R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
@lauren goto considered harmful?
R. A. Dehi
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The results of the meta-analyses suggest a definitive association between the protective role of vitamin D and ICU hospitalization. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/16/1/130
> Those who know anything about the matter are aware that every writer, from Epicurus to Bentham, who maintained the theory of utility, meant by it, not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain; and instead of opposing the useful to the agreeable or the ornamental, have always declared that the useful means these, among other things. Yet the common herd, including the herd of writers, not only in newspapers and periodicals, but in books of weight and pretension, are perpetually falling into this shallow mistake. Having caught up the word *utilitarian*, while knowing nothing whatever about it but its sound, they habitually express by it the rejection, or the neglect, of pleasure in some of its forms; of beauty, of ornament, or of amusement.
—Mill
R. A. Dehi
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What's really strange about adjusting to Mastodon is the stuff that is forcibly broken on corporate sites I just *don't have to worry about* here. Subtle stuff.
You can just *copy links* here. You don't have to de-obfuscate them first like on Twitter or Google News.
I use Twitter in a pathological way because I suspect they're gathering metrics on which features I use. I'm afraid to even load certain iffy features in case it helps Twitter conclude users like it. Here I can just like… do stuff.
R. A. Dehi
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Folks are treating the recent tech layoffs as something spontaneous. They were not. The current layoffs were orchestrated by a hedge fund (TCI Fund).
This hedge fund demanded that the big tech companies lay people off because they were being paid too much. Let that one sink in: a hedge fund manager saying that you're being paid too much.
Note that TCI is demanding that Google lay off more people.
@fuzzychef I suppose that makes sense; money paid to employees isn't available to be paid to investors, so makes sense that investors want to reduce it. Dumb investors, probably, since Alphabet's revenues mostly depend on those employees' skills and goodwill, but the error is understandable, if stupid.
R. A. Dehi
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Back in my college days, I spent a fair amount of time trying to understand how to compile functional programming languages through self-study, and got introduced to the idea of category theory by way of Ocaml, but frankly never learned anything useful about it. Now, some 35 years later, I'm trying again, with the gentle introduction of Eugenia Cheng's How to Bake Pi, as an audio book during my commute. #wishmeluck
@alcinnz Would recommend using a PEG parser instead of a Pratt parser; it does make operator precedence harder (for left-associative operators anyway) but it makes everything else easier.
R. A. Dehi
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I hope the two guys that keep Google Scholar going as a pet project didn't get laid off. Just as a quiet reminder of the fragile contingency of this core academic service.
R. A. Dehi
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We love free software. With much thanks to the talented @SachaChua for illustrating the reasons. See https://www.sachachua.com/blog/ for emacs news and more!
@mjgardner @ownlifeful @zmughal I don't think is *mostly* because Google favors Python. PyTorch and SciPy favor Python, too, for example. Perl is still okay but PDL has never caught up to NumPy.
R. A. Dehi
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@tomjennings @b0rk Is pretty useful to understand which algebraic properties hold for unsigned ints or floats despite overflow and rounding, and which ones don't; algorithm correctness can depend on it. Most of the time we don't care but occasionally we care a lot.
@b0rk If you get too high a score in a video game, sometimes end up with a large negative score instead. Same with number of lives. This behavior leaks into most programming languages: Scala, though not JS or Python. Sometimes it's a disastrous bug that adding up positive numbers can give you a negative number, especially a large one.
10s-complement is useful for mental arithmetic. 651 - 382? Well, use the 10s-complement of 382: 618. 651 + 618 = 1269, drop the carry, 269, 651 - 382 = 269. Easier to add mentally than subtract, for most of us.
R. A. Dehi
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Ten yrs ago, a friend exited this world in a gut wrenching manner, prompting an existential reckoning in my mind. His death rearranged my relationship to / engagement with mental health, the tech sector, and the production of knowledge. My heart mourns for hours spent arguing with one another about sociological ideas. Posthumously, he became a martyr to some, an idea more than a person. But what I miss the most is my flawed, principled, stubborn, passionate friend who challenged me every day.
R. A. Dehi
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I have the first five @oshwassociation@twitter.com certifications in China- who do they let run, and sit on the board? Two Chinese men without a single certification between them. The @oshwassociation@twitter.com rank and file is 100% ok with this, there was no outcry, it was never publically addressed.
@brouhaha CPU vendors don't like exceptions
R. A. Dehi
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𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘦 𝘢 10𝘧𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘐’𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 12𝘧𝘵 𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘳!
Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.
You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter
The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
This site shows you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
@raph Parallel prefix sum with non-commutative monoids is underappreciated.
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
