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Anyone who signs up will get two free months of Stadia Pro with instant access to nine games, including GRID, Destiny 2: The Collection, and Thumper. I guess they worked out the scaling issues?
This one's a "usual": "Give us your credit card and sign up for a subscription, but we promise not to charge you for two months. Oh yeah, and we might forget to tell you when the two months are up. So sad." type of offer.
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The laws of physics imply that the passage of time is an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we might have to rethink the reality of infinitely precise numbers. Just another reminder that physicists (and theoretical mathematicians) have been doing this, "stay isolated at home long enough to start thinking about weird stuff" for a long time
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Quote: a century-old mathematical language called intuitionist mathematics, which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits. I'm a strong supporter of this.
In fact, we shouldn't really need more than one number.
I propose that it be four, because three's not enough, and five can get too noisy.Quote: If numbers are finite and limited in their precision, then nature itself is inherently imprecise, and thus unpredictable. Exactly!
So if there is only one number, then all the unexpected things in the universe can be explained!
(Like I say, though, let's stick with four, because I've got a headache.)
Essentially, what he's saying is that because we'll probably never have enough data to reliably predict absolutely everything, we should give up trying to figure out the causes and effects of how the universe works.
I don't think I'll be subscribing to his newsletter.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: So if there is only one number, then all the unexpected things in the universe can be explained!
Of course... 42
Sorry for the obvious, but it was too tempting
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Are you sure that's the answer to the right question?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Liquid nitrogen
Sorry for the obvious, but it was too tempting II
I am leaving it here... enough silly comments from my side for today
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The accuracy required is a measure of how unstable and difficult a juggling pattern is. If they didn't, the balls would fall
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In other news, bees can't fly.
But "reaction times" don't come into the juggling thing. Jugglers don't stand there and wonder which ball is going to fall next or where; there's no thinking involved.
Each throw, catch, and movement has to be practised heavily, until it practically becomes autonomic.
So by basing the study on reaction times, they're looking in entirely the wrong direction.
I suppose that's what you get when you let a mechanical engineer and a mathematician make choices on how the body and brain work.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
modified 8-Apr-20 13:24pm.
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Right. Besides, you don't need any fast reaction time to know what happens if you throw a ball straight up: It comes straight down. If you throw a ball against the wall at a 45 degree angle, it will bounce back at a 45 degree angle. These are elementary rules of physics. When you have internalized then, you know what is going to happen; you don't have to analyze a visual impression of it to know.
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Just restating Mark's valid point.
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A real test would be for a juggler to just stand there and have people throw balls at him randomly from different directions at varying velocities.
Which sounds like fun.
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I'm not very accurate in ball-throwing, and worry that that could skew the figures.
Would it be OK if I threw darts, instead?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Fingerprint-based authentication is fine for most people, but it's hardly foolproof. All those surprised, don't raise a finger
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Kent Sharkey wrote: don't raise a finger Damn these KSS rules!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Kent Sharkey wrote: don't raise a finger
OK
(I raise 3) .|||.
Can they read between lines?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: All those surprised, don't raise a finger
How about two?
,|,, ,,|,
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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There was an earlier wave of fingerprint reading, maybe 20 years ago, years before smartphone readers were available. We had exactly the same kind of debunkers then. Mythbusters did a program on it, and for years people lost faith in it.
It doesn't matter that the stealing of your fingerprint requires a whole lot of effort (you don't meet that many possible intruders at the pub, and anyone who steals your empty beer glass before the waiter picks it up is somewhat suspicious!) The process from picking up the fingerprint to creating a false finger that can be used is rather complex and expensive. The lock to be opened must be available to the intruder - he must steal your smartphone or portable, or break into the house where the big PC is placed. In most cases, the risk is near-epsilon.
In those days, fingerprint readers were separate devices. Nanufacturers added safety features, like thermosensors to distinguish between a live finger and a cold rubber one. Intruders had to make hollow rubber fingers to be filled with lukewarm water. The sensors got sensors for electrical resistance between two points on the fingertip; intruders had to switch to a semiconducting rubber mixture. Software was extended to store all 10 fingers, asking you to present a randomly selected one - few intruders have picked up your left hand pinky! (Some fingerprint login systems demanded left hand fingerprint for privileged accounts, for improved security.)
