The article also reeks of "this doesn't work for me, therefore it won't work for anyone" I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely does not concede that everything should have a GUI interface.
"Why does shit like DPDK exist?" I don't know, but I bet you could find out with a little investigation, which might make this sound more like a well-researched position and less like a tantrum.
"people who absolutely insist that the Church Turing thesis means muh computer is all-powerful simulator of everything". Yeaaah...we're done here.
The author's about page reports that he is a former physicist with experience in automotives and law enforcement. It also contains the statement "I have a particular dislike of self-anointed 'experts';" with no apparent irony.
And my personal favourite: "People may think I’m fighting above my weight class, because many of the people I label as clowns are on television and in important newspapers, much like the stars of 'The Bachelor.' "
Uh huh.
ajarmst commented on Obvious and possible software innovations scottlocklin.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/haltingproblem
If they're so easy and obvious, why hasn't the author done it, at least as a demo? The article also reeks of "this doesn't work for me, therefore it won't work for anyone" I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely does not concede that everything should have a GUI interface.
"Why does shit like DPDK exist?" I don't know, but I bet you could find out with a little investigation, which might make this sound more like a well-researched position and less like a tantrum.
"people who absolutely insist that the Church Turing thesis means muh computer is all-powerful simulator of everything". Yeaaah...we're done here.
ajarmst commented on The inventor of the black box was told to drop the idea spectrum.ieee.org/tech-hi... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
I've watched enough Aviation Disasters to know this isn't always good enough.
Which episode has a crash that (1) they failed to find a primary cause for and (2) would have been solved had they had video?
This is a proof assistant, not an automated theorem prover. The user has to supply* the mathematics and the proof checker formally verifies whether or not the steps are correct. It doesn’t have any creativity (that’s up to the mathematician).
*I should have clarified there is some proof generation, see the comment below by opnitro, but I meant the meat and potatoes of novel non-trivial proofs currently has to be supplied by the user.
Thanks for the clarification.
ajarmst commented on The inventor of the black box was told to drop the idea spectrum.ieee.org/tech-hi... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
I've watched all the episodes of Aviation Disasters. The device missing from cockpits is the video recorder. Many investigations revolve around questions like what is the pilot looking at, what the instruments show, even who the heck is in the pilot's seat. Video can confirm switch settings and instrument readouts (the voice recorder is also used to confirm if the warning horns sounded properly).
Instead, a lot of effort goes into trying to reconstruct this.
Just put a dang video camera in the cockpit.
I've also, for decades, advocated a camera that records flight operations at an airport. Just stick a couple in the tower pointed at the runways. Note that in the Concorde disaster, there was no video of the take-off. They had to rely on eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. The only video came later from some passenger in a car who happened to have a video cam at hand. That accidental video proved valuable. (It's a horrifying video.)
I was surprised at all the vitriol opposition to pointing a camera at the runways. People confidently told me it would cost millions of dollars, and was completely infeasible. Jeez, anyone could buy a security camera that recorded on a loop for a few hundred. Every convenience store had them.
It would be less useful than you’d think. Pilots are trained to articulate what they are doing and generally follow very well-practiced procedures. Another pilot can quite accurately reproduce what a pilot is doing just from the transcript, and the warning horns and other indicators are quite expressive of other things. The audio is good enough to hear breakers opening. Anything a video camera could see out the window that would be relevant will be remarked upon by pilots.
ajarmst commented on The inventor of the black box was told to drop the idea spectrum.ieee.org/tech-hi... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
There’s an interesting aside in that neither a CVR nor a FDR would have been helpful in figuring out the cause of the Comet disasters. The way they did was brilliant.
The article is interesting, but that lede is incoherent. Many mathematicians accept computer proofs the way chess grand masters accept computer players. Computer “assistants” that generate proofs that humans cannot follow or understand will always be controversial, and the proofs they generate, even though accepted as valid, will always be decorated with an asterisk.
ajarmst commented on Useful and useless code comments blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021... · Posted by u/jerodsanto
When I teach coding, I used to have a similar lesson around commenting code: "don't tell me you're creating a variable. I can read the code. Tell me what the variable is for."
I still mostly abide by that, but I've had an opportunity to write some larger programs for the first time in a few years (a hazard of teaching programming is you find yourself working with pretty small programs), and noticed that the comments started become a part of my conversation with myself. I'd drop in quick reminders for what I intended to do in a function before going moving on to something else. When I came back and then wrote the code corresponding to the comments: well now it's redundant, but it wasn't. I stopped cleaning that stuff up (I'd clean it if I had to present or publish it, of course). The comments kept some context of my thinking when I wrote it, what order I did things in, etc. It would be gibberish for another, but it wasn't for me, especially after a few days, or even longer. (Note: I'm a pretty fast touch-typist, so muttering to myself doesn't invoke much of a productivity cost. I also note that commit messages are another great place to capture that sort of context for yourself, and not using that opportunity is a sin.)
So, I've changed some of my greybeard aphorisms around commenting: "When commenting code, consider the needs of the person who will be maintaining this code. Who will probably be you. Be nice to future you."