Viewing profile — aoanla

Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in t…

Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!…

Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy …

I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to …

I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves th…

I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me a…

I mean, it does - people search stuff all the time now, rather than thinking about it.

N-body problems can't be analytically solved. However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermedi…

Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited m…

It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same…

Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install. Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.…

Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate i…

The classic of this field of books is Abramowitz and Stegun's "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" - although the two listed names are merely those of the compilation editors, as t…

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even m…

Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea: The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the…

Back in 2011, the UK Government commissioned an "independent review" of copyright etc (The Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property"). It broadly agrees with your ideas - at leas…

I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others - however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am m…

I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you. I attempted it …

Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despit…

I don't know, the brief time I spent with D:OS2, there was quite a lot of inventory shenanigans.

Absolutely. I watched a few people playing Early Access builds of BG3, and I can't believe more people aren't put off by how overly flashy everything is. Characters models overact …

I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2. I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but di…

The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it…

Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves , but the "Do…

This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future t…