Readit NewsDead Comment
Where are all the Racket personal projects?
N.B. I say this as someone who personally contributed small fixes to Racket in the 90s (when it was called mzscheme) and 00s (when it was called PLT-Scheme).
Opinion
Another example: when I hear the famous "Yanny or Laurel" recording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) I hear "Laurel". I can understand how someone hears "Yanny". Our perceptions conflict, but neither of us are objectively wrong, because (from Wikipedia) "analysis of the sound frequencies has confirmed that both sets of sounds are present".
The single word "opinion" is not an answer to the question I asked.
> Another example: ... "Yanny or Laurel"
This is not remotely the same thing.
> I can understand how someone hears "Yanny">
So can everybody else. Everyone I have heard speak on this topic has the same exact experience. Everyone "hears" one of the words 'naturally', but can easily understand how someone else could hear the other word, because the audio clip is so ambiguous.
An ambiguous audio recording, which basically everyone agrees can be interpreted multiple ways, which wikipedia explicitly documents as being ambiguous, is very different from meanings of the words "yes", "no", and "believe".
These words have concrete meanings.
You wouldn't say that "you believe the recording says Laurel". You say "I hear Laurel, but I can understand how someone else hears Yanny".
Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing anything it's not already. Or, you can believe everything and everyone else has no consciousness, and you won't mis-predict anything (unless you assume people don't react to being called unconscious...).
Is AI conscious? I believe "yes", but in a different way than humans, and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong. Is AI smart? Yes in some ways: chess algorithms are smart in some ways, AI is smarter in more, and in many ways AI is still dumber than most humans. How does that relate to morality? Morality is a feeling, so when an AI makes me feel bad for it I'll try to help it, and when an AI makes a significant amount of people feel bad for it there will be significant support for it.
What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?
Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?
...
This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.
"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"
"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."
People who had good things happen and got lucky get more optimistic as that's their experience.
If true, it might be that good genetics and environment gives you exceptional longevity, and also increases your chances of good outcomes at every step of your life which in turn make you an optimist.
Off course, I'd love to believe it's your mindset that affects outcomes, as it would give you control over your destiny, but it's precisely because that truth is so tempting that I'm extra skeptical of it.
It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational.
There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel.
Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists.
I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.
"7000 ft" sounds wrong to me. That's over a mile of hose. Feels like that's unnecessarily long. I'd love to learn more about this. Anyone know when or what fire this was?
I wonder if maybe it can't even use hydrants that are too near each other in the plumbing graph.
What kind of purity test bullshit rhetoric are you using here? Whenever you find yourself saying, “you need to explain yourself”, step back and question things.
Have you tried reading the thread instead of jumping on a guy for wrongspeak?
The Soviet connection is really not that hard to follow. They were discussing development cycles. Whether China, which is a communist country with a “5 year economic plan”, is successful due to that 5 year plan.
So it’s very relevant to mention the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a communist country, it “invented” the 5 year economic plan, and it failed spectacularly.
Every command that you issue to the ssd returns a response. It would be nice to have a bunch of performance counters that tell us where the time went with each of the commands we give it.
GPUs have this already.
I know I am just an amateur
In the PicoBalloon hobbyist world, we are generating our own hydrogen. You can buy the equipment for cheap from China and generate it from water. It doesn’t require extreme temperatures to store. Are we generating dirty hydrogen?
Why does this paper suggest storing at extreme temperatures and pressure?
Hydrogen gas also has very low energy density. To store enough of it to be useful, it has to be pressurized/liquified, which requires the expensive storage solutions.
Virtual dispatch absolutely has an overhead, but absolutely nobody in their right mind should be using COM interfaces in a critical section of code. When we're talking things like UI elements, HTTP clients, whatever, the overhead of an indirect call is negligible compared to the time spent inside a function.
The one thing I'm personally trying to see if there's any room for improvement on in a clean slate design, is error handling / HRESULT values. Exceptions get abused for flow control and stack unwinding is expensive, so even if there was a sane way to implement cross-language exception handling it's a non starter. But HRESULT leads to IErrorInfo, ISupportErrorInfo, thread local state SetErrorInfo/GetErrorInfo, which is a whole extra bunch of fun to deal with.
There's the option of going the GObject and AppKit route, using an out parameter for an Error type - but you have to worry about freeing/releasing this in your language bindings or risk leaking memory.
I could definitely be wrong, but I think C++ style "virtual dispatch" (ie, following two pointers instead of one to get to your function) doesn't really cost anything anymore, except for the extra pointers taking up cache space.
Don't all of the Windows DirectX gaming interfaces use COM? And isn't AAA gaming performance critical?