BitSound

joined 1 year ago
 

That was a laughable election. I would've preferred if Harris had won, because I'm not an accelerationist, but that time is past. Where do we go from here? Can the DNC be dragged back towards the left, or is it done for?

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not sure if this is what you're referencing, but there's a famous quantum computer researcher named Scott Aaronson who has this at the top of his blog:

If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel.

His blog is good, talks about a lot of quantum computing stuff at an accessible level

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago

Cross-posted to !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world, which is probably the closest active community we've got

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ha, that reminds me of Donald Knuth offering 0x$1.00 to anyone that finds a mistake in TAOCP, like this guy:

https://nickdrozd.github.io/2019/05/17/knuth-check.html

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Does anyone here actually use awk for more than trivial operations? If I ever have to have to consider writing anything substantial with bash/awk/sed/etc, I just start writing a Python script. No hate to the classic tools, but Python is just really nice.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by BitSound@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
 

If you haven't read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M's backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):

# Assuming df is your DataFrame

# Show the plot
plt.show()

That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn't actually think about the code at all.

What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there's bigger issues to watch out for?

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

Maybe they mean engineers in general? Engineers tend to be over-represented in cults, because "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Sorry, mixed up the videos. It's actually this one, from 2014:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

Edited link above

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)
 

good luck with that lol

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

Definitely not. There's a whole genre of music that's created for riding the coattails of popular songs. They wait for a song title by artists like Taylor Swift to be announced and then release their own songs with the same title. Sometimes they're actually good, like this dude:

https://genius.com/artists/Only-fire

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I've been wondering how much of that is back to school. I have the sense that Lemmy has a lot of younger users. I can't judge though as I've been inactive for long stretches due to life. I've been trying to contribute more now

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

The latter, but I also don't really mind paywalls in the form of "get early access" like SMBC comics or "get exclusive special content" like a lot of bands do.

You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don't have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn't crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video

 

Someone asked over here about the best way to get into SCP. I listed a couple of my favorites there, but what do other people recommend?

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 24 points 3 weeks ago

Probably my favorite set of stories is by qntm, who writes lots of short fiction you can check out at his site. He wrote There Is No Antimemetics Division, which I think is best described by the intro he wrote for it:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

There's a lot of other good entries too. They generally take the form of a wiki entry at https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/, as a classified file describing some anomalous thing or event. They have a shared canon but only loosely, individual stories can conflict with one another. Here's a couple good ones:

I'll post over in !scp@lemmy.world too, to see what other people recommend for getting into it

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