Viewing profile — wbillingsley

Yes

What I used to recommend to my sofware engineering classes is that instead of putting large files (media etc) into Git, put them into the artifact repository (Artifactory or someth…

I set this as part of a Scala programming assignment for my second year undergraduate class at UNE (Australia) last term. However, during the working a square is not Queen | Elimin…

I wonder whether future generations will be ingrained with a Truman Show fear that maybe only the few thousand people they meet are real and everything else is generated background…

I've never really understood the problems he had getting the Hitchhiker movie made - all the articles around before it came out talked about having to revise the script to make sen…

Sometimes. Foals are born (almost) able to walk. There are occasions where evolution baked the model into the genes.

We use ARM. Because then we can lean on some things (e.g. the ARMlite simulator) UK schools built for A-levels.

That's a similar approach to the one I use for teaching git. First the sim, then the CLI. https://theintelligentbook.com/supercollaborative/#/challeng... (Albeit I made mine simula…

The more obvious one is that Orion's standing on his head.

We do sometimes have an informal "Christmas in July". Which is a little odd, since 6 months on from Christmas would be June.

Sorry to see them go. I used them with students and they were always very helpful.

It depends. e.g. In Australia, the snake most people worry about (the eastern brown - world's second most venomous and common in cities) is native, so yes it's important to an ecos…

The elephant in the room in this study is how the UK economy has performed over the study period. From a quick read, they are essentially asking people to predict whether they'll b…

LLMs are very good at uncovering the mathematical relationships between words, many layers deep. Calling that understanding is a claim about what understanding is. But because we k…

Give this one a go, you know you want to... https://theintelligentbook.com/thinkingaboutprogramming/#/de... (programmable lander)

> What's the big advantage of encoding whole requests into JSON blobs If you're doing URL routing, you're at the mercy of your web framework If you've got a data structure coming i…

If I recall, the overhead of running a university (the fraction taken by the central institution to run campus and facilities, versus the amount coming into the schools to pay acad…

Hugely sorry to hear this. I met him when he was visiting Cambridge while I was a PhD student and he's a wonderful person as well as a computing luminary.

I've always been curious that old dogs often get cancer, despite "old" for a dog only being the early teens as well as dogs being smaller.

It would be very difficult to dispel the notion of prestige, because most output measures are highly influenced by input measures. Prestige inevitably flows into the measures. E.g.…

It seems (to me) less complex to have that as "just a library". In most of my little projects, I don't use ZIO, I just have a tiny library I wrote years ago that lets me write stuf…

Although there are some complex libraries available for Scala, there's also a lot of very simple stuff. It's a very expressive language, and sure that lets some libraries do some v…

I sincerely hope Scala.js isn't "dead". Though I know use by academics isn't the use case you imagined, Scala.js has very much been the right choice for me publishing interactive O…