uonpopular_th's comments

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: Consultants: the real reason it costs so much to build new subways in America

>This seems like a viciously difficult problem to solve to me. How do you hire someone for a city's transport agency who has the ability to manage a multi-billion dollar construction project? Anyone with those skills will surely be able to earn 10x more in the private sector.

You pay them 5x as much as they would get in the private sector. In all my hiring trouble never have I been in a position where spending what I was told was unreasonable money on staff did not result in a better outcome.

My only explanation why no one else does this is that CEO will never let anyone else in the company earn more than them.

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: Symbolic Programming with Clojure [pdf]

>Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would work in were C and C++, maybe with some Bash and Perl on the side, 25k lines is a reasonable estimate for a brand new symbolic engine- a thing that in imperative languages didn't exist- with some element of typical PhD edge case over-engineering.

The modern world was very much formed by the 90s. Mathematica, Axiom, Maple, etc were all mature software written a decade or more ago. What people were doing wasn't writing a CAS from scratch but writing one that could slot into whatever program they needed at the time, e.g. chaotic simulation of the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: Symbolic Programming with Clojure [pdf]

>Where do you even begin decompressing a claim like this?

Start writing the code and see where it takes you. Having done that type of work in grad school I moved from C++ to Guile for exploratory work for that very reason.

I then rewrote the slow bits in C as custom functions much like how you would in Python.

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

The bureaucrats who should have been enabling and coordinating scientists instead decided what the policy should be for Covid19 and ruined the lives/careers of anyone who did not fall in line.

The worst of these decisions by far was the policy that covid was spread by aerosols and not airborne: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

This was nothing short of Lysenkoism in the 21st century.

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: The Fediverse is already dead

>Others have documented the sordid tale of Mastodon’s development better than I could, but suffice it to say that many queer people, people of color, and women have been cast aside by Rochko despite significant and often culturally defining contributions to the software and ecosystem.

This is why pandering to extremists never works.

It's time that everyone born after 1980 realize the Christ Freak of your childhoods has wrapped herself up in rainbows and moved onto a new culture to destroy.

In 202X The last refuge of the scoundrel is diversity.

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: Physics and Mathematics Self-Study Project

They don't teach you that any more than current books do.

You might gain that because you compare the two and notice the old books are obviously wrong against new data ... something the current books happily tell you too.

uonpopular_th | 3 years ago | on: Time to get the Posix elephant off our necks?

This reads like someone whose spend a lot of time thinking about the problem and a lot less time working on the problem.

The main gist is: Why is memory shared between two processes?

The answer is: you can unblock a deadlock when you have a consumer and producer by just turning one of them on and off. In all other cases you can't. All the 'solutions' to that problem make assumptions about the processes sharing state which are somewhere between difficult to impossible to keep valid in the real world.

In short: 2 is a magic number and it's not the fault of posix.

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