smingo

https://www.anquotes.com/charles-bukowski-quotes/ has some similar themes.

“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”

smingo

8 ay öncediscuss

I got on very well with Van der Linden's Deep C Secrets. It's from 1994, so misses out on the newer versions, but aside from that it's aged well, IMHO.

And good news: it's been open sourced: https://freecomputerbooks.com/Expert-C-Programming-Deep-C-Se... and its well regarded on Hacker News https://hackernewsbooks.com/book/expert-c-programming-deep-c... .

smingo

12 ay öncediscuss

The entire device is tiny: 20mm x 5mm x 5mm approx. It looks to work using a small laser and a lens which focuses the beam about 5mm above the device. The sensor unit contains a photodiode(s), and algorithms count the particulates. It looks to need a heat sink.

smingo

geçen yıldiscuss

There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational strategies.

Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International

smingo

geçen yıldiscuss

Commodore release a new variant of their C64 computer, with a '99%' faithful recreation of the original hardware on an AMD Artix 7 FPGA, along with some more up-to-date specifications. Suitable for retro gaming.

smingo

geçen yıldiscuss

Chinese New Year falls between 21 January and 20 February. This would be somewhere between week 3 and week 8.

Some ISO 8601 week numbers for CNY:

2022 CNY fell on Feb 1 , which is Week 5

2023 CNY fell on Jan 22, which is Week 3

2024 CNY fell on Feb 10, which is Week 6

2025 CNY fell on Jan 29, which is Week 5

smingo

geçen yıldiscuss

Skirrow was significant in the Nobel-winning discovery of H. Pylori, has an Agar gel named after him, and championed public health.

smingo

2 yıl öncediscuss

USA has increased its export controls on advanced process node chips, with an act that comes in to effect today, and will get published in a few days' time. The preview is available at https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2024-28270... .

smingo

2 yıl öncediscuss

[flagged]

smingo

2 yıl öncediscuss

Barber's Adagio for strings, although it gets referenced enough; Khachaturian's Spartacus and Phrygia, especially the brass version; Holst's planets, esp Uranus; Beethoven's 7th; Gorecki's 3rd.

smingo

2 yıl öncediscuss

indeed, with an incoming Teams meeting invite, it should be determinable from the sender's context which account should work on the meeting. Instead there is 2 minutes of waiting, and what seems like pot luck with the account.

smingo

2 yıl öncediscuss

Not so sure that's fair. There are papers cited from 2016 that are from other authors.

smingo

2 yıl öncediscuss

The dystopia in the film version of Ready Player One clearly borrows from this.

smingo

3 yıl öncediscuss

Putting the WiFi SSID and password on the side of the energy monitor sensor box allowed for this:

> The whole thing was quite dissapointing. However, I do have a few Raspberry Pico microcontrollers lying around at home. If I could connect to the WiFi network of the energy manager directly and get the data from the server, I could just extract kW consumption from the API, multiply it by a correct rate and then display it on some Grafana instance.

Love it!

smingo

3 yıl öncediscuss

Regulating here is necessary, but the challenge is steep! IoT devices may include a complex bill of materials (BoM) including software (SBoM). Vulnerabilities can appear in any of those components.

On the one hand, CVE and vulnerability databases are excellent, and with some automation of vulnerability and patch availability the's the possibility of automated re-build.

But the manifests can be huge. And some component could be vulnerable, but was never anticipated to be so, and perhaps doesn't even have the means to be patched. Update processes for sub-sub-components may not have been exercised, and could lead to bricked products.

So labelling and guarantees are welcomed. But the challenge is practically insurmountable, and until the entire industry steps up to meet it, labelling and guarantees are going to be 'best effort'.

smingo

3 yıl öncediscuss

Totally valid point. Escrow then open sourced, or perhaps even some insurance policy so that the future patching and vulnerability remediation is guaranteed.

There's a bunch of stuff consequential to EO 14028 which could allow for some automation of library vulnerability.

smingo

3 yıl öncediscuss

As a tool for quantifying the number of civilisations, agree, the Drake Equation is not so useful given the known unknowables.

But as a tool for stimulating discussion, creating engagement for SETI, or as an exemplar for Fermi Estimation, it's excellent.

smingo

3 yıl öncediscuss

Someone must have felt very clever when they concluded Erlang would be dimensionless.

  Calls per second X seconds per call = no unit.

But that's wrong. Clearly the number of calls ongoing maps on to lines being used for a circuit-switched network, or datagrams in flight, or whatever. Far from dimensionless.

  Call_starts per second X call.seconds per call_start = calls as the unit

Much more plausible, IMHO.

smingo

4 yıl öncediscuss

Do you have an opinion on Carbon?

smingo

4 yıl öncediscuss

Not for big arrays.

Radix sort is O[n] . (or [n * number of bytes in Int] or whatever is being compared).

It's omitted from the comparisons, I see. Radix sort can also have predictable memory overhead.

Submissions

Commodore 64 Ultimate gets released

Martin Skirrow, campylobacter researcher, obituary

New export controls curb China's AI chips

Concerning amount of errors on BBC comp. sci. revision page

comments