suyjuris's comments

You can compromise by using abort in debug builds and std::unreachable in release builds.

Instant typesetting would be very welcome – I have often wished for exactly this. But I do not think that it is a technical problem. TeX is very fast, after all. (As you would expect with software that age.) Rather, people do complicated things and those become slow at some point. If you cannot do complicated things, the system will likely not be popular, and the popularity of LaTeX is its main appeal, I think. Everything is just a package away. Perhaps it is possible to aim at another point on the pareto frontier and have something fast with fewer features, similar to the relationship between C and C++. Anyway, I hope I am wrong and wish you the best of luck!

If you want to explore how BDD algorithms work visually, with animations, I did write an open-source tool for exactly this purpose a while ago: https://nicze.de/philipp/bdds/

Let me know if it is of any use! :)

Sources are at https://github.com/suyjuris/obst .

You can also do it as follows:

    if (!(~mask & (WGPUColorWriteMask_Alpha|WGPUColorWriteMask_Blue))) { ... }

Not quite as long but perhaps less readable.

> In the German system, for instance, PhD students are paid (mind you, it's an academic salary, which is not a lot but a first year PhD student with a full time contract already makes more money than the median German salaried worker)

Just to put numbers on this: PhD students earn roughly 4300€ per month (before taxes and insurance), resulting in something like 2600€ take-home pay. This is for a “full-time” position (quotes because all positions are full-time, it is only the pay that is reduced). In CS full-time positions are common, in most other fields they are not.

If you want to look up details, search for E13 TV-L.

I once implemented rounded rectangles by drawing circles with regards to arbitrary p-norms [1,2] – I did not think about it at the time, but the derivatives are probably quite nice. (It did have the advantage of using the same code for rounded rectangles and for circles.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(mathematics)#p-norm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp_space#/media/File:Vector-p-...

I you feel that the actor is an important part of the sentence, you can include it in passive voice as well: “However, it was attacked at Pearl Harbor by Japan, and then chose to enter the war.”

I would disagree. This sentence is about the Unites States, not Japan, and the use of passive voice reflects that.

I always have earmuffs on my desk, they are great when something noise is happening outside and I need to concentrate. Also cheap.

> This is why airpod pros or similar noise cancelling headphones are worth their weight in gold.

In case anyone else was wondering: the weight in gold is about 500$.

> Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.

Do you have more information on that? A quick search did not yield any results.

Much depends on the subfield, but here are two shortcuts to understanding a dense paper:

1. Many CS papers are presented at conferences, and many of these talks are recorded and available.

2. Look for a paper citing the one you are interested in. The “related works” section often contains brief summaries, which are written with the benefit of hindsight.

Somewhat related, an earlier comment of mine on how to acquire copies of a paper without resorting to unauthorised copying [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711206

There is something to be said for leaving a platform if you do not like the direction it seems to be headed in, even if you could compensate for the issues in the short term. Otherwise you might sign up for years of incrementally increasing misery.

Once Windows installed updates against their users' preference I switched my main desktop to Linux – this was a significant amount of work but has saved me a lot of frustration over the past years. Similarly, once I experienced UI stutter in Gnome and noticed that it moved towards Javascript, I switched to i3. Again, huge setup cost (e.g. I had to implement alt-tab behaviour myself), but things ran smoothly since.

> I distinctly remember him talking about how worthless having a file system is on a server, or for that matter an operating system.

If I recall correctly, his statement can be more charitably summarised as noting that many of the functions of an OS or FS are not useful in the specific use case he had, which was running a single program serving a website. He would therefore prefer to not have the additional complexity, attack surface and performance overhead. I do not think that this is very controversial? There are of course trade-offs involved, and he did mention that he was planning on running Linux as a way to get device drivers and something booting with reasonable effort, at least initially.

Thank you, that is indeed a source and I have raised my estimate of the probability larger casualties slightly. (For the record: above excerpt is from an article in the online magazine CounterPunch [1], which itself refers to the 2009 book [2].)

However, its methodology and rigour have been criticised [3]. As I am not an expert in this area I cannot evaluate the source directly, but several general heuristics apply. The source is a single book. (I am aware that the book claims to rely on numerous non-english sources, but I do not believe that they make the same claims.) The book relies on observational epidemiological data, which is generally hard to get right, and dose-response curves seem to be not analysed (seeing a relationship between doses and effect sizes is a good way to exclude spurious correlations). Finally, since the article mentions Yablokov's prior occupation I will also note that he founded and lead the Soviet chapter of Greenpeace, an organisation with a strong anti-nuclear position.

So I do not think that this is strong evidence. (But as I said earlier, I do currently consider it weak evidence.) In any case, the book claims one million deaths, not multiple millions, and only a fraction of those is attributed to thyroid cancer.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/02/russian-takeover-of-...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110419144513/http://www.strahl...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Do you have any kind of source for this? As far as I am aware, estimates for deaths based on thyroid cancers are ~160 [1]. Not 'thousand, just 160 – you claim is off by five orders of magnitude. Estimates for the total death toll are up to 60000 if you assume the linear no-threshold model [2], so might be much lower in reality.

[1] See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di....

[2] The model assumes that any amount of radiation is harmful and estimates the harm of low doses as a corresponding fraction of the harm of large doses. Empirical evidence is unclear, at best, but it functions as worst-case estimate.

> Liskov substitution principle tells you that a rectangle cannot be a super class of a square.

It does not. The Liskov substitution principle states, as it applies here, that a property that holds for all rectangles has to hold for all squares. This is true, as every square is a rectangle.

> the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has

I assume you are using “exponentially” in its informal meaning of “somewhat quickly” ? At least I am not aware of any routing issues that scale exponentially with the size of the graph.

To the contrary, if you can pick the graph structure then routing is not very difficult at all.

“Fledern” is not actually a German word (in any kind of common usage at least). A literal translation of flying would be “fliegen”.

Apparently the word fledermaus originates 1200 years ago and is derived from “flattern” (to flutter).

If you find chess variants interesting, I would recommend looking at Go [1] as well. It is similar to chess in that it is an ancient turn-based strategy game for two players and with perfect information, but I find it much more pleasing from a game-design perspective. The rules are much simpler, there are no draws, and the starting player does not have an advantage. Also, you can have handicaps so that two players with different playing strengths play a evenly-matched game.

To me, this shows that it is possible to solve most of the commonly cited issues in chess by changing it into a radically different game. But can you do it with only a minute adjustment? I find it difficult to imagine chess without draws, but it is not inconceivable. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

[2] E.g.: if the game would end in a draw, instead the player who has made more King-moves wins. If that is tied as well, Black wins.

> Also I think we have shown using a variant of Galois theory that there can not be a closed from solution for the nth prime.

Do you have a reference? This sounds interesting.

There are, of course, integer polynomials where the set of positive values is precisely the set of primes (think something like x²(y+1)-(z+x)y, but much more complicated) [2].

(This might seem like an interesting fact, but it really is not. All sets of numbers where a computer can decide whether a number belongs to the set have such a polynomial.)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_for_primes