Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Astonishing. Sorting without energy.

"If that were true, it would mean that this is a perpetual motion machine!!!"

It wouldn't. This isn't Maxwell's demon. The motive propulsion is coming from thermal motion and is therefore random. No useful work is extracted from the device without energy input.

Re: Astonishing. Sorting without energy.

Nit-picking your title, the article explains that the actual sorting consumes energy. It is just the random walk across the surface that gets by on thermal fluctuations.

Re: OC

Randy cocks display to hens. I imagine that's what the author must have been thinking.

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"What better QA testers would you suggest than actual real world users?!"

1) Someone with a contact on the development team to whom they could report bugs.

2) Someone who has documentation for how the software is supposed to behave.

3a) Someone who is actually paid to do it full-time.

3b) Someone who isn't trying to do some other full-time job in order to pay their bills.

4) Someone who has been trained to anticipate likely errors in implementation.

But of course, that would cost money whereas just shipping shit apparently doesn't, so ...

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"Ok troll, here's your daily bread:

Since Vista, we've been able to disable auto-updates through the services panel."

Ok, fanboi, here's yours. Since Windows 10, you have only been able to defer upgrades for a few months and then only if you have paid for some corporate licence.

Re: Usefulness

You can automate the re-formatting on checkout and checkin and if you work in a team that makes this a requirement then you wouldn't be much of a programmer if you didn't automate it.

The IOCCC contest is also of social interest but I'm not aware of anyone working professionally who writes that way. Likewise, if you deliberately indent something in C or C++ to align with the wrong block (the equivalent of adding space in Python) it will compile fine but you can expect a visit from your colleagues on the next dark night. Demanding that whitespace indentation corresponds to the actual block structure is an informal-but-rigid requirement in every (text-based) programming language I've ever used. Python actually bothers to enforce it, but even C and C++ enforce it if you have lint-like warnings on your compiler.

As regards external libraries, perhaps you missed the bit where re-formatting was automated. If it bothers you, reformat it, but actually I suspect that you will get used to all the styles that are common in your language and switch seamless from one to the next as you step through the debugger. The rest of us did at some point in our careers.

No-one is suggesting that multiple styles should be mixed within a given section of the codebase. (I bet that's what the "studies" were looking at, though. I've read plenty of "studies" in my time that I wouldn't wipe my arse with.) To assert that consistency is required across *all* code would be a much less plausible study result. It would, for one thing, be a compelling argument for never using more than one language in a project, which is certainly a proposition that people will dispute. It would also be an argument about never writing Windows programs in C or C++, since the Win32 and CRT house styles are different.

In the real world, outside of academia and internet flame wars, "readability" is not a matter of formatting or any other stylistic metric. It is about whether things have identifiable names, whether the algorithms are clear, whether things are done in the obvious order, whether violations of the first three are properly justified in an obvious fashion either in the code or in documentation, and whether those comments and that documentation are actually kept in step with the code. Your compiler can't check that, but by god it's important!

"perhaps that means that it's too complicated"

Ease of programming is not necessarily a good thing.

When engineering a physical object you have to pay attention to tolerances. For simple objects, or with very clever engineering, those tolerances might be fairly generous. For the most complicated objects, the tolerances will usually vary from one part of the object to another but will often be very tight in the critical areas.

In programming, sometimes it is really important that you say exactly what you mean and definitely do not say anything that you don't mean. That's like an intelectual tolerance. Some languages are fairly relaxed and will execute almost anything you can type and will attempt to "do the right thing" based on heuristics. Others are fascist straight-jackets that demand bowing and scraping in the appropriate places, but which can then be trusted to do exactly and only what you have (finally) specified.

Obviously it is possible to have the worst of both worlds, with fascist syntax and DWIM semantics. However, I doubt it is possible to have the best of both worlds. At some point, you have to knuckle down and get particular.

Re: Usefulness

"The poor fuckers who have to maintain your pile of shite code after you've been sacked, that's who!!!"

Matters of formatting can be sorted by automatic tools. Matters of implementation style are no more subtle in python than in any other language. The fact that the python community has coined the word pythonic when few other languages have coined anything similar is interesting from a social point of view but of no technical importance. I concur with the OP: Who cares whether it conforms to the "right" way of doing it.

Re: Just in time..

Surely the ECJ will simply turn around in 2019 and say "we no longer have jurisdiction" and punt the case back down to the UK where the receiving court *will* now have the power to make a binding judgement ... on whether the law that will (by then) have changed had been broken (now).

Re: It's not about saving you money, it's about enabling *green* energy

"And how do smart gas meters enable green energy?"

As he described. If you can switch the country off when the green power isn't available, you don't need to have any non-green power in reserve.

Re: Benefits

"I like the idea of a fixed result in a democratic decision making process; can we choose the 1945 UK General Election please."

Nobody is suggesting that we can't apply to rejoin after we've left, but right now we have already left and living two final years under the rules of membership is merely to give everyone time to adapt to the change.

We could have a second referendum to choose between "the deal on the table" or "hardest Brexit possible under WTO rules", but a second referendum on the decision to leave would require a time machine. We have already left.

Re: Hashes

"p.s. It's "in practice", practise is a verb. Cf. "in fact" and "advise vs. advice"."

Isn't that "fact" somewhat locale-dependent?

XOR isn't good quality encryption, so I'm not sure your proof stands.

Re: partially correct...

"You are committing a crime if you don't hand over the password, with reasonably belief that you know the password."

IT angle: if the legal system were an IT system, this would be recognised almost immediately as a privilege escalation bug of truly Microsoftian proportions. The standard of proof for knowing the password should be "beyond resonable doubt" because it is being used to access the scale of punishments for criminal offences.

Proposed constitutional amendment: Anyone demonstrating a logical inconsistency between one part of the law and another should be able to choose which part applies to them.

Re: Who'd be a web designer?

Well you could just stick to specifying font families and stop trying to use the web as some kind of DTP package.

Earth calling web designers: nobody cares about your stupid font.

Re: So what's the solution?

The solution is to treat it like any other sensor that can give duff readings and to treat it like any other black box whoses contents are undocumented. That is, use normal engineering and due diligence.

There really is nothing to see here. Even this story, warning us not to believe the AI hype, is part of the AI hype inasmuch as it is suggesting that these devices present some new kind of problem.

Re: How is writing code a crime?

He WAS management. He was the US head of blah blah blah (read the article).

Re: Did He Have An Option ???

"The general principle is this: when a crime is committed that you had knowledge of, the cops will generally classify you as either a witness or a co-defendant. Witnesses don't go to jail."

Very nicely put!

Re: "Until you go to court how do you know it's illegal?"

"it's not credible to think that the software engineer found guilty in this case wrote software to game the emissions tests without management instructions to do so"

From the article: "As head of the VW's Diesel Competence unit in the US, Liang oversaw the software function that enabled the cars to cheat the emissions tests. He is also the most junior of the eight current and former VW executives that have been charged so far."

This wasn't some lowly sucker just following orders. He wasn't the very top brass, but he was high enough to be held responsible and the jury is still out on the others.