Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)
Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in…
I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to support them with Linux (or any other…
I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves their sanity...
I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks…
I mean, it does - people search stuff all the time now, rather than thinking about it.
N-body problems can't be analytically solved. However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermediate states along the way In the case of…
Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited metric.
It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same property.
Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install. Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to…
Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could…
Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge…
Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea: The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the fringe theory that gravity is really…
I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others - however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am more just making the gentle point that…
I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you. I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a…
Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despite being an active computer gamer at the…
I don't know, the brief time I spent with D:OS2, there was quite a lot of inventory shenanigans.
I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2. I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but didn't make it past the early parts due…
The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it's much more debatable as to the nature…
Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves, but the "Dodge" sequence (REAMDE and Fall) becomes…
This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future tech thriller and part-1940s spy…
I think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story which…
Yeah, I think the dissonance I fundamentally had with the ending of The Diamond Age is that it seems to not have any sense of irony (or any concept that, maybe, the Seed might not be the awful idea that his protagonists…
There's an implicit assumption here that the "purpose of [physics] research" must necessarily result in concrete results in order to be "worthwhile". A lot of theoretical physics, at least, is increasingly really…
Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)
Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in…
I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to support them with Linux (or any other…
I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves their sanity...
I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks…
I mean, it does - people search stuff all the time now, rather than thinking about it.
N-body problems can't be analytically solved. However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermediate states along the way In the case of…
Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited metric.
It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same property.
Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install. Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to…
Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could…
Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge…
Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea: The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the fringe theory that gravity is really…
I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others - however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am more just making the gentle point that…
I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you. I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a…
Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despite being an active computer gamer at the…
I don't know, the brief time I spent with D:OS2, there was quite a lot of inventory shenanigans.
I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2. I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but didn't make it past the early parts due…
The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it's much more debatable as to the nature…
Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves, but the "Dodge" sequence (REAMDE and Fall) becomes…
This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future tech thriller and part-1940s spy…
I think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story which…
Yeah, I think the dissonance I fundamentally had with the ending of The Diamond Age is that it seems to not have any sense of irony (or any concept that, maybe, the Seed might not be the awful idea that his protagonists…
There's an implicit assumption here that the "purpose of [physics] research" must necessarily result in concrete results in order to be "worthwhile". A lot of theoretical physics, at least, is increasingly really…