Readit Newsrenhanxue commented on What Problems to Solve (1966) genius.cat-v.org/richard-... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
I think it's entirely possible the inks are much later. Possibly Kelly erased whatever was on the parchment previously. In fact the drawings might have made liberal use of the original, just to hide that fact.
Which is worse actually. Kelly may have semi-erased an existing valuable manuscript.
The hypothesis that the manuscript is a palimpsest (that is, written on an old parchment that was scraped clean of a previous text; such recycling was common because parchment was expensive) has been thoroughly rejected. That sort of thing is detectable, in fact there's an entire field of research dedicated to recovering lost texts from palimpsests, but the Voynich manuscript shows absolutely no signs of that.
Edward Kelly[1] was in the right place at the right time, and I recall reading many years ago (though I cannot now find the source) some evidence that he was familiar with the Cardan grille[2], which was sufficient to convince me that he was mostly likely the author, and that the book was intended as a hoax or fraud.
These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of the illustrations suggest an origin in the early fifteenth century" [0].
Edward Kelly was born over a hundred years later, so him "being at the right time" seems to be a bit of a stretch.
Not sure why those are json_agg() instead of array_agg() in that example. Why would you use a JSON array instead of a native properly typed array? Yes, if you have some complex objects for some reason you can use JSON objects. But those where all just arrays of IDs. Also why was it json_agg() and not jsonb_agg()? Is there any reason on why to use JSON over JSONB in PostgreSQL?
If you, for whatever obscure reason, need to preserve whitespace and key ordering, that is you want something that is effectively just a text column, then you should use JSON over JSONB.
I can't think of any case at all, no matter how contrived, where you'd want to use the non-B versions of the JSON aggregate functions though.
It will not, of course - anything that's inside is long dead, not designed for Earth atmosphere, and it had to be programmed to trigger in the first place.
In fact, the capsule could also burn up on reentry. Sure, it's a Venera-8 double designed to enter Venus' atmosphere at 11.6km/s... but it has extra mass on it (the upper stage never separated so it should look like [1]) and the capsule's CoG doesn't take all that stuff into account, which might cause it to tumble, reenter backwards, or damage it. On the other hand, it's reentering from a really low-energy orbit so it could survive the reentry - but not the impact in case it lands on the ground.
Marco Langbroek, who did the reentry forecast that the linked article is based on, convincingly argues[0] that the bus did separate and reenter separately (in 1981) and what remains in orbit is just the lander. There are several independent pieces of evidence that are consistent with this; the orbital decay pattern, the radar cross section and optical telescope observations all point to only the lander itself remaining.
See also his blog[1] for an up-to-date reentry forecast.
[0]: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4384/1
[1]: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-...
renhanxue commented on Porting Tailscale to Plan 9 tailscale.com/blog/plan9-... · Posted by u/adriangrigore
> In 1999, Intel introduced the Pentium III processor with SSE instructions.
I kinda expected this paragraph to continue with
> This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
renhanxue commented on Good-bye core types; Hello Go as we know and love it go.dev/blog/coretypes... · Posted by u/ingve
More than one person designed the language than Pike, you know. He's retired. Maybe you can find another member of the devteam to pick on?
Both (for example) Russ Cox and Ian Lance Taylor have contributed some very notably bad ideas to the project, yes. Does rephrasing it to "Rob Pike and people who think like him" make you happier?
renhanxue commented on Good-bye core types; Hello Go as we know and love it go.dev/blog/coretypes... · Posted by u/ingve
I think most Go devs have been pretty happy with Go’s trajectory. I think it’s mostly the people who aren’t using Go and are unlikely to start using Go no matter its feature set who are the ones who are mostly ignored. It has also been a really good thing that Go “doesn’t learn from the ‘mistakes’ of the past” or else it would have exceptions and monads and lifetimes and inheritance and a Haskell-like syntax.
Go isn’t perfect, but it’s wildly more productive in my experience than any other language, and that matters a lot more to me than being able to be maximally expressive or abstract.
I've coded golang for four years. Web services. I hated it at the start and I hate it even more now. The generics are miserable to use and are very limited in what they can do, the standard library is awful (database/sql in particular is offensively bad, but you have to use it because all the third party tools rely on its interfaces), there's footguns and dangerous syntax subtleties everywhere, and the idea of the zero values for uninitialized struct fields is to me an even worse mistake than the concept of null. At least if you make a mistake with null the program crashes, which is obvious, instead of just silently doing the wrong thing, which is not. The language claims to be simple; it's not, it's just pointlessly restrictive in weird ways wherever it happens to offend Rob Pike's personal sense of aesthetics. At least it compiles quickly, I guess???
I wish we could use some boring language that works, like C# or Kotlin.
renhanxue commented on FFmpeg School of Assembly Language github.com/FFmpeg/asm-les... · Posted by u/davikr
The counterpoint to this is that if you can write AVX2 assembly, that will be supported on ~99% of x86 CPUs around today (Haswell was 2013), so just that one branch covers ~80% of the desktop/laptop market.
If you really care about performance though you'd want to be a lot more specific than this. I've seen image processing code that not only does things like avoid specific instructions on some CPU families (like for example it avoids the vpermd instruction on Zen1/2/3 CPU's because of excessive latency), but also queries the CPU cache topology at runtime and uses buffer allocation strategies that ensure that it can work in data batches that fit in cache.
Apart if you want more clicks on YouTube, I don't think it's fair to call him a sham, unless you believe every popularity is a sham, but I don't think it's the case being made here.
Also, Feynman never wrote any books. His "textbooks" are lecture notes, mostly compiled by other people.