This kind of situation actually does occur, and you can then use the knowledge that the solution is unique to conclude that neither alternative (WORDS+AMPLE or WORD+SAMPLE) can be part of the correct solution.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947523

Points: 7

# Comments: 11

Basically: You have a problem; Oracle/SAP says they'll solve it for you. Now you have a second problem; they say McKinsey'll solve it for you. Now you have …

[0] https://mckinsey.com

[0] https://archive.ph/Hyqx9

[0] https://www.sphinx-doc.org [1] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/extensions/napole... [2] https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/sphinx/intro.ht...

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19871207

However, it seems like that explains why we needed Windows drivers, but not why device-specific Linux drivers are a thing? Unless the implication is that manufacturers who needed to make custom drivers anyway didn't bother to make their devices class compliant?

IMHO that's actually not a big deal. From a comment I made in 2020 [0]:

> That's what I was concerned about before I played through one of the three campaigns a few years ago — that the UI would seem unbearable after having played a lot of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2. I found it actually quite OK after learning the keyboard shortcuts (of the Dos version). What actually ruined it for me and made me not want to play the other campaigns is the poor AI. Easy enemies would have been alright; I'm not that good at RTS games anyway and being able to finish each level on the first try was nice. But the opponents are so exceptionally stupid that it just got boring.

So, yes, the controls seem silly from a modern point of view, but they're far from the critical issue that prevents the game from being enjoyable.

By the way, there's a grave mistake in my old comment. I had written:

> Dune Legacy lets you play the campaigns, not just single-player skirmish, against its improved AIs. I just tried selecting ‘hard’ and (with game speed at maximum) got completely wrecked on the second map. Wonderful!

As I played more of the campaign in Dune Legacy, it turned out that the AI is even worse than in the original game. I only thought it was ‘wonderful’ because it attacked my base-under-construction with most of its preexisting army as soon as I gave my presence away too early on. But once I switched my strategy to build more stuff in secret before attacking, it turned out that the AI just sat there uselessly; no halfway decent build order, no scouting.

TL;DR: If you'd like to try multiplayer vs. humans, learn the controls and give it a try, it's really not bad! But if you want a good single-player RTS from the olden days … maybe try Plants vs. Zombies? Overcooked? Definitely not Dune 2.

Oh, and about UnDUNE II: that one really has poor ergonomics, judging from the 5 minutes I played it. It's an incredibly cool piece of art, but what it does particularly well is emulating the original game within the constraints of Pico-8. As opposed to imagining what Dune 2 would have been like in a world where Pico-8 were state of the art. It's like playing Doom on a digital pregnancy test: It's extremely cool that I could do it if I wanted to; but I really, really don't want to.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487643

From my (programmer's) point of view, all I need to know to work with an audio interface is the number of input and output channels and the respective arrays of sample rates and bit depths. In theory, a generic USB driver can handle that. In practice, I observe that my Linux-using colleagues have 99 problems with audio, but none of those is related to plugging in a $1 dongle from AliExpress. (Therefore, I used to think that those audio interfaces ‘just work’, but now I'm curious about what I've been missing all along.)

Why is releasing Linux drivers for an audio interface even a thing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30565073

Points: 31

# Comments: 20

In terms of language features, the stand-out highlight is structural pattern matching; see https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0634/#abstract

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28751409

Points: 14

# Comments: 2

One way in which this simplifies things, for example, is checking whether two boxes overlap: They do so exactly when there is an overlap on each axis. (E.g. you look at them from the front, side, and top, and there is no gap between them. This test wouldn't be sufficient if they could be rotated arbitrarily.)

The original Quake levels make use of this: a lot of things have an invisible axis-aligned bounding box (i.e. a cuboid just large enough to contain them) around them. Before checking for an exact intersection, the much cheaper test for the AABBs is performed first. This is useful even when only one of the objects tested is approximated in this way; the other one could be a bounding cylinder around a player/enemy, or a surface in the level geometry.

No, they don't. I'd phrase it differently, e.g. “each door is shut for an instant when the end of the pole is just inside the door”. (Also, make it clear that the barn is long enough to fit a 10m pole between the two shut doors.)

