Thank you! I zoomed in on the photo looking for sanded corners on the MacBook and saw none. Took me a sec to finally see the amorphous edge nr the trackpad...
I might have to visit this exhibit next time I'm in NY. I hope their materials will answer the question of how he dealt with new construction, remodels, and demolitions over his 20 years!
At some point there was an "AI" assistant in windows called Cortana. I think it was a lovely little joke and a nod to their fun side. Unique name, easy to remember. Like Apple's Siri.
Julian Togelius is a full professor of computer science at NYU and I was fascinated by his blog post about succeeding in academic CS while not being able to solve undergraduate math problems.
It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).
I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far
It is a more complex system than having a single central organization. Not every interest is well represented, so there may not be a lot of content for everyone.
I've never had a mastodon.social account, but I can understand the frustration of having technical issues. If you really wanted to join, like you said, you can just try joining on a different server or even software - with other social networks you generally don't get that choice.
But it looks like you gave it a try and made the rational choice that, for you, it's not worth that effort.
But just because it's not your thing, and it's not the biggest one out there, doesn't mean it failed or missed it's shot. Personally I think it's pretty amazing that an open source project, with no VC money or marketing department or big corporate tie in, has about a million active users, and has for a long time now.
DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.
You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.
And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
In US schools during K-12, we generally learn functions in two ways:
1. 2-d line chart with an x-axis and y-axis, like temperature over time, history of stock price, etc. Classic independent variable is on the horizontal axis, dependent variable is on the vertical axis. And even people who forgotten almost all math can instantly understand the graphics displayed when they're watching CNBC or a TV weather report.
2. We also think of functions like little machines that do things for us. E.g., y = f(x) means that f() is like a black box. We give the black box input 'x'; then the black box f() returns output 'y'. (Obviously very relevant to the life of programmers.)
But one of 3blue-1brown's excellent videos finally showed me at least a few more ways of thinking of functions. This is where a function acts as a map from what "thing" to another thing (technically from Domain X to Co-Domain Y).
So if we think of NVIDIA stock price over time (Interpretation 1) as a graph, it's not just a picture that goes up and to the right. It's mapping each point in time on the x-axis to a price on the y-axis, sure! Let's use the example, x=November 21, 2025 maps to y=$178/share. Of course, interpretation 2 might say that the black box of the function takes in "November 21, 2025" as input and returns "$178" as output.
But what what I call Interpretation 3 does is that it maps from the domain of Time to the output Co-domain of NVDA Stock Price.
3. This is a 1D to 1D mapping. aka, both x and y are scalar values. In the language that jamespropp used, we send the value "November 21, 2025" to the value "$178".
But we need not restrict ourselves to a 1-dimensional input domain (time) and a 1-dimensional output domain (price).
We could map from a 2-d Domain X to another 2-d Co-Domain Y. For example X could be 2-d geographical coordinates. And Y could be 2-d wind vector.
So we would feed input of say location (5,4) as input. and our 2Dto2D function would output wind vector (North by 2mph, East by 7mph).
So we are "sending" input (5,4) in the first 2d plane to output (+2,+7) in the second 2d plane.
Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.
reply