Yes. If you want to do rapid development use exceptions. If you want to do systems programming, forget about it.
Btw, the discussion does have a philosophical aspect. It is about concept of “unknown” (a.k.a. “unexpected”).
My argument was that with systems programming you should avoid “unknown” as much as possible. By handling error as soon as they happen you basically say while it is error it is not “unknown” or “unexpected” state. It’s just a different, perfectly valid and well-understood codepath.
With exceptions you take the error, you acknowledge it’s “unknown” nature by converting it into generic exception, you break away from the standard codepath and pass the responsibility for dealing with the unknown to someone else. This is great when you are OK with 80% or 90% solutions. Errors are sparse and handling them correctly in 90% or cases can mean the problem will be never hit, especially if the program is not used very widely.
I feel like nobody really realizes how big a deal apple’s M1 Unified memory arch is? This is something I’ve been waiting for since.
AWS rents M1 silicon, only the standard though.
But that’s not what ScienceorNature do; they publish short papers that are of immediate interest to a wide readership. There already are journals that regularly publish complex nuanced research on specific or broad topics, but they aren’t ScienceorNature – they’re the less prestigious outlets that Patrick T Brown feels he has to settle for. That’s not to say that Natureorscience can’t or don’t publish nuanced stuff, I’m sure they would say that everything they publish is appropriately nuanced, but everything-and-the-kitchen-sink articles are not exactly their forte16.
I think the solution is actually quite simple (and completely impossible): we should abandon ScienceorNature altogether and stop trying to divine truth, competence and worth from individual papers. A single paper never holds all the answers to a complex problem17. Thinking that a paper can, and that you can write it18, is hubris. That’s not how science works. Scienceornature make a killing from people who still sort of believe that it does and there are far too many of them. Those same people are making important decisions about who gets hired, promoted, funded, feted, adored, and fired. It’s a simplistic view of science and its a simplistic view of the value of researchers, individually and en masse, particularly in a subject so dizzyingly wide as climate and its impacts on California wildfire and well everything. Of course that means that those who have made a living from the system (and here I feel it would be remiss not to mention that both Patrick T Brown and I now have four articles19 each in NatureorScience) might have to acknowledge that maybe they weren’t so special after all. Don’t expect it to happen any time soon.
Richard van Noorden:
“Weird. Author of Nature paper @ PatrickTBrown31 says he looked solely at effects of warming on wildfires, ignoring vegetation and human ignition pattern changes, to mold research to journal’s desire. Yet peer-review file shows issue raised in review & authors argued against it!”
https://twitter.com/Richvn/status/1699402389676056617
Let it be said in passing that Nature publishing their reviews is an excellent step towards transparency.
Saw an article about a pedal-powered washer. Is that actually reducing CO2 emissions?
1000 g co2 / 1000 kilocalories
Greenhouse gas emissions per 1000 kilocalories - Our World in Data for rice
1000 \text{ kilocalories} \approx 4 \text{ MJ} \approx 1 \text{ kWh}
Hence food is about 1000 g(CO2) / kWh
If your elec natural gas, you get about 600 g(CO2) / kWh. Surprisingly similar!
Ah, but there’s a wrinkle - muscles are about 15 to 30% efficient, whereas electric motors are maybe 80 to 90%.
Nickel / Stainless steel soldering with conventional solder using Rubyfluid flux
Takeaways:
- I understand that SpaceX put a lot of thought into where people sat; putting design and manufacturing teams physically together, for instance. This is a much earlier example of the same thing.
- So much focus on software tooling. Tooling for communication, tooling for
We actually had a script that would go through the MAINSAIL and pull out
those boundaries and then they were published with the micro-architecture document, and that’s the only
way you could keep it accurate because things are changing all the time and your documentation would
be out of date very soon if we didn’t have some automated way of doing that. But we found that the
engineers were automating things by writing their own scripts where in earlier days you might have to go
to ask a CAD person to come and do something for you --and that’s difficult to do
I’d work together with them but what was really key was to be able to bring in such young talent which was more fluent with programming than the old crotchety designers that had always done it a different way. So they had very good raw talent, but their big problem was to bring them in and build them into the team and into the methodology. It worked out excellently and we had to bring in a lot of tools that hadn’t been there before. We had to be careful that we didn’t overdo it in bringing in tools which could bring down the whole project. So it was a very good balance of experience trying to make the right decisions and young energetic talent that was adaptable to any methodology. One of the things we did to try to cut down on documentation is we redid all the cubicles so we could have the logic designer of a unit sit with the circuit designer of the unit because there was no automated system for tracking timings and so on and so forth. It was much easier to just turn around and ask the question; then Jim came up with the methodology of documenting the timing. But a lot of the first order questions about how something was supposed to work, what the general times were, were just handled by looking over your shoulder and asking the other person on the unit. As a project, the methodologies came together really very well. There was a lot of strain getting them to work but once they were together, they were iron clad and they worked really wellSo you’re always developing a new processor on existing technology and a new technology on a
compacted processor where all the bugs are wrung out and everything – a really nice strategy.
The Hungarian has no grammatical gender. Names applying to male persons are masculine, and those of females feminine.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simplified_Grammar_of_the_Hungarian_Language/Gender
TE connectivity LGH-style connector.
cheap 20 kV
Modest [… snip …] … he was firm in his opinions, and knew how to express them in language that was always forcible and often seemed to him on reflection to have been violent. Then, with what eager haste he would try to repair the wrong of which no one could ever have suspected him, — to take away the sting no one but himself ever felt. “ Old-fashioned ” he undoubtedly was, in the fair sense that most good fashions maintain themselves to a ripe old age, but one never quite thought of him as a piece of the antique world, so fresh and vital was his interest in all that was best and finest in the new world around him. As to his whole outward bearing among men there could be but one natural expression for it, — the grand simple name of gentleman.
A pretty wild piece of writing from 1900! There’s a little bit of xenophobia and misogyny that you have to read over, but much less than in most works of that time period.
Yesterday I started thinking about it via an analogy to writing. I heard once that if you’re trying to help someone become a better writer, you should point out no more than three classes of things they’re doing wrong at one time, because too much new information can be self-defeating.
Imagine you’re a writing consultant and people bring you their writing and you advise them on how to make it better. Keeping in mind the need to not overwhelm, initially maybe you focus on the simple things that won’t make them a great writer, but are easy to teach. “You’re doing comma splices, your transitions between paragraphs suck, you’re doing citation wrong.” You talk up how important these things are to get right to get them motivated, and you bite your tongue when it comes to all the other stuff they need help with to avoid discouraging them.
Say the person goes away and fixes the three things, then comes back to you with some new version of what they’ve written. What do you do now? Naturally, you give them three more things. Over time as this process repeats, you eventually get to the most nuanced stuff that is harder to get right but ultimately more important to their success as a writer.
But for this approach to work presupposes that your audience either intrinsically cares enough about improving to keep coming back, or that they have some outside reason they must keep coming back, like maybe they are a Ph.D. student and their advisor is forcing their hand. What if you can never be sure when someone walks in the door that they will come back a second time after you give your advice? In fact, what if the people who really need your help with their writing are bad writers because they fixated on the superficial advice they got in middle school or high school that boils good writing down to a formula, and considered themselves done? And now they’re looking for the next quick fix, so they can go back to focusing on whatever they are actually interested in and treating writing as a necessary evil?