Viewing profile — deerpig

The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of …

I disagree, perseverance is not the same as goal-seeking for goal seeking's sake, or at least, it doesn't have to be. Twenty years ago I set a thirty year goal, literally bet my li…

Physical Review D is not a light weight journal. You don't get published there unless you are being taken seriously in the scientific community.

And "stochastic superoptimization" sounds so much cooler than their original term; "super-duper random improvement."

Yahoo, when it was a single page with a couple of dozen links. I think that was before there was a browser for Windows -- I was using the Omniweb browser on a NeXT Color workstatio…

So it's sort of the opposite of Field of Dreams, which often results in vaporware. Just because people come, doesn't mean they know what they want or know how to express a problem …

It's in elisp? Of course it is. It's emacs!

Great music. I want one.

Site is down for me....

I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of th…

SGI famously converted one of their Crimsons (which was a commercial failure) into a fridge and beer tap...

I've noticed that over the last few years it's become increasingly difficult to do things with US based services (especially banking) if you are outside of the US. And this goes do…

Sounds like a pun from the Wake. I would be surprised if it wasn't. I loved the Wake. Only read it once all the way through but I dip into it from time to time. It's a fantastic pl…

Gitlab requires a lot of resources. We have a local Openstack cluster and were running GitLab on a small instance. It was a beast. Moved to a larger instance and it works beautiful…

This just makes me sad. When class material, which is supposed to be the antithesis of closed and proprietary is treated as property, then there is something very wrong with the ed…

You aren't kidding about it being hard to find anything about that paper. I tried finding it a couple of years ago and just spent an hour now and had no luck. Thanks for the link I…

When I was a kid we had the whole set. I assume that it was something tied together with Britannica -- we had an early 60's set. I tried to read them but the font faces were so sma…

The breakup of Ma Bell required a regulatory breakup. Bell Telephone was just too entrenched to break up on decentralize on it's own, short of a collapse. No amount of innovation o…

I hope somebody down votes this. If I could I would.

> It's byzantine How so? Can existing tools achieve the goals that SOLID is trying to deliver? Distributed is hard, but it's not impossible. The Whole Internet has become so centra…

Not simply that the West bought more. China refused to accept anything except silver and gold in payment for their Tea. There is only so much silver and gold so they looked for som…

In case you weren't being snarky, the article was talking about Claude Levi-Strauss who was a French Anthropologist, not not the maker of jeans... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cla…

> China is 92% Han Only because the government keeps redefining what is Han. I lived in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Ghongzhou for over ten years. There were Hakka, Canton and Chui Chow…

He really pushed identi.ca, there was a nice community there back in the day. It became a bit of a refuge from the noise on twitter. I had my identi.ca account in my sig file up un…

>The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theo…