mncharity (u/mncharity)

mncharity commented on Tales from Mainframe Modernization oppi.li/posts/tales_from_... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

kstrauser · 3 months ago

Ah, I see what happened here. It looked to me like you were highjacking the thread and posting a link to your own project. It’s at a different domain than the post and didn’t seem to be related to the story at all. I think I wasn’t alone there.

As a suggestion, next time you might say something like “here’s something else the author wrote”. Then it’s clearly not you advertising your own stuff.

mncharity · 3 months ago

Ah, ok. My thanks.

mncharity commented on Tales from Mainframe Modernization oppi.li/posts/tales_from_... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

kstrauser · 3 months ago

Cool, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. Submit it as a story if you want to have a conversation about it.

mncharity · 3 months ago

Curious. At -4 and flagged, it's clear others agree. I'm blindsided by this. Discussion has moved on, so if someone can elaborate, I'd appreciate it, so I can adjust. Even upon reflection, I don't get it. The author of TFA, calls out their current work, in the TFA, and a comment providing convenience links for those curious about it, is "not what we’re discussing here"? I'd normally consider links to an author's other interesting work, even when not in the TFA, as an unremarkable and desirable part of "Convers[ing] curiously". No?

mncharity commented on Near-infrared spatiotemporal color vision enabled by upconversion contact lenses cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0... · Posted by u/ArnoVW

mncharity · 3 months ago

> Humans cannot perceive infrared light due to the physical thermodynamic properties of photon-detecting opsins.

Seeing near-NIR without pointing a laser at your eye is interesting, but "cannot perceive"?

It's dim, yes. But there are perception reports well beyond 1000 nm (like 1.3 or 1.5 um). People see NIR ophthalmoscopes. I fuzzily recall a DIY attempt to wear a NIR bandpass filter, to make bright day into dark-adapted near-NIR night. And two-photon sensitivity[1] can level off the single-photon sensitivity log curve above 900 nm.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892...

mncharity commented on Show HN: ClipJS – Edit your videos from a PC or phone clipjs.vercel.app/... · Posted by u/mohyware

mncharity · 3 months ago

Perhaps add a screenshot to the landing page? The current "Ok, what does it look like?" path seems discouragingly long (landing page, Get Started, Add Project, name project, click on project).

mncharity commented on For algorithms, a little memory outweighs a lot of time quantamagazine.org/for-al... · Posted by u/makira

whatever1 · 3 months ago

Lookup tables with precalculated things for the win!

In fact I don’t think we would need processors anymore if we were centrally storing all of the operations ever done in our processors.

Now fast retrieval is another problem for another thread.

mncharity · 3 months ago

> if we were centrally storing all of the operations

Community-scale caching? That's basically what pre-compiled software distributions are. And one idea for addressing the programming language design balk "that would be a nice feature, but it's not known how to compile it efficiently, so you can't have it", is highly-parallel cloud compilation, paired with a community-scale compiler cache. You might not mind if something takes say a day to resolve, if the community only needs it run once per release.

mncharity commented on Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL technistuff.com/posts/vis... · Posted by u/agnosis

mncharity · 3 months ago

My context was mostly "zooming" time. Like power-of-ten zooms of size, but for time. Or timelapses. So a single rendered moment, represents an aggregate of some extent of time. Say you're linearly scrubbing over a 10 kyr span, made of 100 steps. Then each step summarizes a 100 yr extent, with all its heterogeneity. Similarly for a span of 100 yr of 1 yr steps, or 100 Myr span of 1 Myr steps. How might one do that well, gracefully handling the heterogeneity?

Now educational graphics are notorious for negative training. Some aspect is done carefully perhaps, but others less so, and a menagerie misconceptions are reinforced. Some solar system introductions for example, start with such a wretched graphic, which so reinforces many common misconceptions, that even before you hit the text, you've dug a net-negative learning hole that you're never going to climb out of. Many readers would understand the topic better if they'd never seen the page.

Raising a general question: in what ways might we render an Earth globe, that gracefully aggregates/summaries some extent of time? How do you handle things that varied during that time? Diverse clouds, day/night, diversity of seasons, diversity of years, climate changes and sea levels and ice ages, moving continents and paleoclimates. An extent of some mere 10s of Myr encompasses west antarctic as both temperate rainforest and arctic tundra - so what might one paint, to represent west antarctica over that extent as a whole?

