Hacker News: JulianMorrison

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?"

JulianMorrison — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 12:20:37 +0000

They're using it to replace "search on stack overflow, cut and paste, does it work?"

New comment by JulianMorrison in "GNU Octave"

JulianMorrison — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:24:01 +0000

They're tools for different tasks, consolidating them would make a less helpful mishmash

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]"

JulianMorrison — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 18:55:44 +0000

Anyone with heaps of money

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]"

JulianMorrison — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 23:14:50 +0000

He employs rocket scientists.

And also, I hear, a layer of glad-handing management dedicated to keeping him from putting his thumb in the rocket scientist pie, patting him on the head for his cockamamie ideas, and faking up Potemkin demonstrations to keep him happy.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "The SAFe Delusion"

JulianMorrison — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 19:48:14 +0000

In my experience, if what you've got is a months-ahead plan where management sets the deadlines AND controls the scope via pressuring the line manager, and delivery relies on crunch time and panicky de-scoping and working to the letter and not the spirit of the contract, then what you have is waterfall in a fedora and a Groucho Marx novelty disguise.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Gen Z never learned to read cursive"

JulianMorrison — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 14:55:47 +0000

If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead scripts - everything from cuneiform, to gothic black letters, to cursive. If they need it, they can go learn it.

Most won't.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "How to bury carbon? Let plants do the dirty work"

JulianMorrison — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 09:54:04 +0000

Dry the algae, press it into bricks, put it down a mine.

Charcoal is another option, including putting that into soil as a supplement for agriculture.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Against Generality (2016)"

JulianMorrison — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 10:55:43 +0000

Programmers love "one clever trick".

Reality does not, it's irreducibly complex and as a result that trick quickly becomes an annoyingly overstretched metaphor.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Oberon (2009)"

JulianMorrison — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 10:37:49 +0000

Pascal family languages parse quickly because they won't let you use anything before it's defined.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal"

JulianMorrison — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 13:09:22 +0000

Reporting the images to law enforcement is good. There should be a human in the loop to separate medical images from exploitative ones.

Perma-deleting his account on an automated accusation is bad. That should hinge on, at minimum, law enforcement's decision to charge a crime. [Edit: unless the criminality of the images is obvious - again, a human needs to be in the loop.]

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Potential fabrication in research threatens the amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s"

JulianMorrison — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 20:49:20 +0000

A big part of the problem is things moving so fast that a lot of stuff doesn't have a long run. Covid and its vaccines being an example. In the end the reason to trust them was a mix of "if not this, then what?" and "it doesn't seem to be killing people".

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Consciousness is not computation"

JulianMorrison — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 11:37:34 +0000

> To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine.

No it does not. An unobserved computer still computes.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035"

JulianMorrison — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 11:49:18 +0000

Not to mention: huge underground tanks of gasoline are a fire and explosion hazard. They are an environmental hazard if they leak or spill. They require building to safety codes. They require trained and skilled operation. They need to be to insured.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035"

JulianMorrison — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 10:59:27 +0000

Which is another feedback loop, high cost, shrinking demand, shrinking supply, rising cost.

Also oil has high fixed costs. Stations, tanker trucks, refineries. Fewer customers carrying them means they rise as a percentage of purchase price.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035"

JulianMorrison — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 10:40:07 +0000

It's the oil infrastructure that will affect them, because it's global. If that goes away...

New comment by JulianMorrison in "EU vote to ban all sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2035"

JulianMorrison — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 10:04:30 +0000

There may be a faster fall-off than you'd think, because of feedback effects. Same way film cameras stopped being popular and then you couldn't get the films, or get them developed, so they got more unpopular, repeat until extinct. If fuel stations start closing down and you can't get the parts, it won't matter if fuel cars have decades of good service life ahead.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Happy Birthday, Libera Chat"

JulianMorrison — Thu, 19 May 2022 10:36:28 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20220519070552/https://libera.ch...

New comment by JulianMorrison in "AI software clears high hurdles on IQ tests but still makes dumb mistakes"

JulianMorrison — Sat, 07 May 2022 12:25:14 +0000

When a measure becomes a target, it cease to be a good measure.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources"

JulianMorrison — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 14:49:06 +0000

Real name policies have done nothing to make Facebook less toxic, because bigots in general don't mind their real names being out there. This is what happens when you ignore systemic power imbalances. The bigots have that power and as a result they don't fear consequences.

The Republicans announcing public lynching of trans kids are doing it under their real names.

New comment by JulianMorrison in "Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources"

JulianMorrison — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 14:02:33 +0000

The main use of Twitter, to me, is that it gets news out of places that have poor, slow or no mainstream coverage, and does it fast - seconds after the event, in some cases. That won't be helped at all by unblocking the howling id of the right wing and (barely distinguishable) the paid and volunteer troll farms of every (would-be) dictator with a hate-on for reality. That will just adjust the ratio of piss to pool sharply in the wrong direction. To the point it may lose its utility.