If the compiler would know the stack size, we wouldn't have StackOverflow
Readit Newsmendelab commented on Memory Management Every Programmer Should Know zacharylee.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/zacharylee
Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written:
> Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.
I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism).
But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Topkek. Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). At best he was a siren, being one of the first to sound the alarm about the importance of security, but he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more.
Are you laughing because we lost most newspapers to garbage online news, because schools are digitalized with no benefits, because social media made us less democratic, or because fake products are sold on the most successful online stores?
For sure he underestimated the impact, but he was not /wrong/. Most things did not get replaced by computers, they were lost to computers.
mendelab commented on Mathematicians roll dice and get rock-paper-scissors quantamagazine.org/mathem... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
> The three dice below are said to be "intransitive" -- no one of them is stronger than the others.
Except that this is a definition of "stronger" quite different from the one in common use:
> [Die] A beats [die] B on 58% of rolls.
> B beats C on 58% of rolls.
> C beats A on 69% of rolls.
By any conventional metric, one of these dice is the strongest, and it's C. If you released something like this into the wild, you'd expect to come back later and find that C had done the best and A had done the worst.
import random
dice = [
[3,3,3,3,3,6],
[2,2,2,5,5,5],
[1,4,4,4,4,4]
]
wins = [0,0,0]
for t in range(10000):
die1 = random.randrange(3)
face1 = random.randrange(6)
die2 = random.randrange(3)
face2 = random.randrange(6)
result1 = dice[die1][face1]
result2 = dice[die2][face2]
if result1 > result2:
wins[die1] += 1
elif result2 > result1:
wins[die2] += 1
print(wins)
edit: The reason C and B look equally good in the code above is that B gets many fewer draws than the other dice do (because it's split 3/3 whereas they're both split 5/1). Those draws that don't happen are a win for B and a loss for [the other] B, but if you only count the win, it looks like B is benefiting. B wins about the same amount as C does, but it loses a lot more. A loses about the same amount as B does, but it wins a lot less.
B is actually the best if you play all three at the same time.
Intransitive dice are still surprising and interesting to me, I Wonder if there are 3 such dice which are equally strong when played at the same time ?
Another fun dice concept are go first dice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_First_Dice
mendelab commented on Is it possible for a lunar eclipse to occur before sunset? astronomy.stackexchange.c... · Posted by u/georgecmu
Technically correct, but misses the point :)
For sound, it should be the same with a corner of a room, it ~doubles the sound in the vicinity of the corner, hence a ~3dB increase