barsoap

joined 2 years ago
[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

How the hell do you cross the gap between these and actual understanding? Other than the blind way of going up level after level, starting with a bipolar transistor, which doesn’t seem easy at all.

You don't pretend that Haskell has anything to do with electrical engineering and then you're golden. You do not need to understand the one to understand the other. You do not need to understand quantum mechanics to understand a transistor, either -- I mean, sure, if you intend to develop process nodes then you better understand quantum mechanics, but if you plan on soldering transistors together until you get an FM receiver? Who cares. Learn to read datasheets, that's the actual skill you'll need.

You choose some random interest and learn it and don't look higher up or deeper down the stack, you respect the abstraction boundaries, until and unless you actually have a good reason to cross them.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The Rust book is also good at teaching coding, but it would be more of a jump into cold water. It's still more about teaching coders about Rust, only teaching coding incidentally to pick up people coming from a variety of languages, instead of getting into the core of computation itself.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Have you already heard of our Lord and Saviour, the Wizard, and the scripture known as The Wizard Book? By the end of it you will be able to write a compiler, be a smith who can forge their own tongs.

(The software to use with the book is nowadays called racket, use #lang sicp to enable the right dialect)

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (13 children)

Cause when it stops being glamorous magic, it starts becoming optimized and normal, like painting fences.

The portrait kind of painter working like the fence kind is not a good thing. It's not even a thing at all, it's an illusion.

Also when it comes to accessibility for the aspiring hobbyist coding is very accessible. If you have nothing to start with, sure, more expensive than knitting, but probably not more expensive than acquiring a merino wool habit, and if you already have any kind of computer, any, as well as an internet connection, it's literally free. The tools, the knowledge, everything. Willingness to learn not included.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

2000 years ago would've been the Romans, Christianity much less Catholicism simply didn't exist at that time. And I think Morocco conquered Andalusia before the crusades. By like 400 years.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago

The question is rather "how many people have a metro station within walking/biking distance" and "how many long-haul trips do you need to make".

Over here we don't set aside half a day (or more) to to drive to walmart to buy groceries for a fortnight, we pick stuff up as we need it when we're out, anyway. Dropping into the supermarket to grab some things is like a five minute detour if you know what you need and where it is. You can spend the metro ride thinking about what to cook, buy what you need, then get going.

According to statistics commute times in Europe are actually slightly longer than in the US, but that doesn't take into account that combining trips is much easier over here and that riding public transport gives you time to, whatnot, knit, biking or walking counts as exercise, while driving a car counts as, at best, nothing, at worst, the road rage will ruin your day.

I'm not saying that you, personally, can flip a switch and make it work for you, on the contrary: The reason that you're not doing it organically is because the infrastructure where you live is right-out designed to not make it work for you. What I suggest is that instead of saying stuff like "It cannot be the case that Europeans are living better lives, they must be imagining things" you say, to your compatriots, "How are those bloody europoors better at this we are supposed to be the best let's figure out how to beat them". Or at least that's how I imagine motivating Americans looks like.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently

Nothing to do with economics, everything to do with city planning and resource allocation. Public transit and bikes are a bad option in the US because the transit is completely underfunded, "only poor people take the bus", and bike paths, even pedestrian paths (if they even exist) are sent on detours around car infrastructure instead of cutting through everything.

And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car.

My mum did just fine first coming by with the bike, putting me on the back seat, then swinging by the supermarket, groceries in the front basket, later on coming by with the bike, me riding along on my own, still swinging by the supermarket. We were driving on calm backstreets and through a park which was actually the most direct route, much more direct than with a car as you'd have to get onto the collector, first. Got more than one kid to wrangle? Put them in a trailer, or get a suitable cargo bike. They can even have seatbelts.

No, you don't need a warehouse full of washing machines in every neighbourhood. People don't shop for washing machines daily. People don't need cars to shop for them, either, delivering bulky stuff makes a ton of sense. Groceries? Wherever you were that day, a supermarket should only be like a two or three minutes detour.

And it's not like European cities didn't go down the car-centric route, mind you. Difference being we realised it's a stupid idea.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

We already can detect direction of infrared radiation, it's called being warm on one side but not the other. Technically also possible by, say, lying half-way under a blanket and half-way not, but sensory integration takes care of the ambiguity.

More interestingly, did you know we can see the polarisation of light?

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago

As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part?

Yes. There's a number of projects which distribute binaries which aren't as liberally licensed as the source they're built from. E.g. Ardour is another one. There's a demo version, subscriptions start as low as $1/month, $45 buys you the current major version and the next major version with all its updates, perpetual license. There's also the implicit understanding that if you don't pay up and want support, your bug reports better be developer-grade.

Basically it's a way to get artists who are used to either freeware or commercial offerings to donate. Also as far as DAWs go it's a fucking steal.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Under Article 80, the GDPR foresees that non-profit organizations can take action or represent users.

Emphasis mine. Just in case anyone is still denying that Euro-English is a thing. It provides for it, which implies it anticipats it, so if we get rid of unnecessary Romance it foresees it. Plans for, as Wikipedia puts it, but not only the French etymology (prevoir) works, there's also German vorhersehen/vorsehen which collapse when you calque them into English. Gives Brits all kinds of headaches, they were writing lots of huffy memos before Brexit.

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