mcprwklzpq's comments

mcprwklzpq | 16 days ago | on: EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)

Good news. My phone would have to live another couple of years, and the next one i buy would stay with me for a decade.

Just 10 years ago you could detach back of the smartphone with a nail, then switch the battery in a few seconds yourself. Smartphones even sometimes came with a second spare battery in the box!

Old smartphones were much lighter, smaller and thinner then modern shovel sized bricks with fat batteries. Screens were smaller and so the batteries too.

Phones are boring. They work fine already. I could use my current 3 year old phone another 6 years if it lived through the day without charging.

mcprwklzpq | 4 months ago | on: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

> Enakshi Barua, 14, said she’s also opposed to the ban, on principle. Barua said. "I feel like the trust isn’t there between the students and teachers." > staff members are collecting around 30 contraband phones a day > There’s a strike system with escalating punishments

Does not sound good.

mcprwklzpq | 7 months ago | on: An engineer's perspective on hiring

When does the CTO has time to be the first unit in the pipeline? How much applicants do you have?

From our experience just posting a junior web developer job gets up to 1000 resumes into our inbox. And we just a small company without an established name.

The only possible first step for us is to automatically send everyone an at home coding challenge. This narrows down the list to only about 50 developers that would reply. Only 10 of them would send working code. And only at that point we can actually start to interview.

mcprwklzpq | 2 years ago | on: Dark Messiah modding community got Ubisoft approval

Dark Messiah had unique combat mechanics in hazard filled environments, where you could create all sorts of physics based accidents to eliminate enemies.

Game combat was showcased in the demo which made a lot of people at the time to believe it would be the game of the year. Unfortunately the demo contained all the best levels and the full game fell short with less engaging ones.

I did not play much games since that time so i do not know if some other games outclassed the Dark Messiah combat experience but trying the demo is worth it for a lot of fun in great level design. https://archive.org/details/DarkMessiahMightAndMagicDemo

mcprwklzpq | 3 years ago | on: Precedents of the Unprecedented: Black Squares Before Malevich

Except Malevich had written extensively about why he painted the Black Square and he never said it was to reject god.

Malevich even wrote an essay "Бог не скинут: Искусство, церковь, фабрика" (God is not thrown down: Art, church, factory) in which he argued that god exists because it is impossible to prove otherwise.

From this essay it is possible to conclude that Malevich in Black Square painted god as he imagined it. He wrote that since the seventh day of creation god rests and does nothing. That is why it appears as if god does not exists. Black Square depicts nothing.

mcprwklzpq | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?

Like everyone else i rely on open source libraries. I sometimes need to change them either to fix bugs that i encounter or to improve them in some way to better fit my purposes.

It is in my best interest to send my changes to the library maintainer so that i do not have to maintain my own fork of the library.

It is not always in best interest of maintainers to merge my changes because it is either more work for them or their purposes for the library are too different from mine.

Maintaining an open source project is a lot of work and i would also like to hear more from maintainers about their motivation to do it.

mcprwklzpq | 4 years ago | on: ‘Journey to the Edge of Reason’ Review: Gödel’s Beautiful Mind

Thank you. I downloaded this paper a month ago to read it eventually. Your comment made me read it yesterday and i have a question.

By using the type system would we exlude potentially consistent theories? Is it similar to how limitimg ourselves to a decidable language instead of a turing complete one would prevent us from writing potentially never halting programms that could still halt?

mcprwklzpq | 4 years ago | on: ‘Journey to the Edge of Reason’ Review: Gödel’s Beautiful Mind

I can ELIP (Explain Like I am a Programmer) statements and consequences of both incompleteness theorems and two related problems.

So the pemise is that you have to write 4 programs, but you can not, they all would fail for some inputs.

1. The first Gödel's incompleteness theorem. A program has to take a set of axioms and a set of true statements about natural numbers. It has to return proofs for all the statements. How it will fail? It would either for some statements return a proof that contradicts itself (so the set of axioms is inconsistent) or return no proof at all (so the set of axioms is incomplete).

2. The second Gödel's incompleteness theorem. A program has to take a set of axioms. I has to return true if program 1 given theese axioms would never retrun a proof that contradicts itself. How it will fail? It would return true for some set of axioms that are inconsistent.

3. Entscheidungsproblem. A program has to take a set of axioms and a statement. It has to return true if the statement is true. How it will fail? It would return true for some false statement.

4. Halting problem. A program has to take a program (in a Turing complete language). It has to return true if the program will ever finish. How will it fail? It would return true for program that would never finish. Or probably would itself never finish. This is also possible for all other programs.

mcprwklzpq | 4 years ago | on: Dürer shaped the modern world

Yes, not the first but most open. In Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks there is a drawing "Draftsman drawing an armillary sphere" dated 1510 which shows a kind of drawing machine. It is 15 years earlier than Durers woodcut. But Durers one was published in a book at the time.

