Viewing profile — garethrees

Looking at Inferno book 4 (the virtuous pagans), Jacopo gives us notes for the Pleiad Electra at 4.121; for Hector at 4.122; Julius Caesar at 4.123; Camilla and Penthesilea at 4.12…

I am not sure that "Dante is clearly writing in the expectation that his audience will know these references" as claimed in the article. He put a lot of learning into the work, and…

Language models are based on probabilities of tokens appearing in a context. For illustration purposes, imagine a very simple model with just one token of context that has been tra…

Another way to sum a column of numbers uses calc: M-x calc-grab-rectangle RET V R +

A couple of issues that came up for me when porting from x86 to ARM recently: 1. The x86 architecture gives programmers a lot of memory ordering guarantees, so that communication o…

Jeannette Power's "Observations physiques sur le poulpe de l'Argonauta argo" (1856) is available at the Internet Archive [1]. [1] https://archive.org/details/b2228476x

This bit of speculation goes back at least to David Eugene Smith (1925), "History of Mathematics", volume II, page 59: "There is a possibility that the Romans avoided IV, the initi…

> Typically pretty wet weather for the (spring) race Paris–Roubaix is certainly memorable when it's wet and muddy, but the last time it happened was in 2002! Early spring is the dr…

A warning heuristic needs to have a low false positive rate; a low false negative rate is nice but is not necessary. The purpose of a warning is to detect some common errors withou…

Here's the letter from Chris Boardman and the other commissioners, which doesn't seem to be linked from the Guardian story: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/2145/19-13…

This seems like a good idea to me, since there's evidence that programmers are making this mistake, and the proposal is to add a warning only for the expressions that are most like…

Discussed a couple of days ago in the context of average Uber speeds in London and other congested cities [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113084

This is a well-known principle of urban transport. If driving is faster than the alternative transport mode (whether that's public transport, if any, or walking), then at the margi…

The difficulty of Chaucer for modern English speakers is exaggerated because of the unfamiliar spelling. The reason that modern editions don't modernise the spelling is that if you…

This one-line shell script is a bit simpler: base64 /dev/urandom | head -c 16 (Vary the number of characters according to the desired entropy: you get 6 bits of entropy for each ch…

It's slightly more efficient to squeeze non-alphabetic characters first and then convert to lowercase, rather than vice versa, because in the former case most of the non-alphabetic…

McIlroy's claim was not that his script is the shortest possible way to implement the task, but rather that the Unix philosophy of combining general-purpose tools operating on text…

The film was based on the novel "No Highway" (1948) by Nevil Shute, who had worked as an aeronautical engineer at De Havilland.

Do you mean Aaron Swartz?

The linked post is a bit poorly expressed, but I think there is a good point there: fixed-size binary floating-point numbers are a compromise, and they are a poor compromise for so…

The description must be sufficiently similar to something that did happen, though, for you to be confident that you recognise the incident.

In C you avoid signed integer overflow either by knowing that the result will be in range before applying an operation, or, as a last resort, by testing that the operation is defin…