std_badalloc's comments

As someone who did cross platform development for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone way back when, Windows Phone did actually have the superior dev experience by far (talking about WinPhone 7+ here). It wasn't free, but neither was iPhone development.

They didn't have any market share though, so there wasn't much money to be made making apps for them. I suspect they failed because they launched 2-3 years after Android and iPhone, so the other platforms had accumulated the network effects of an existing user base and app ecosystem that they couldn't catch up to. And they tried hard, IIRC, Microsoft offered to build a Snapchat client for Snap Inc, and to pay them to be allowed to do so, but were denied.

PyTorch is the most impressive piece of software engineering that I know of. So yeah, it's a nice interface for writing fast numerical code. And for zero effort you can change between running on CPUs, GPUs and TPUs. There's some compiler functionality in there for kernel fusing and more. Oh, and you can autodiff everything. There's just an incredible amount of complexity being hidden behind behind a very simple interface there, and it just continues to impress me how they've been able to get this so right.

It's the same in Norway, and it seems completely indefensible.

1) It's the opposite of progressive taxation, since the tax deduction is higher the larger your mortgage is (and there's no deduction if you don't have a mortgage).

2) It artificially inflates housing prices.

Overall, it's a shifting of cash away from those that want to enter the housing market towards those that are in it, i.e. taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The policy seems like an obviously indefensible mistake, yet no political party dears to touch it because the majority of voters are beneficiaries of it, and the topic is slightly too complicated for there to be an informed public debate about it.

I've seen studies where they tracked wild Norwegian salmon, and found that 90% died before spawning. As far as I understood it, this was interpreted as "natural death", but it's the same figure as the one in the article. It seems like a very plausible explanation that those deaths also largely occurred due to the same poisoning from tires.

The difference is presumably the digital contract, that is written in a programming language that only a handful of people on earth can understand, where a programming error can make your money disappear, such that you have no recourse in the court system.

Another difference is the pyramid scheme incentives in the cryptocurrency tech, causing everyone who's bought into it to be incentivised to talk about how great it is.

I think it was with the seq2seq paper of Sutskever, Vinyals and Le in 2014: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215

People were doing a mix of learning from data and hand engineered solutions before this, but this was the first system learned end-to-end, afaik.

> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless?

> All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices.

No, but this is exactly the point of DRM and the legal protections around circumventing it. It never was about copyright protection. Copyright infringement was already illegal before the DMCA, and the introduction of DRM didn't make a dent in the amount of copyright infringement.

The point of making DRM circumvention illegal is for me to be able to sell you a bunch of bits, but ensure that I don't have any commercial competition in regards to how you use those bits. You can't legally make a device that plays DVDs without the blessing of a cartel known as DVD FLLC. You can't legally make a device that plays music from iTunes without the blessing of Apple. Etc. It's about retaining monopolistic control over media distribution and use, by forbidding certain forms of competition in the market.

Getting a law passed that forbids market competition (in many countries! not just the US) under the guise of being about copyright protection, is one of the greatest cons I've ever heard of, but that is what has happened.

I don't think the example here is the best. There's a case to be made for extracting pure functions and organizing them like this, but I don't think this code makes it. The benefit of pure functions IMO is primarily in that the code becomes easy to reason about if it doesn't depend on state. But any app that does anything will have state, and the question is how you manage that. One guideline could be that individual code units should reduce the amount of state you need to worry about at higher levels of abstraction.

In the example, there is hardly any code that does anything different depending on state. There's no state being managed, so there isn't actually any architectural problem being solved here. Should the API go down or change its format, the code breaks. The pure pluck_definition() will still fail to parse the JSON if the format changes. The pure build_url() will stop working if the API changes its URL format. They will pass unit tests, but fail in practice.

An actual problem to be solved here is to abstract away the details of the REST API, formatting and network errors. One way to do this is to pack that into a component with a well defined interface. You can still do this stateful/non-stateful split within the component if you want, but on the application level you need to apply that heuristic recursively at different levels of abstraction.

Yeah, but ResNet does not have sparse matrices, so how could it use them? Post ReLU activations may be sparse, but I don't think that helps when used with a non-sparse Conv2d.

First I've heard of this. What is the software situation like on a device like this? I assume no comptability with Android, so apps have to be developed specifically targeting their OS?