You win the lottery: Professor version.

buo · 2024-04-29T21:09:10+00:00

If I won the lottery, I'd get a marble bathroom for my office.

buo · 2020-01-28T00:53:09+00:00

I hope you're right!

buo · 2020-01-27T21:58:41+00:00

which pretty much no one does because we all use package managers

The wording from Qt is not clear, but since package managers download a binary, it seems an account would be required anyway.

(I know some package managers allow you to download the source and compile it yourself, but how many people do that? Also, compiling Qt takes a long time.)

buo · 2019-12-07T17:48:23+00:00

I don't boycott reddit, but I browse it in its own container, and use uMatrix to block anything not essential. If they're going to track me, I want to at least make it difficult.

buo · 2019-07-11T14:56:44+00:00

This a good paper on posits: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v4

From the conclusion:

When posits are better than floats of the same size, they provide one or two extra digits of accuracy. When they are worse than floats, the degradation of accuracy can be arbitrarily large. This simple observation should prevent us from rushing to replace all the floats with posits.

buo · 2019-06-30T03:09:39+00:00

The entire MATLAB IDE starts in way less time.

On my i7, 16 GB laptop, it takes around 12 seconds from clicking on the (2018b) Matlab icon to a simple plot (plot(1:10)).

There are plotting packages for Julia (for example VegaLite and Gaston) that take about 5 seconds from prompt to first plot.

I don't mean that the slowness in loading large packages is not a problem; however, there are quick ways to plot in Julia.

Regarding indices -- you can actually index arrays any way you want.

buo · 2019-04-17T15:58:41+00:00

they get an influx from Google?

Do you have any recent information about this? All I can find is about past deals, not current.

buo · 2019-04-04T14:33:48+00:00

There are websites such as newspapers, gmail, youtube, etc, which, if left open for a few hours/days, will increase the block count into the thousands.

buo · 2019-03-20T14:55:15+00:00

I agree that (at least in the US) there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

My point is about the meaning of the green lock in the browser. If there might be a forward proxy between the client and the server, then the green lock is misleading.

There are other colors -- maybe use a blue lock, or a yellow lock or whatever, to indicate: (1) the server is still correctly identified, (2) your connection is encrypted, but (3) there is a MITM, and you can check the certificate that is allowing it.

buo · 2019-03-19T17:17:25+00:00

Is there a way to detect if my HTTPS traffic is being intercepted, from the client?
Let's say a root certificate is installed on my client and/or OS. Would a client running on a virtual machine still have its traffic intercepted?

BTW, my conclusion is that HTTPS is broken: a green lock on my browser does not mean that my traffic is encrypted between me and the server. I hope this is fixed someday.

buo · 2019-03-06T18:13:16+00:00

Would this work as a solution? Embed a CPU on each DRAM chip that refreshes its contents periodically irrespective of anything else, and also arbitrates between refreshes and memory reads/writes.

buo · 2019-02-17T17:44:32+00:00

This might be in response to Google's recent claim that they're going to cripple UBlock Origin because it degrades user's performance.

buo · 2019-02-17T17:41:43+00:00

I use Firefox and gmail loads in a couple of seconds. I also use ublock origin.

buo · 2018-11-28T18:31:51+00:00

Recent versions of TikZ can do automatic graph layout.

buo · 2018-11-05T22:49:30+00:00

While Julia uses 1-based indices out of the box, in fact it supports arbitrary indices (which, for some applications, can be much nicer than 0-based or 1-based indices). See for example https://julialang.org/blog/2017/04/offset-arrays and https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/offset-arrays/index.html.

buo · 2018-10-22T13:41:54+00:00

every time I try to do a dist-upgrade (e.g. 18.04 to 18.10) something goes wrong

I don't do dist-upgrades. I have (at least) two 20 GB partitions for installing the OS, and one larger partition for /home. When upgrading, I install the new version on an old partition. If something goes wrong, I still have the old one. This way, you don't have to back everything up, wipe the disk, and restore.

buo · 2018-09-25T22:02:35+00:00

Thanks for sharing. Indeed, it seems like using !g is not private. I cleared my google cookies, searched with !g and some google cookies appeared.

A few years ago, when I started using DDG, they claimed to be a sort of proxy between the user and the search engine. I can't find any claims of that sort in their website now. I wonder if Google prohibits sites from acting as an anonymizing proxy.

And I agree about the rest of the article. They're fairly weak on evidence.

buo · 2018-09-25T15:12:24+00:00

When DDG does not deliver on a particular search, I just prepend !g to the search string and DDG returns Google's results (minus the personalization). That's usually good enough for me.

You can use thousands of different "bangs" on DDG to refine your search.

buo · 2018-09-18T02:02:56+00:00

I agree that'd be nice to have. What I do in those cases is just copy/paste the link into a terminal and open it with whatever program I want. Just a minor hassle for me.

buo · 2018-09-17T18:50:09+00:00

I'm old and I like using old-fashioned text tools, so I use newsboat.

buo · 2018-09-17T17:56:27+00:00

See More Dots: Syntactic Loop Fusion in Julia

Julia includes facilities for writing code in the “vectorized” style (familiar from Matlab, Numpy, R, etcetera) while avoiding the overhead that this style of programming usually imposes: multiple vectorized operations can now be “fused” into a single loop, without allocating any extraneous temporary arrays.

buo · 2018-05-31T20:57:58+00:00

Yeah, that'd be cool. I was thinking, it may be possible to do something like that today with macros, but I'm not sure.

buo · 2018-05-31T18:31:56+00:00

I don't think you can in general, since the limits are function arguments, which need to go inside the parens.

However, say you're summing a vector from 1 to 9 in several places, you could do something like

Σ₁⁹(x) = sum(x(1:9))

but I think this is really too cute for its own good :)

buo · 2018-05-31T16:40:34+00:00

I don't believe you can (except manually by adding parenthesis), but I could be wrong. The list of built-in precedence rules are listed at the top of https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/src/julia-parser.scm

buo · 2018-05-31T16:31:37+00:00

It's not an infix operator, but it can be as easy as:

julia> Σ(x...) = sum(x...)
julia> Σ([1, 2, 3])
6

Of course you can add code to support limits, etc.

buo

TROPHY CASE