And so on. The best readers became very resistant to fake fingers. But media had no interest in reporting about this; everyone "knew" that fingerprints don't work, as proven by Mythbusters; there was no need to reconsider that conclusion!
Until Apple started it up again. Who would raise any critical comment to something that Apple promotes? It had no thermosensing, no conductance reading, it lacked a lot of the safety features that the separate readers (the good ones) had. But coming from Apple, it must be good!
I wish that we could get back the old, advanced readers for use on plain PCs, either integrated (as they were for some years on the ThinkPad portables, although I don't think they had any conductivity or thermosensors), or as USB devices. Especially when used in 2FA, where you both must provide e.g. a password and a fingerprint, the security is way beyond what is needed in 99.99% of all systems. You wouldn't get the same security on your smartphone (until they add an advanced reader with all bells and whistles, and 2FA), but few smartphones hold information that needs military grade top secret protection.
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"Thinking of tests as validation, it just bakes all these assumptions about your system into a file you run all the time. It creates stasis." "All headlines are clickbait." (some more than others)
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Oh, I see!
TDD done this guy's way doesn't check outputs based on inputs!
Is that what he's saying? I have no idea what he's saying. It's like reading alphabet soup -- all the letters and words are there, but if you try to find any solid underlying meaning, your spoon just splashes soup onto the nice, clean tablecloth.
He seems to be saying that if you write new tests before you change your implementation, you won't need to write new tests after you change your implementation.
Six, meet half a dozen; half a dozen, six.
What I do know is that evangelists will turn TDD, which should be a functional and reasonably usable methodology, into a morass of "Lets follow multiple patterns, rather than get the job done" unnecessary work.
When thinking of adopting a new methodology, it's always wise to check the evangelism level, and to find out how many exceptional circumstances there are, where you have to do things differently.
Of course, to do things differently to this guy, you have to first figure out what he expects you to do.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Agile development implies that a developer can change his code at any time, to return another result, or perform a different operation, as requested by some new requirement. Any test regime is incompatible with agile principles. The outputs of a module is defined by what the module returns right now, after the new updates. Module tests for checking that the outputs are the way the outputs are, are meaningless. TDD, module tests, system tests or integration tests are all incompatible with agile development principles.
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You’re designing a set of libraries, used by millions of developers every day, running crucial applications around the world. You want to improve it and add a new feature or enhanced functionality. You must do this, all the while not breaking the millions of existing applications. Despite the evidence to the contrary, they are.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Despite the evidence to the contrary, they are. what? breaking the millions of existing applications?
Jokes apart... during .Net Framework was fine, now with all other .Net XXX I have the impression, that it is getting messier with each new release.
But... the frightening thought is... It could be managed by the Windows Update team...
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Something about seeing what sticks on walls and scat flinging monkeys?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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In the good old Win32 API, two completely different strategies were used: Either, when a function Func was extended, we were offered the FuncEx interface. Next time it was extended, it became FuncExEx, and so on. There was at least one case of FuncExExExExEx - five extensions to the original.
The other alternative was to put all arguments into a single struct, the first argument being the size of the struct. Arguments required for new extensions were added to the end of the struct. If you supplied an extended, "new" struct to an old library, only the old members were accessed and the old functionality was unchanged. If you supplied an old, shorter struct, a new library would know not to access the extended parameters. The struct size served as sort of an interface version indicator.
I was never in doubt which of these alternatives I preferred, and have tried to push that principle in projects I have been involved in, but most developers reject it fiercely. If a method requires seven parameters, the seven values should be listed in the call, not hidden in a f*** struct!
(Years ago, I worked for a company that had to expedite the release of the new compiler to satisfy an important customer, who had reached the limit of function 99 parameters! The new compiler allowed 256, satisfying the customer's needs. But this was in the days of Fortran, so using structs was no option.)
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Microsoft says IPE (Integrity Policy Enforcement) was designed for immutable and embedded systems (e.g. network firewall device in a data center). What's next? The Linux core team submitting a fix for Excel?
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