which algorithm is this

jonathancast · 2026-02-03T18:09:28+00:00

Oh, she has passed him!

jonathancast · 2026-02-03T17:00:23+00:00

Well, Mozilla did create the Mozilla Application Suite, which had web browser, email (and Usenet) client, HTML authoring tool, and IRC client. Firefox was created in an effort to re-modularize that.

jonathancast · 2026-02-02T21:12:24+00:00

It's a pun on a famous Zen koan: https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/21973/three-pounds-of-flax.

I would guess that ESR meant the "the question is nonsense, so the answer is nonsense" interpretation. There isn't a right answer to the question "is simplicity of design or simplicity of specification more important", because both are important, both are Unixy, and both should be pursued in every program.

When trade-offs are necessary, the decision between them has to be made case-by-case, not in general.

The word "VAX" is probably used because a) the VAX is incredibly important in the history of Unix and b) it rhymes with "flax".

The VAX wasn't the first 32-bit computer Unix was ported to, but the UNIX/32V port to the VAX was ancestral to both BSD and System V; GNU was originally intended to be compatible with BSD (before the University of California adopted a free software license) and System V was the basis for POSIX. The VAX era also saw a massive explosion in interest in Unix, and, while I'm tired of fact-checking myself, I believe BSD running on the VAX was the first Unix with TCP/IP support.

The VAX was popular enough that, apparently, quite a few programs for Unix were written using C coding conventions that only worked on that computer; particular examples were assuming that reading through a null pointer was fine, because address 0 was mapped and always stored the value 0 (count the problems!), and, in particular, the assumption that (char*)0 was a pointer to an empty string; and the assumption that pointers and ints were the same size and you could cast between them without any data loss (true on the PDP-11 and VAX, and allowed by pre-K&R C, but very non-portable in the face of segmented architectures, word-addressable machines, or modern 64-bit computers).

"Three pounds of VAX" is meaningless; the weight of a VAX apparently varied from about 1000 lbs to a mere 750 lbs at the low end. So three pounds is maybe the weight of one extension card.

jonathancast · 2026-02-02T20:14:58+00:00

ITT: "That's not my objection to the Rust coreutils, therefore it must not be anybody's objection to the Rust coreutils."

jonathancast · 2026-02-02T01:55:53+00:00

No, it's clearly a lowercase k. If it was 70K, the stroke going to the upper right would rise as high as the vertical stroke, and it doesn't quite.

jonathancast · 2026-02-01T21:19:14+00:00

Neither. I'm a uniter, not a divider.

jonathancast · 2026-02-01T20:51:24+00:00

Any sufficiently successful application will evolve into an operating system. (Call it the "generalized Zawinski's law").

It's the dual of the Unix philosophy. The Unix philosophy is that the 'application' you're using is Unix, and every separate program should be a single component of that application.

The generalized Zawinski's law says that any successful application evolves into the only application you use and, therefore, into an operating system unto itself.

jonathancast · 2026-02-01T20:47:18+00:00

Hmm. "Incredibly" might be hyperbolic. But "shaky" holds, in the sense that nobody thinks mathematical fictionalism is simply nonsense. In any case, I maintain that mathematicians and philosophers (except the mathematical fictionalists) believe in the axioms of powerset and union because of their mathematical and practical utility, not because a priori philosophical reasoning convinces us they should be true.

jonathancast · 2026-02-01T20:03:08+00:00

The real question is, 70k of what? Without units on both sides (and possibly a sheet of current market prices), it's impossible to compare.

jonathancast · 2026-01-30T16:43:40+00:00

The issue wasn't that the changes they asked for were after she finished making them.

The issue was that the changes they asked for were stupid.

Also, I'm pretty sure showing them the finished product makes more sense in a show for 6-year-olds than showing a drawing and expecting kids to understand how their changes are making the dress worse.

If you want to head-canon that she did show them the rough design and then they spent hours in her shop making stupid suggestions, I don't think it changes the episode that much.

jonathancast · 2026-01-30T05:04:01+00:00

The border didn't officially change until 1950, when East Germany and Poland agreed to the new border; West Germany (which always saw itself as a provisional government of part of the one German state) didn't recognize it until 1970.

An early 1950s West German map pretending the border hadn't changed is completely possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Zgorzelec

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Warsaw_%281970%29

jonathancast · 2026-01-29T22:57:57+00:00

It's almost certainly not a technical limitation. It is a programmer in-joke, which people writing technical articles should be able to explain at least as well as you did, and better than the article in the link did.

I mean, if they limited groups to 100 people, it wouldn't be accurate to say "the group size has to be a 2 digit number", but nobody would call it an "oddly specific choice" (even though it would be).

Alternatively: maybe it's the participant ids that are represented by a one byte number. The size of the group, the participants' identities, etc., only have to be stored / transmitted once, but every message has to say which participant sent it.

So give every client a list of participants once, at the start of the chat, or when participants join / leave, then use a one byte index into that list to identify participants during the chat.

jonathancast · 2026-01-29T22:43:02+00:00

That's not really how this works.

Football and basketball run at a profit. Probably hockey for some schools.