Wikipedia has a short timeline of perspective machines [1]. There is also a link to excelent classification and description of all the drawing machines. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_machine

2. https://drawingmachines.org/

mcprwklzpq | 4 years ago | on: Dürer shaped the modern world

Interesting fact - Durer used a kind of 3d rendering engine to study and teach perpective. He made a woodcut of it called "Man Drawing a Lute". I learned it from Computer Graphics Principles and Practice which uses it to teach how 3d rendering works. See [1] or [2] for illustration and description of the method.

He also made another woodcut called "Daraughsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman" with more practical method. See illustration [3].

1. https://trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress.com/2014/05...

2. https://virtualterritory.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/did-albrec...

3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Draughtsman_draw...

mcprwklzpq | 4 years ago | on: Show HN: UML model and code examples of GoF patterns in Crystal

Just discovered plantuml and liked it - i can use some visual aid if only i do not have to draw it.

Sequence and use case diagrams are useful. Class diagrams i would rather see in code.

I also misuse use case diagrams for arbitrary graphs. It is good to see if a graph i came up with looks too much like spaghetti. Helps to untangle it. But it is not proper UML and i could use the graphviz dot itself for it without plantuml frontend.

mcprwklzpq | 5 years ago | on: Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

Einstein explained gravity without action at a distance with general relativity theory. I wonder what would Newton thought about that one since about his own theory he said "so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.". So this action at a distance was solved but certainly not in the way that could revive mechanical philosophy.

Edit: There were a lot of mechanical explanations of gravity in 2 centuries between Newton and Einstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gra...

mcprwklzpq | 5 years ago | on: Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

Here is a later text version of this lecture: Noam Chomsky - Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding. https://chomsky.info/201401__/

I tried to edit for brevity and summarise the main point here, too:

Mechanical philosophy originated with Galileo and his contemporaries, held that the world is a machine (device with gears, levers, and other mechanical components, interacting through direct contact) and could in principle be constructed by a super-skilled artisan. The way they viewed these machines is similar to the way we view computers today (compare with "we live in a simulation").

Galileo insisted that theories are intelligible, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.” The same conception, was developed by Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, and others.

Descartes recognised “the creative aspect of language use” (and thought), a capacity unique to humans that cannot be duplicated by machines. The use of language is: 1) innovative without bounds, 2) appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them, 3) can engender thoughts in others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves.

Descartes invoked a new principle to accommodate these phenomena, a kind of creative principle (mind), res cogitans, which stood alongside of res extensa (body) (Cartesian dualism).

Newton showed that to account for the properties of matter (or res extensa or body) it is necessary to resort to interaction without contact, therefore matter is not a machine, and we do not have any definition of matter. The properties of the material world are “inconceivable to us,” but real nevertheless.

Since then in science we do not conceive of the world as a mechanism (the world is a machine that we explore and map) but we construct intelligible (the one that a machine can compute) theories about the world.

In summary: we can not know what the world is but we build theories about it that a machine can compute. The world is not a machine - our mind is a machine.

Also in there Chomsky subscribes to cognitive neuroscientists C.R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King critiques of neuroscience (mind is not computed by neural nets, but mabe by some chemical reaction inside cells, maybe by RNA, which may provide Turing complete set of operations).

mcprwklzpq | 5 years ago | on: 100 years later, the dystopian origin of the word ‘robot’ still rings true

In this article [1] i see quite a lot of funny examples of false friends for czech to russian translation. Stale is cherstvyj in russian, but in czech cherstvyj is fresh. A corpse in russian is a torso in czech. Shame is attention. A cigarette butt is a cucumber. Toadstool is buckwheat. Looseness is speed. And so on. Some words like zivot in czech are closer to old russian meaning (life) than current (stomach). Between some i can see some other relation. And with some i have no idea how it could coincide that way.

1. https://zen.yandex.ru/media/solo/takoi-zabavnyi-cheshskii-ia...

mcprwklzpq | 5 years ago | on: 100 years later, the dystopian origin of the word ‘robot’ still rings true

Robota means different thing in czech than rabota in other slavic languages. Czech robota means corvee. There are different words for corvee in other slavic languages - "barshhina" (in russian), "panshhina" (in ukranian, polish and belarusian, spelled a bit differently in each), and rabota in them means any work, in czech work is called prace.

Edit: This is a good example of "false friends of a translator" - words in different languages that sound similar but have different meanings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

That said rabota and robota still have a common root which means slave in most slavic languages. So how is it the czech is such an outlier is a curiosity.

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