steamrolled (u/steamrolled)

steamrolled commented on Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time vidarholen.net/contents/w... · Posted by u/microsoftedging

bArray · 8 months ago

Trying adding "ass", it explodes [1]. Not sure if that's because of keywords such as 'class' or something else? "dumb" is really on the uptake [2].

[1] https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...*

[2] https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...*

steamrolled · 8 months ago

Assembly, assign, assert, assume, associate... I think most of what you're picking up is not actually naughty.

steamrolled commented on Is gravity just entropy rising? Long-shot idea gets another look quantamagazine.org/is-gra... · Posted by u/pseudolus

neuroelectron · 8 months ago

The speed of light is C, a constant. Mass is composed of these particles that are bound by C. Because they are vibrating, a lot of that speed is being wasted in brownian motion. So the denser it is, the more your average vector is going to be toward more dense brownian motion as the particles interact and induce more brownian motion. The gradient has a natural sorting effect.

Seems pretty intuitive to me. The question remains though, what is this density made of since gravity exists in a vacuum? Quantum fluctuations popping in and out of reality? Does this infer that quantum fluctuations are affected by mass as well? It would seem so since in Bose Einstein Condensate, what is "communicating" the state across the BEC if the particles are no longer interacting?

steamrolled · 8 months ago

> Because they are vibrating, a lot of that energy is being wasted in brownian motion. So the denser it is, the more your average vector is going to be toward more dense brownian motion as the particles interact and induce more brownian motion ... Seems pretty intuitive to me.

So this is why warm objects weigh more?

steamrolled commented on Infinite Grid of Resistors mathpages.com/home/kmath6... · Posted by u/niklasbuschmann

Workaccount2 · 8 months ago

One of my core grips with STEM education, mainly the math heavy part of it, which frankly is most of it, is that it is taught primarily by people who love math.

The people who loved application and practical solutions went to industry, the people who got off spending a weekend grinding a theoretical infinite resistor grid solution went into academia.

steamrolled · 8 months ago

Loving math is not necessarily a problem. But if you want others to love it too, you have to explain it in a way that makes them see the light.

A lot of STEM education is more along the lines of "take the rapid-fire calculus class, memorize a bunch of formulas, and then use them to find the transfer function of this weird circuit". It's not entirely useless, but it doesn't make you love the theory.

steamrolled commented on Infinite Grid of Resistors mathpages.com/home/kmath6... · Posted by u/niklasbuschmann

steamrolled · 8 months ago

I don't get why EE education emphasizes problems of this sort. The infinite grid is an extreme example, but solving weirdly complicated problems involving Kirchoff's laws and Thevenin's theorem was a common way to torture students back in my day...

Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms. It's a pure math puzzle centered around an "infinite grid of linear A=B/C equations". Not the puzzle I ever felt the need to know the answer to, but I certainly don't judge others for geeking out about it.

steamrolled commented on Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/spwestwood

senko · 8 months ago

Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative.

This article may seem reasonable, but here he's defending a paper that in his previous article he called "A knockout blow for LLMs".

Many of his articles seem reasonable (if a bit off) until you read a couple dozen a spot a trend.

steamrolled · 8 months ago

> Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative.

That's an odd standard. Not wanting to be wrong is a universal human instinct. By that logic, every person who ever took any position on LLMs is automatically untrustworthy. After all, they made a name for themselves by being pro- or con-. Or maybe a centrist - that's a position too.

Either he makes good points or he doesn't. Unless he has a track record of distorting facts, his ideological leanings should be irrelevant.

steamrolled commented on Simulink (Matlab) Copilot github.com/Kaamuli/Bloxi... · Posted by u/kaamuli

stochtastic · 8 months ago

This is very cool, thanks for sharing. There are many industries and academic fields where Matlab has gone out of fashion (I work in one), and my experience has been that there's a lot of over the top negativity about Mathworks products, centering mostly on the license and business model. But I think there's a lack of awareness of just how superior Matlab and Simulink are to all alternatives in some domains. All that to say: don't let the Matlab hate get to you, you're using the right tool for the job.

steamrolled · 8 months ago

The complaints about licensing seem a bit weird given that the company actually accommodates hobbyists. They have a $100-something perpetual home license that doesn't require internet access.

Most other vendors of niche "pro" software just give the middle finger to hobbyists and want you to pony up thousands of dollars for an annual subscription.

I think it's perfectly OK to say "I don't need this, open-source tools work for me". Just like you can use KiCad instead of Cadence for PCB design. But getting angry at Mathworks for wanting money from commercial users seems weird.

steamrolled commented on Solving LinkedIn Queens with SMT buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/azhenley

GZGavinZhao · 8 months ago

Formal Methods in general are underrated in the industry. Pretty much no large companies except AWS (thank you Byron Cook!) use them at a large scale.

Edit: maybe there are large companies that use them behind the curtains, but AWS is the only place I know of where they publicly acknowledge how much they appreciate and use formal methods. If you know any of them, please comment and I'd be curious to learn about how they're using it!

steamrolled · 8 months ago

> Formal Methods in general are underrated in the industry. Pretty much no large companies except AWS (thank you Byron Cook!) use them at a large scale.

At least Microsoft and Google poured a lot of money into this by funding well-staffed multi-year research projects. There's plenty of public trail in terms of research papers. It's just that not a whole lot came out of it otherwise.

The problem isn't that the methods are underrated, it's that they aren't compatible with the approach to software engineering in these places (huge monolithic codebases, a variety of evolving languages and frameworks, no rigid constraints on design principles).

steamrolled commented on The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021) notes.volution.ro/v1/2021... · Posted by u/wonger_

bee_rider · 8 months ago

It is kind of a journey in an annoying way. Like, do we really need to know all the stuff about: this man page says to sanitize input, this one doesn’t, blah blah blah.

Or, let’s just look at an excerpt, here’s the section “proper solution:”

I’ve emphasized the actionable advice.

> The proper solution would be dropping that broken tool immediately, securely erasing it from your hard-drive, then running and screaming that tool's name out-loud in shame... (Something akin to Game of Throne's walk of atonement...)

Joke

> I'm not kidding... This kind of broken tools are the cause of many stupid bugs, ranging from the funny ups-rm-with-spaces (i.e. rm -Rf / some folder with spaces /some-file), to serious security issues like the formerly mentioned shellshock...

Joke/contentless stakes raising.

> So, you say someone holds you at gun point, thus you must use that tool? Check if the broken tool doesn't have a flag that disables calling sh -c, and instead properly executes the given command and arguments directly via execve(2). (For example watch has the -x flag as mentioned.)

Here it is, the paragraph that has something!

> Alternatively, given that most likely the tool in question is an open-source project written by someone in his spare time, perhaps open a feature request describing the issue, and if possible contribute with a patch that solves it.

This doesn’t seem practically actionable, at least in the short term—most projects might ignore your patch, or maybe it will take multiple years to get pushed out to distros.

> Still no luck? Make some popcorn and prepare for the latest block-buster "convoluted solutions for simple problems in UNIX town"...

Dramatic buildup/joke.

steamrolled · 8 months ago

The original post asserted the article is nonsense; you're trying to justify that by saying you don't like the author's writing style. Two separate things...

The article is mostly correct, although it makes some weird claims (e.g., the Shellshock bug had nothing to do with the class of bugs the article is complaining about - it was a vulnerability in the shell itself). It definitely has a "newcomer hates things without understanding why they are the way they are" vibe, but you actually need that every now and then. The old-timers tend to say "it was originally done this way for a reason and if you're experienced enough, you know how to deal with it", but what made sense 30-40 years ago might not make much sense today.