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Comment No, this is not a bad sign for science (Score 1) 153

Yeah, we get it: Trump is a troglodyte & a cockwombling ass-hat, but in the grand scheme of things, any president is wonderfully temporary. Congress on the other hand creates spending agencies & budgets that outlast... empires. They need term limited or purged much more frequently in some sort of Roman Colosseum grudge match to the death. Tenured professors should probably face the same fate... up to and including facing every fresh batch of incoming freshmen themselves - no TA's, noone to run interference. That'll either drive them to become ax murderers or they'll have an aneurysm & twitch out - both acceptable outcomes for the shit-hole endowed universities these days.

There are too many low quality participants at all levels of academia, engineering, science, hell, any technical discipline, really - from the professors/executives themselves all the way down to the incoming freshmen/new hires. Maybe, just maybe, better screening & admission standards will result in higher quality professors _and_ students, resulting in fewer 'publish or perish' bullshit papers, less grade inflation, and more accomplishments due to much higher quality talent that isn't perpetually treading water just to keep from drowning in all the stupid of their peers.

Comment Re: C (and here are somemore chars to satisfy the (Score 3, Informative) 40

It is surprising how often I encounter strings with NULs in the middle. Bytes have 256 different values, and sooner or later someone wants to transmit all 256 values in what was an ascii text-based conversation. HTTP is a good example. The conversation starts as a normal group of strings, until the header says "Content-Length:" and a bunch of binary data follows later.

Another issue in C is that strings are used for both immutable strings and for string buffers. Java makes it clear that string buffer is going to be something that grows, and a string is immutable. This allows optimizations like keeping the string length and maximum buffer size handy when the buffer is being appended too. C does both functions with the ever present char * type, for better and worse.

Comment Re:Can someone help explain "perfect" randomness? (Score 1) 140

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Comment Not True (Score 2) 140

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

Comment The Developer is dead - long live The Engineer (Score 0, Troll) 121

If using an LLM for coding is rotting your brain, then you likely were never using your brain, you were simply translating a requirement from one human language into software. That's accounting, not creating, and your brain has been rotting the entire time.

Seriously. Software 'development' is little more than acting as a human requirements compiler, and that ship has sailed. Engineers - of any discipline - applying math & developing algorithms - is an endeavor that takes far more than 'software development'. Developing 'software' is kind of dead - like farming with a stick or a horse. Complain all you want, or hop on the tractor and learn how to use automation to your advantage.

When asked the speed of sound, Albert Einstein said, “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” Are all those years thinking about Java & C++ teaching you to think about the broader problems to be solved, or have you lost sight of the forest for the trees?

Comment Re:I Wonder Why? (Score 1) 95

Managers have more leverage over a visa-based employee compared to a citizen. If a citizen refuses an order the worst outcome is that they must find another job. Whereas a non-citizen may have to leave the country if they can't find another job before their visa expires. Highly paid positions are not always easy to achieve so there is no reason to believe this effect would be limited to cheap workers.

Comment Re:Dealing with smog is straightforward (Score 1) 52

Actually this is not entirely correct. People who live and work locally drive less and therefore generate less smog. Whereas, commuters are relatively more responsible for generating smog but may not live in smoggy areas. This counterintuitive fact has been observed in Los Angeles and there are articles in the LA Times discussing it. For LA, the majority of smog *does* come from locals but commuters contribute more than their fair share. Other cities may be different.

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