So I was taking advantage of your post, to raise a general question which has long puzzled me.

Thanks for sharing your nice work.

mncharity · 3 months ago

Err, out of respect for Murphy, I'll emphasize that none of that was intended as critique. It's just a challenge I've repeatedly faced, mentioned in hope that readers attracted by the post might have thoughts on it.

mncharity commented on The value isn't in the code (2022) jonayre.uk/blog/2022/10/3... · Posted by u/fragmede

mncharity · 3 months ago

A different perspective is that there is a vast body of result-of-thought-and-experience associated with developed software. That is then lossily encoded in many forms. Memory, judgment, skill, team, contacts, customers, docs, test suite, other assorted software, etc. It's much easier to reimplement a language when you have a great language test suite. Easier to create a product if you already have a close relationship with its customers. Easier to implement something for the 3rd, 4th, 10th time. Etc. And the assorted forms have results they encode well and not so much, and assorted strengths and weaknesses as mechanism. Memories decay, and aren't great for details. Judgment transfers well; leaves. Teams shuffle. Tests become friction. Software works; ossifies.

Insightful synthesis around even a single form isn't exactly common. The art of managing test suites for instance. An insightful synthesis of many forms... I've not yet seen.

mncharity commented on The value isn't in the code (2022) jonayre.uk/blog/2022/10/3... · Posted by u/fragmede

Liftyee · 3 months ago

From my little experience I find this article's point to be true. I've been in a few organisations where the flow of people (students) is constant, so experience constantly leaves and mistakes get repeated (we haven't figured out a proper knowledge base). All one can do is try their best to transfer the experience before graduating, but taught lessons don't stick as deeply as firsthand learnings (with the associated toil...)

mncharity · 3 months ago

Hmm. We've often discussed AI as programmer codegen tool, and as vibe coder. But there have been other roles over the decades associated with programming. Perhaps AI could serve as a team Librarian? Historian? Backup Programmer (check-and-balance to a programmer)? A kibitzing greybeard institutional memory? Team Lead for humans? Coach/Mentor? Something else? Mob programming participant?

mncharity commented on Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL technistuff.com/posts/vis... · Posted by u/agnosis

agnosis · 3 months ago

Thats an interesting point. I think that if the climate difference is important I would allow the user to toggle between summer and winter. Or choose based on the context if you are showing specific events like wars that were impacted by winter weather. From my research (not professional or scientific) ice sheets didn’t move much between seasons so I wouldn’t include them. When you have very large intervals of 100k years when you go further back there could be several ice ages in between so I don’t think it makes much sense there. In what context do you think that this would be important to consider?

mncharity · 3 months ago

My context was mostly "zooming" time. Like power-of-ten zooms of size, but for time. Or timelapses. So a single rendered moment, represents an aggregate of some extent of time. Say you're linearly scrubbing over a 10 kyr span, made of 100 steps. Then each step summarizes a 100 yr extent, with all its heterogeneity. Similarly for a span of 100 yr of 1 yr steps, or 100 Myr span of 1 Myr steps. How might one do that well, gracefully handling the heterogeneity?

Now educational graphics are notorious for negative training. Some aspect is done carefully perhaps, but others less so, and a menagerie misconceptions are reinforced. Some solar system introductions for example, start with such a wretched graphic, which so reinforces many common misconceptions, that even before you hit the text, you've dug a net-negative learning hole that you're never going to climb out of. Many readers would understand the topic better if they'd never seen the page.

Raising a general question: in what ways might we render an Earth globe, that gracefully aggregates/summaries some extent of time? How do you handle things that varied during that time? Diverse clouds, day/night, diversity of seasons, diversity of years, climate changes and sea levels and ice ages, moving continents and paleoclimates. An extent of some mere 10s of Myr encompasses west antarctic as both temperate rainforest and arctic tundra - so what might one paint, to represent west antarctica over that extent as a whole?

So I was taking advantage of your post, to raise a general question which has long puzzled me.

Thanks for sharing your nice work.