When you put it as “shut the doors simultaneously”, it's more troll physics than a paradox.

Meta-puzzle: figure out how to still imply that the runner is completely enclosed for an instant, without incorrectly insinuating that it is so from her perspective.

That's the crux, I guess. There's this ‘Matrix’ idea that the universe might be a simulation, but here we have a much weaker, more plausible property; I would describe it as: could real-world processes be simulated exactly? That's what I meant by ‘can be run on a Turing machine’: is the organism equivalent to a simulated version.

Two quick addenda:

(i) This doesn't require the hypothetical Turing machine to exist; as you said, it's an abstract idea. In the strict sense, where it can have potentially unlimited memory, a Turing machine can't exist in the real world. Even so, we can ask whether an entity that has wants/needs/desires can exist in a Turing machine in theory. If yes, it's easier to show that it can exist in practice, in reality.

(ii) Maybe physics is non-deterministic and the equivalent mathematical model requires a non-deterministic Turing machine or something else still. But whatever physics does can be done by a physical computer; I believe there's nothing a natural person can think that can't in principle also be thought by an artificial machine.

There has got to be a difference between the pain a real ER patient feels and the simulation a training dummy for medical students is running. It's just so hard to come up with a clear definition of that difference. Let's try something simpler.

“When squeezed, Elmo shakes, vibrates, and recites his trademark giggle, "Uh-ha-ha-ha-hee-hee!".” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_Me_Elmo

Elmo isn't really giggling. But I think it's possible for a digital circuit to ‘get’ a joke. Or, indeed, to be ticklish.

As shkkmo mentioned, one could just postulate the existence of a ‘soul’ and be done with it. I'd prefer something more rigorous; something falsifiable.

> There is no equivalent for anything that can be run on a turing machine.

So you're claiming that organisms such as ourselves cannot be run on a Turing machine? Any particular reason/evidence?

> you could write out on paper the calculations that a chatbot is performing to select what it says

In the case of ML, only on the lowest level; there's no human-readable algorithm for putting together utterances. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that someone can actually understand and explain how exactly a particular response was constructed. Could the same not be done, in principle, with the response from a human? You could write out on paper the QFT equations that a brain follows to select what it says.

Well, OK, no one can actually do that, because we don't understand the subject matter sufficiently. But that's my point: That we understand the simpler system better doesn't mean that it's a more abstract concept, or that it can't be mistreated. Of course there is a tendency to have more compassion for more complex organisms — think about how you'd treat a monkey, a rat, a spider, a packet of yeast. We also tend to distinguish between organisms and inanimate things.

But discriminating based on what we understand exactly seems like a bad argument. Also, what if — as seems likely — artificial life will be made like AI currently is? That is: the necessary complexity is too much to plan in detail, so we make a primitive framework in which systems with desirable properties are then bred and evolved. Just like breeding plants and animals still is a thing — we can now sequence entire genomes and research what individual genes do, but it's too complicated to be a viable approach when you want a tastier nectarine.

Can someone ‘write out on paper’ how a Waymo tells a pedestrian apart from a mailbox? If no, does that mean the AI is more prone to being mistreated?

> physical compulsions that it needs to fulfill […] be mistreated by denying these needs

What's the difference between a physical compulsion and a utility function governing a physical system? If I deny a paperclip maximiser the raw materials it needs to make more paperclips, it's definitely not going to be happy …

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28455053

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I know this is asking a lot, but as an end user with an unlimited budget for big dreams, I'd like to see something like this as a fork of Firefox that eventually gets enough of its changes upstreamed so it can become just an extension for the browser I'm already running anyway.

Anyway, a little addendum:

> Why go fullscreen and modal?

And for when I want it full-screen and modal, at least do it right, please. E.g. it shows up in the cmd-tab task switcher, but that can't actually be used to switch to Bonsai, nor away from it (!!). And, again, it's too slow. (What's with the dramatic fade-out animation?)

Btw., you can drag a link on top of it (at least when option-space doesn't do something else already ;) and the cursor changes to identify a valid drop target, but when you drop, nothing happens.