Over the years, I've found that the best ideas come to me when walking to the bathroom and back. Especially when I'm trying to come up with a good solution to a difficult programming problem. Just getting up from the screen and engaging in some mindless physical activity seems to cause my subconscious to spit out surprising insights that I wouldn't have come up with if I had been 100% focused on the problem at hand. It's really a bit of a mystery how the human brain sometimes works this way.
Readit Newsmisil commented on The positive effect of walking on creative thinking (2014) [pdf] apa.org/pubs/journals/rel... · Posted by u/gmays
Can we perhaps take this opportunity to pour one out for Matt Levine? I can't think of any writer/journalist who can bring an often esoteric topic like present day financial shenanigans to life with such clear, intuitive and bitingly funny writing. His coverage of the whole Elon/Twitter saga alone is second to none.
I think I once read a comment on here that the command-line parsing logic of ffmpeg is Turing-complete. It's probably telling that I can't remember if that was meant as a joke or to be taken seriously. And I say this with nothing but admiration for the tool.
misil commented on Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion simplethread.com/agile-at... · Posted by u/jetheredge
I think the big divide here is between tech companies and non tech companies.
Tech companies can look at the agile manifesto and use it as a heuristic guide, because engineers are already kind of on the same page about it. You don't need heavyweight process etc.
Non tech-companies need the window dressing of tech companies to retain their best engineers, but ultimately agile is kinda telling them to turn everything upside down and also threatening to make them superfluous. Nobody is really up for that.
So agile in non-tech companies is Kabuki theater and engenders cynicism, and agile in tech companies is basically superfluous "water is wet" advice no one even bothers to comment about.
You'll notice a lot of these blogs about how agile has failed are coming from consultants, who are basically brought into traditional companies that are struggling with some part of this process, not tech companies.
This very much resonates with my experience. I've seen this very process take place when working at a small tech startup that ended up being bought by a non-tech giant keen on undergoing a "digitalization" initiative. Our prior processes were lightweight, goal-oriented and effective. No one bothered calling them "agile", they were just the natural way to deal with an ever changing landscape of customer and system requirements.
After the buy-out we were told to undergo a thorough transformation into this brand new unified top-down software development process the company had some consultants design for them. Complete with a baffling array of buzzword driven "agile" development practices and project/squad/team/chapter manager/lead/head roles to be filled. The more you kept inquiring what exactly those roles should entail, the more conflicting and vaguer the answers got until you realized that no one had the faintest idea how any of this was supposed to actually mesh together in practice. The license packages for the expensive project planning software we were to use where long paid however.
misil commented on The exponential function is a miracle blog.plover.com/math/expo... · Posted by u/ColinWright
This is such a weird thread. There are a bunch of people arguing about why their favorite math thing is more a miracle than someone else's favorite math thing.
Nothing is surprising if you've seen it before. Let's just let each other be excited about our favorite math, okay?
Euler's identity is the one that gets me:
e^(i * pi) + 1 = 0
Fun fact: Gauss is said to have commented on this equation that "if this was not immediately apparent to you upon being told it, you would never be a first-class mathematician".
misil commented on Mitchell Feigenbaum, physicist who pioneered chaos theory, has died rockefeller.edu/news/2628... · Posted by u/yeellow
If you're interested in Feigenbaum's constant, check out Numberphile's video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETrYE4MdoLQ.
misil commented on Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust brave.com/improved-ad-blo... · Posted by u/teovoinea
A simple guide to choosing your browser:
Does it make money by showing you ads?
Chrome: Yes Brave: Yes Firefox: No
If yes, then they need to track your behavior in detail. I'm sure you don't deserve to be tracked.
Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google, in other words: by funneling their users towards Google. This pretty much also boils down to "making money by showing you ads". Google's search ads, to be precise. Now you can say: "But I can turn this off", but then you'd also turn off their source of revenue.
Brave's stated goal is to establish an alternative ad-based business model that's long-term viable without the user being tracked. Will this be successful? Who knows, but at least they're trying to find a business model that respects your privacy while being long-term sustainable. Firefox's model doesn't, at least the way it works now.
misil commented on The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town spectator.us/der-spiegel-... · Posted by u/jackfoxy
My favorite tidbit of this story:
In 2014, Relotius sold two stories to the monthly magazine of a Swiss paper, both interviews with hairdressers. The second one (still online: https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar...), a supposed interview with a Finnish hairdresser immediately received a comment from someone in Finland ("this report seems to be fiction"), complaining that the mentioned salon doesn't actually exist, the mentioned prices were all wrong and the mentioned name had the wrong gender. The magazine printed a correction and decided to no longer work with the author.
No offense to Finnish hairdressers, but if someone completely fabricates a story this meaningless, it's reasonable to assume that he's a pathological liar and not a single written word of his can be taken seriously.
Given that the guy was such a pathological liar, even about trivial matters, I find it very hard to believe that no one supposedly ever had any suspicion about the truthfulness of writing.
misil commented on How Math’s Most Famous Proof Nearly Broke (2015) nautil.us/issue/67/reboot... · Posted by u/dnetesn
I can recommend Simon Singh's book on this topic, his writing is rather captivating (The Big Bang is one of the best books I've read, so is the Code Book). He also made a BBC documentary on the topic.
I also want to urge anyone with even just a fleeting interest in mathematical topics like this to go out looking for said BBC documentary. It's a marvelous portrait of the characters and backstories behind this proof.
misil commented on Moonlight Sonata Visualized (2012) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=yojDu... · Posted by u/netgusto
This (highly stylized) rendering of the opening of Bach's Matthew Passion has helped me appreciate the structure of this extraordinary piece of music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAafyK44fCc