dpiponi

pervognsen, 29 days ago to random

There's a retired couple living in my mom's apartment complex who seems to spend 12 hours every day sunbathing outside during the summer months. They did this when we were visiting last year and they're continuing the streak apparently. After you've lived in a warm climate for a while, the whole idea of sunbathing starts to seem obscene, but this is something else.

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I know I must be a uniquely weird individual because in decades of using tabbed web browsers I've still never wanted to close tabs to the right and I've often wanted to close tabs to the left.

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

Watched The Descent for the second time. Just as good as the first time. To me it's the perfect little horror movie.

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

For me, and presumably countless others, a computer has always been primarily a creativity tool. But I think this idea may be novel or unusual to a large segment of the population.

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

One of the weirder bugs I've experienced: you know how you're always being told to make sure caps lock is off when you enter your password? My Mac is currently enabling caps-lock at login and you can't disable it. It took a long time to deduce this was the problem but surprisingly I was able to log in after going round a few loops and realising an obvious trick...

A known problem with a venerable history: https://iboysoft.com/tips/macbook-stuck-on-caps-lock.html

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I love the waves of leg motion on this critter that was walking across our driveway.

Very dark red segmented worm like creature with maybe 100 legs that move in waves starting at the back and moving forward.

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I hate typing practice. Seriously. I've been programming computers since before most of you were born. But I need to move on from being a two fingered typist, even if a fast one,

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I have to admit I enjoy seeing familiar sci-fi plots appearing as papers. This one proposes that AIs cause civilizational collapse, explaining the Fermi "paradox".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00042

"AI could represent a major threat to the future course of not only our technical civilisation but all technical civilisations"

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

Let me tell you about my embarrassingly stupid C++ mistake so you don't have to make it:

If X is of type std::optional<T> and Y is of type T you can assign Y to X like so:

X = Y

I sort of don't like that because X and Y are different types.

You can also write

*X = Y

which works because *X is of type T&. Now the types match.

But woe is me! Don't do the latter. If X is an empty optional then *X = Y fails silently.

It's obvious when you think about it for a moment. But when you're thinking about the bigger picture you can forget about the little things.

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I kept saying to myself "he's gotta be an alien", "surely he's not human", but in my heart of hearts I didn't really believe it...until...well I'm not giving you any spoilers...

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kl4glp547o

I blame all the stupid rule based systems for getting your attention. iOS Focus is the most needlessly complex solution to a problem relative to the problem difficulty I've ever seen.

JimPropp, 1 month ago to random

Is there a video that provides intuition about why countable subsets of R (even dense ones) have outer measure zero, by zooming in on a cover of such a set by a union of countably many intervals?

monsoon0, 1 month ago to random

Do you want to know more about the mathematics of #quantum computing? This @SMBCComics is a great start 👇🏼 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I don't know if I hallucinated this but maybe someone recognises it:

I'm sure I once (~20 years ago) saw an arbitrary precision real number library for C or C++ that worked by picking some fixed precision and worked until it produced a result at the required precision, or, if it convinced itself it couldn't achieve that precision, did some kind of backtracking so it could redo the computation at a higher fixed precision. Somewhat analogously to how transactional memory works - and I think under the hood there may have been some unusual memory model.

Sound familiar to anyone?

dpiponi, 1 month ago to random

I'd love something like algebraic effects in C++. So I could write code like (and this is just a sketch, not a realistic proposal for syntax):

handle (new -> MyOwnMemoryAllocator)
{
int* x = new int[n];
...
}

or

handle(out -> Log)
{
out << "debugging stuff" << endl;
}