Viewing profile — r-bryan

Why does a carpenter cut the end off a 10-foot board to get a required 9ft-2in, thereby wasting 8% of the input and incurring dumpster charges? Suppose the architect's design speci…

Check out this 156-page tome: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13478 : "Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges" The intro says that it "...serves a dual pu…

Methinks Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment finds some empirical support here.

Oh FFS why is print-vs-debug being debated as either/or? Both can be valuable, depending on the circumstances. It's clearly both/and.

Well dang, we are not restricted to git as the only place we can put historical metadata. You know, discursive comments, for starters?

I once worked with a company that provided IM services to hyper competitive, testosterone poisoned options traders. On the first fine trading day of a January new year, our IM prov…

Yeah, basically the oil companies pumping up fossil fuel to burn, but we get a single use of it as plastic before it goes to the incinerator.

A little stoichometry suggests that, ignoring oxygen, hydrogen, and energy input, the cited worldwide market for C2H4 would be satisfied by just about 1 gigaton of CO2. So if "we n…

Earth escape velocity is 11.1 km/s, which is Mach 32 at sea level. They have some more engineering to do, maybe even invent something better than carbon fibers.

"Always be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."

OK, but I'd rather prevent/cure the dementia.

I can highly recommend Epsilon (emacs-like) from lugaru.com.

Be an engineering mentor for your local high school robotics club. From personal experience, I can guarantee that you will come upon aspects of engineering where you are a rank new…

There is an unfortunate fallacy here. Your notion "the real world" conflates the physical world with a social milieu. The physical world is (at this scale) immutable, so of course …

This scenario is very reminiscent of the leadup to the Innovator's Dilemma. The dinosaurs grow taller and fatter seeking and thriving on the juicy foliage higher up the tree, while…

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I dunno. Don't we have yet to resolve where the curly braces belong, or emacs vs vi, or mac vs pc, or red sox vs yankees, or at least what materials to use for the staff bikeshed?

The author missed Symbolics Document Examiner and its partner, Concordia, dating from around 1985. Disclaimer: I led the implementation team.

As Carl Sagan might have said, "To build a platform from scratch, you must first create the universe."

I don't see why zero-growth has to be zero-sum. If not all the "labor" inputs are eaten up by society-wide subsistence, some value will continue to accumulate, somewhere. To the de…

The book _Writing on Both Sides of the Brain_ (Henriette Klauser) got me unstuck. Ignoring the left-brain/right-brain stuff, imagine that you have a creative, let it fly part and a…

Cool. Now solve it for a circular fence on the surface of a sphere. In fact, solve all four cases {exterior, interior of sphere} X {exterior, interior of fence}. Spherical trig can…

Maybe it was ObjectStore (read about it on Wikipedia). Pretty clever, I thought.

That PDF document was produced by some historical interviewers, not Symbolics. Your comment roundly criticizes Symbolics for someone else's work. Only in the words it contains does…