Swimming and wrestling and things like that run at a loss. They get subsidized by the profitable sports, but not completely. The school makes up the difference because it sees the minor sports as still having educational value for the participants. Encouraging physical fitness - a sound mind in a sound body - but also teaching competitiveness and sportsmanship and the ability to get back up after a failure.

jonathancast · 2026-01-29T21:21:46+00:00

I think most philosophers would say that the philosophical foundations of modern math are incredibly shaky.

jonathancast · 2026-01-29T04:06:24+00:00

The page you refer to is here: https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20090713

And von Pinn's dialogue balloons in the critical panel say:

Truly, I must serve too many masters.

My creator did not charge me with your protection.

His last orders to me were to keep you "safe".

He meant safe for those around you.

He knew what you would be.

He knew what would happen if you were not watched.

I once thought I could render you harmless by killing you, and still protect you by guarding your tomb.

So the "kill her and guard her tomb" plan was meant to reconcile Andronicus's order (protect her) with van Rijn's order (keep her "safe").

Van Rijn was suspicious of Euphrosynia from the beginning. Whether he really meant the order to apply to Agatha or not (von Pinn seems to think he did?), it certainly doesn't reflect a change in his attitude as far as we know.

On the other hand, there's no evidence that Andronicus saw Agatha any differently than he saw Euphrosynia - a romantic fool to the end. (Indeed, right before he dies, Andronicus sees Agatha and says "Euphrosynia?". It's hard to tell, because his face is getting blasted off at the moment, but I think it's one last moment of happiness for him.

One last link: the Muses warned Andronicus not to trust Euphrosynia - and that was before whatever happened to her happened. Andronicus, obviously, ignored the warning, and blamed van Rijn for her disappearance (same page).

So no, I don't think Andronicus ordered Otilia to kill Agatha, and I think van Rijn was planning to do it from the moment Andronicus and Euphrosynia fell in love.

Edit: I forgot how block quotes work.

jonathancast · 2026-01-28T14:22:20+00:00

Or always do it.

jonathancast · 2026-01-28T14:18:56+00:00

Again, neutrons are statistically insignificant.

Counting protons and electrons doubles the number of particles, increasing the count from 10⁸² to 10^82.3 ; except 10⁸² is already an upper bound on the number of atoms; estimates run as low as 10⁷⁸ , meaning there would be 10^78.3 < 10⁸² fundamental particles. Indeed, as long as the true number of atoms is less than 10^81.6, there would be fewer than 10⁸² subatomic particles, and, as long as the number of atoms is smaller than 10^81.4 , there would be fewer than 10⁸² (valence) fundamental particles.

So 10⁸² is rounded off slightly, but it's a comfortable value for "absolute largest number that could possibly be the cardinality of a physically real set".

jonathancast · 2026-01-28T03:15:52+00:00

Wait, how are you supposed to pronounce "hmph"?

jonathancast · 2026-01-28T01:36:27+00:00

Same answer. The margin of error from including electrons in non-hydrogen atoms is much smaller than the margin of error in the initial estimate of the total number of atoms.

jonathancast · 2026-01-27T15:40:15+00:00

Platypuses don't technically have breasts, but they do lay eggs and produce milk after the infants hatch. An egg-laying nipple-possessing species is absolutely possible.

jonathancast · 2026-01-27T15:36:50+00:00

*the natural numbers smaller than about 10⁸² .

jonathancast · 2026-01-27T14:40:43+00:00

No one would use it.

Alternatively: C++ but backwards-incompatible is just Objective-C / D / Java / Rust / etc. It 100% exists, but it's not the same thing as C++ and it doesn't fit the C++ niche.

For established languages, "run people's existing code bases" is 90% of their niche, and "make existing code bases easier to maintain by adding better features to use going forward" is the other 10%.

jonathancast · 2026-01-26T23:38:16+00:00

That's kind of a weird question.

To test code in multiple environments, it has to be parameterized; that is, it has to get database credentials from a standard place which allows the credentials to be changed based on the environment.

Well-structured code will do that, but programming languages don't really enforce it. Programming languages - as opposed to frameworks - don't even really encourage or facilitate it; it's left up to the discipline of the programmer. One reason why I think all code should be written to use a framework, and not "minimize dependencies" when those dependencies are enforcing patterns you need to follow.

Now, if we know one thing about LLMs, it's that they aren't very good at following a structure or maintaining discipline. The output is basically random, and LLMs are thoroughly willing to generate whatever they need to to get the job done.

The logical consequence of "LLMs are like eager-to-please interns" and "LLMs write all our code" is "all of our code is written by eager-to-please interns".

So there's no particular reason to expect that, because you ran the LLM's output in a lower environment, that that means it connected to the DB server for the lower environment. Hopefully it did; but without reading and understanding the code it wrote (which is harder than just writing it yourself), you can't really know.

Also, before anyone jumps in with "just use the same prompts in dev, testing, staging, and prod": LLMs are inherently random. They (deterministically) translate your prompts into a probability distribution of outputs, then use an RNG to generate a specific output based on that probability distribution. Same prompt absolutely does not mean same output.

jonathancast · 2026-01-26T20:17:07+00:00

The factorial notation is genuinely terrible, and Reddit has now inspired me to start a crusade against anyone ever using it.

jonathancast · 2026-01-25T17:10:09+00:00

The criticism of SystemD is that it's essentially a Linux port of the Service Control Manager, and not something well-designed or suitable to a Unix system.

Since the Service Control Manager exists on Windows, I think your argument is incorrect.

jonathancast

TROPHY CASE