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• Post #2265316

  I have come to dislike the remark "what you are doing is actually...", usually followed by a step up the mathematical abstraction ladder. I find it somewhat condescending, as it implies the recipient do not know what they are doing. Also, why are we "actually" doing something *more* abstract than we think? Why not the other way? When I write a program, what I "actually" am doing is moving voltages around in a CPU. Or hitting plastic keys on m...

• Post #686109

  Academia is just the New Game Plus of going to school.

• Post #320539

  The omnipresence of autocorrect troubles me because it enforces language normativity and discourages playfulness. I appreciate Germannic languages because they allow creative and evocative use of compound words, but autocorrect adds significant friction to this process. I worry about ossification.

• Post #320537

  Is the PDF viewer on the ACM DL wrong, or does the original QuickCheck paper have terrible kerning? https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/351240.351266 Downloading the PDF from the ACM DL also results in a PDF with visual artifacts and overlapping letters, but this one is fine: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/john-hughes/quick.pdf Has the ACM DL started passing PDFs through some buggy filter?

• Post #320536

  Gallery of #Futhark hedgehogs: https://futhark-lang.org/hedgehogs.html

• Post #320535

  I thought #WGSL was supposed to clean up pointless browser differences, but it seems like #Firefox and #Chrome don't even agree on reserved words. "i64" is reserved in Firefox, but not in Chrome (and not in the spec).

• Post #320533

  Many reviewers object to using a citation reference as a noun, e.g. "in [2] it is shown...". But what is the best way to use a paper in a noun? Classic practice seems to be to refer to the paper by the surname of the first author, but I dislike the habit of ascribing meaning to author ordering. Many paper titles are too long to repeat verbatim. What is to be done?